The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-21-2020, 06:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: They are parochial and provincial in their outlook, which perhaps results partly from being involved in those activities; but I suspect that's not the reason, because therefore blues hunkered down in cubicles are just as involved in their activities.

No; insular, parochial and provincial red attitudes result from their restricted views of the world, being stuck in set ways of regressive thinking, inherited and enforced by your parents and/or local community. Blues are aware of the larger world, and thus see the bigger picture, are less authoritarian and more willing to question and see new conditions, and thus are also far less xenophobic than you Trump supporters are, by a long shot. Living on the coasts and near the waters and more urban means we blues are exposed to more kinds of people and ideas than you reds. And of course, more exposed to this virus problem too, although it's everywhere.

Seeing the big picture as we do, we are able to see the virtue of sacrificing for the greater good of society, while conservatives are less able to see this. By and large though, some conservatives are seeing this now too.

Not only am I indeed not the type who could do those things to animals, I am not the type who would. Thus I would not even take the time to learn. My opinion is, let the poor creatures alone and let them live. They can take care of themselves if we leave them alone. Nature now is to be preserved, not exploited.

I would suggest the red are closer to nature, the blue more civilized.  They represent different places in man’s cultural evolution.  The red are not the beginning, are well civilized.  The blue have not reached the end point, are moving on continuously.  If both could leave each other alone and not see one as superior to the other, we might be better off.  Unfortunately the federal government likes one size to fit all, and the two wind up bumping heads.

[pbrower2a]

(04-21-2020, 10:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-21-2020, 07:27 PