Generational Theory Forum: The Fourth Turning Forum: A message board discussing generations and the Strauss Howe generational theory

(06-07-2019, 01:53 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: [ -> ]

(06-06-2019, 05:04 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: [ -> ]

(06-06-2019, 03:19 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: [ -> ]Few ever said that Trump could not speak well. Not in an erudite or intelligent way, perhaps, but in a way that can connect and dramatize well. He IS a skilled demagogue and a TV star, and that requires show-biz talent. So he can give a good speech as president once in a while, and praise the heroes of the America he wants to "make great again" and espouse patriotism and all that boring stuff. Too bad that's about all he does well. It was enough to fool the American people, but that's not real hard to do.

Where fooling the people is concerned, he joins an impressive roster which includes the likes of Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler. The former was originally considered a "good guy" who we helped attain power before his true colors surfaced; the latter was originally thought of as only a "minor nuisance".

Bingo -- both Hitler and Castro were self-righteous demagogues nearly devoid of moral compass. Both loved the limelight of making speeches  that allegedly excited audiences. To be sure, Trump does his speaking before picked audiences that show signs of adulating him, and the audiences are getting smaller. Castro had children who knew no better bused in to cheer him.

All three addressed the viscera, so to speak. The difference is that Trump has not shut down his opposition. He may want to, but he can't. It took a while for people like Charlie Chaplin and the Three Stooges to mock Hitler... but not Trump.

In America, if Trump hurts one, one either laughs or cries. And  this is as the greatest generation of comedians in history  (the Silent, like the recently-departed Tim Conway) either die off or quit doing comedy.

Yes, but we still have some good TV pundit comedians today who have been doing a good number on Trump, of course posted in this thread, like Seth Meyers, Bill Maher, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and others.

(06-04-2019, 07:40 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: [ -> ]But since taking office, he elevated his daughter and son-in-law to two of the highest-ranking appointments inside the West Wing. He even suggested that she could hold public office herself after he leaves office.

"If she ever wanted to run for president," the President said this year, "I think she'd be very, very hard to beat."

(the wrong time and place for pushing a daugher's political career -- my comment)

But that his daughter hasn't expressed any interest in running to him. For now, she continues her work on largely noncontroversial West Wing portfolio and style herself as a diplomat on the world stage. On Tuesday, she appeared alongside her father at a business roundtable and bilateral meetings with May as part of the official US delegation.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/04/politics/...index.html

Remember, Trump is right about his daughter, and I have said the same. Her horoscope score is 16-2. Very formidable. As high as Mitch Landrieu! Even Abe Lincoln was only 16-3.

My gallery of all-star candidates includes the presidents with these scores (no candidate nominated by a major party but not elected has ever had scores like these):
George Washington 18-5
James K Polk 22-2
Lincoln 16-3
Grant 17-3
McKinley 13-3
FDR 21-4
Truman 14-0
Reagan 21-6
Bill Clinton 21-3
George W Bush 17-2
Barack Obama 19-2





No other candidates in my database of credible candidates in all US history have scores this high. I have scored a few other people who have not run, or who dropped out before the primaries (1), or who ran in 3rd parties (1), who have high scores:

Jill Stein 16-2
Lawrence Kotlikoff 13-2
George Pataki 15-3
Mitch Landrieu 16-2
Terry McAuliffe 11-2 or higher
Seth Meyers 20-3
Levi Sanders 11-1
Oprah Winfrey 10-3

Jared Kushner has 10-4

http://philosopherswheel.com/presidentialelections.html

How to rope a dope Trump; you bring the rope, he brings the dope.
Seth takes a closer look at President Trump sitting down for a rare interview with "the little wise guy" that wasn't Fox News.

(06-18-2019, 02:17 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: [ -> ]

I hope these polls hold up! lol

I think Americans might prefer these alternatives to the Orange Orangutan, but we'll see!

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet -- and in this role, William Shatner is definitely not the Captain.

I have to admit, I didn't know about Tivo either! Us Boomers, like Trump and me, are not always in the loop!

Isn't it nice that we are saying Merry Christmas again? Wow Classic Xer, Kinser Galen at al! Trump is making America great again!

As the closest thing to the Antichrist said:




Straight out of Mein Kampf. It applies to every despotic or dictatorial regime. 





Everyone has the choice unless others cast it off for us:




“Those who expect to be both ignorant and free, expect what never was and never will be.”

― Thomas Jefferson

We still have the choice! We must choose wisely. Note: the index of Mein Kampf does not have the name Thomas Jefferson in it.

The most horrible book ever written also fails to mention Abraham Lincoln:

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.
--September 30, 1859 Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society

(07-03-2019, 12:06 AM)taramarie Wrote: [ -> ]I had to look up to see if it was a quote directly from Hitler and yes it is correct. Yes the majority of people in a country are far too absorbed into their own lives to be deeply informed into what goes on and that is when corruption can go on like gardeners with unattended gardens, weeds easily grow if they are not known of and weeded out before it takes over the entire garden. Meaning people need to be well informed voters and well aware of actual lies not calling actual facts lies because it is a convenient excuse to back up a bias.

There is no person I less want to sort as an authority even on a well-documented fact than Hitler. He said things that few wish were true. About everything he ever wrote in Mein Kampf is distressing. Still, despite having so little formal preparation for political power he won dictatorial power and used it in the vilest ways

Hitler was an extreme cynic on human nature -- especially on intellectual laziness. In my experience I have found that thinking can save huge amounts of frustration. It is not a substitute for hard, dedicated work, but it can relieve one of some pointless difficulty and distress (including at the worst, grief). He well knew how politics could work at their worst -- with deceit and demagoguery as he knew in the limited democracy that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The journalist William Shirer wrote much truth, to the extent that it was documentary,  in his Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But he could wax sentimental of stories of the old Vienna that was a fairy-tale world of magnificant castles, Lipizzaner stallions, Strauss waltzes and the glorious music of Mozart and Haydn -- over a more subterranean world. Sure, the anti-intellectualism could be kept in check because such people as the Emperor thought such bad for the image of Austria. The Emperor could limit an antisemite like Karl Lueger; after 1918 there was nobody to fend off the worst. Someone like Sigmund Freud could study human nature and impart upon people today knowledge that makes them unable to think as if it were still the nineteenth century. People like Hitler who had learned alleged lessons about the Jews from Lueger could take such lessons a few steps further... to cattle cars taking helpless people to camps where many would be gassed. Like others, Shirer had likely had a wonderful time in Vienna and waxed nostalgic about it. Sentimentality can impart a bias and confusion into history.

(07-03-2019, 03:36 AM)taramarie Wrote: [ -> ]A cynic on human nature but he knew exactly how to manipulate people and he did it so well and he was correct that as long as the people have their eyes shut to actual truth, he can feed their already formed bias or create it. He was a master puppeteer. I wish that your country could learn from that. Evidently not. Any country is prone to have that happen again in one form or another. No country is immune. Perhaps thinking can save huge amounts of frustration, but for some they don't give a crap. Most don't. Its easier to feed bias. Which explains many things throughout history. Racism, sexism, political bias, gang violence, tribalism, you name it, people like to feel they are part of something and any sort of threat perceived because of what others tell them what to think is easier to take on board than rather understand it for ourselves. What is feared is safety and the unknown. 




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If people are not to be fleeced by advertisers (and that is the most benign form of mind-control), turned into cannon fodder in Wars for Profit, and cruel enforcers of an unconscionable order, then they must do their own thinking. To not think is to be a tool of thugs who command the State and the economic power.

Before Trump, I thought that every country has one manifestation of fascism to have some fit to the culture. For America that seemed to be the KKK. No, the KKK is not more benign than Nazism; I can easily imagine Kluxists doing killings parallel in scale, wars of conquest and enslavement, and brutality similarly horrific. I have thought of writing a science fiction novel that inverts the roles of good and evil  for Germany and Japan on the one side and America goes evil due to a takeover by the 1914 Klan. The bigotry of the Klan and Nazis is much the same. I see the conflict ending in utter defeat of America with a Cold War forming over the wreckage after the Germans and Japanese, among others, have kicked KKK a$$ all the way to the midsection of America. Sony vs. Siemens?

Parallels are necessary for making sense, and an image much like this appears as a monumental statue:



except that the statue is in Tokyo, the flag is the Rising Sun Flag, and the mountain being depicted is Mauna Loa in "liberated Hawaii".

I see much of the evil in our society in privileged elites believing that the rest of Humanity exists for the enrichment, indulgence, and power of those elites and that the proles are to obey or die if they fall short of the demands upon them. They might starve slowly or be killed, should they show any sign of rebellion, in some gruesome manner. I see much of the fault in a theological position that the rich and powerful are especially blessed, but the rest of us can suffer for those elites with the expectation of nothing more than Pie-in-the-Sky-When-You-Die.

Cruelty is not the sole cause of evil, but I cannot see anything other than evil arising from cruelty. Dracula was a cruel man; Ivan the Terrible was a cruel man; Hitler was a cruel man; Stalin was a cruel man; Idi Amin was a cruel man; Saddam Hussein was a cruel man. Such matters more than whatever philosophical system any one of these held. Yes, Donald Trump is a cruel man. He may not get away with as much as the horrifically evil men that I mentioned before him, but such is only because our institutions so far stop some of his worst.

Some. More relevant is the example of Italy under Mussolini. Italian political institutions were much stronger than the nascent democracy of the Weimar Republic. Mussolini had to transform Italy slowly into a monstrosity; the full horror of a fascistic America would more likely appear under some right-wing successor to Trump. Clerical fascism meets the inequality of old plantation South and the managerial elitism of Henry Clay Frick -- and a reversion to Manifest Destiny, with nukes as tools of diplomatic bullying. America ends up with a brain drain because, among other things, it is impossible to do biology or archeology if one must do so under the strictures of young-earth creationism.

(07-04-2019, 03:49 AM)taramarie Wrote: [ -> ]Ill keep it short and sweet and to the point. Evil grows in an insensitive cruel environment bred by years of bashing sensitives "snowflakes" I hear foolish Americans call sensitive people. Sensitivity isn't the problem. It is how it is used and abused. That is how you have a cruel leader. Either it is forced onto a society terrified and forced to obey or it is conditioned in the culture and mindset of people bashing and bullying people to not be gentle and sensitive. The society becomes insensitive and its like the toad in hot water. It doesn't know its in hot water as it has heated up over time and it is the new norm. Don't let him become the new norm. He is a symptom of a sick society.

...and it is those 'snowflakes' who make life tolerable in view of the economic necessity and bureaucratic reality.

In America I have heard plenty of right-wing politicians claim that they will make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions that 'make things work'. After they get elected hey make those harsh decisions, and they hurt people while enriching, pampering, and empowering the economic elites. So why can those pols claim to be able to make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions? Because someone else will feel the pain! So it was with the recent Governor of Michigan: he found a city struggling with its finances but that has a nice park that a bunch of real estate developers would love to transform into 'luxury lakeside condominiums'. Bye, bye park! Paradoxically it was bequeathed by some plutocrat about seventy years ago...

You may have heard of the Flint water crisis... to cut costs the city was obliged to use a source of water but not treat it properly. From that decision came lead in the water supply and Legionnaire's disease. As elsewhere in America about every problem has its source in poverty, and where there is some attempt to squeeze the poor one gets harm to the poor. Flint is poor because it has lost a big chunk of the once-lucrative auto manufacturing industry.

It takes time for people to get wise to the most dishonest use of language, the  attempt to make words mean something in practice other than what people understand. That's where Orwell becomes relevant.

(07-04-2019, 05:17 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-04-2019, 03:49 AM)taramarie Wrote: [ -> ]Ill keep it short and sweet and to the point. Evil grows in an insensitive cruel environment bred by years of bashing sensitives "snowflakes" I hear foolish Americans call sensitive people. Sensitivity isn't the problem. It is how it is used and abused. That is how you have a cruel leader. Either it is forced onto a society terrified and forced to obey or it is conditioned in the culture and mindset of people bashing and bullying people to not be gentle and sensitive. The society becomes insensitive and its like the toad in hot water. It doesn't know its in hot water as it has heated up over time and it is the new norm. Don't let him become the new norm. He is a symptom of a sick society.

...and it is those 'snowflakes' who make life tolerable in view of the economic necessity and bureaucratic reality.

In America I have heard plenty of right-wing politicians claim that they will make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions that 'make things work'. After they get elected hey make those harsh decisions, and they hurt people while enriching, pampering, and empowering the economic elites. So why can those pols claim to be able to make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions? Because someone else will feel the pain! So it was with the recent Governor of Michigan: he found a city struggling with its finances but that has a nice park that a bunch of real estate developers would love to transform into 'luxury lakeside condominiums'. Bye, bye park! Paradoxically it was bequeathed by some plutocrat about seventy years ago...

You may have heard of the Flint water crisis... to cut costs the city was obliged to use a source of water but not treat it properly. From that decision came lead in the water supply and Legionnaire's disease. As elsewhere in America about every problem has its source in poverty, and where there is some attempt to squeeze the poor one gets harm to the poor. Flint is poor because it has lost a big chunk of the once-lucrative auto manufacturing industry.

It takes time for people to get wise to the most dishonest use of language, the  attempt to make words mean something in practice other than what people understand. That's where Orwell becomes relevant.

Was the lakeside town you are talking about Benton Harbor, which in recent years became saddled with poverty while neighboring St. Joseph went upscale? There was a fairly well-known book written about their disparity. Know that there were efforts to gentrify at least parts of Benton Harbor.

(07-04-2019, 09:19 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-04-2019, 05:17 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: [ -> ]

(07-04-2019, 03:49 AM)taramarie Wrote: [ -> ]Ill keep it short and sweet and to the point. Evil grows in an insensitive cruel environment bred by years of bashing sensitives "snowflakes" I hear foolish Americans call sensitive people. Sensitivity isn't the problem. It is how it is used and abused. That is how you have a cruel leader. Either it is forced onto a society terrified and forced to obey or it is conditioned in the culture and mindset of people bashing and bullying people to not be gentle and sensitive. The society becomes insensitive and its like the toad in hot water. It doesn't know its in hot water as it has heated up over time and it is the new norm. Don't let him become the new norm. He is a symptom of a sick society.

...and it is those 'snowflakes' who make life tolerable in view of the economic necessity and bureaucratic reality.

In America I have heard plenty of right-wing politicians claim that they will make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions that 'make things work'. After they get elected hey make those harsh decisions, and they hurt people while enriching, pampering, and empowering the economic elites. So why can those pols claim to be able to make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions? Because someone else will feel the pain! So it was with the recent Governor of Michigan: he found a city struggling with its finances but that has a nice park that a bunch of real estate developers would love to transform into 'luxury lakeside condominiums'. Bye, bye park! Paradoxically it was bequeathed by some plutocrat about seventy years ago...

You may have heard of the Flint water crisis... to cut costs the city was obliged to use a source of water but not treat it properly. From that decision came lead in the water supply and Legionnaire's disease. As elsewhere in America about every problem has its source in poverty, and where there is some attempt to squeeze the poor one gets harm to the poor. Flint is poor because it has lost a big chunk of the once-lucrative auto manufacturing industry.

It takes time for people to get wise to the most dishonest use of language, the  attempt to make words mean something in practice other than what people understand. That's where Orwell becomes relevant.

Was the lakeside town you are talking about Benton Harbor, which in recent years became saddled with poverty while neighboring St. Joseph went upscale? There was a fairly well-known book written about their disparity. Know that there were efforts to gentrify at least parts of Benton Harbor.

Precisely. Contempt for the poor became stock behavior of the GOP with Ronald Reagan. With Trump the only 'good' poor are white people who think that white privilege is a treasure to be protected even at the cost of damning themselves to poverty even more severe. Aside from overt criminality, the behavior most likely to damn one to poverty is to hold formal education in contempt. Trump seems to endorse such (little surprise, as despotic and dictatorial regimes fare best when people have enough learning in which to read and do simple math, but not enough with which to recognize the absurdities in propaganda. Tellingly the dissident movements in the old Soviet Union became troublesome about as the regime needed well-educated people to manage the complex technology of such things as nuclear submarines.

Poor blacks and Hispanics respect formal learning, on the whole; their natural leaders, the black and Hispanic bourgeoisie, encourage such as the only viable way out of poverty. Poor whites rarely have mentors.

This says more about Trump supporters than about Trump...

WASHINGTON – South Bend, Indiana, has become a flashpoint for racial controversy in the aftermath of a fatal police shooting of 54-year-old Eric Jack Logan, who is black.

So at a recent Pete Buttigieg campaign stop in Carrol, Iowa, an audience member offered Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, a potential solution.

In a video posted by ABC, an unidentified man is seen telling Buttigieg, "I have a solution for you and I'd like you to make a comment on my proposal. Just tell the black people of South Bend to stop committing crime and doing drugs."

Buttigieg then responded, "Sir, I don't think racism is going to get us out of this."

The man answered Buttigieg and said that "it has nothing to do with race."

Buttigieg then went on to explain how racial disparities in incarceration were evidence of "systemic racism" in the criminal justice system.


https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/poli...3649255002

White people proportionally use more drugs and worse drugs... and get away with them longer. Except for the criminal element that exercises no financial constraints, poor blacks are basically priced out of drug use. Much drug addiction results from abuse of prescription pain-killers heavily associated with people such as miners and loggers who endure severe pain from those injuries.

Yeah, sure, as far as the fellow who associates crime and drug use with being black.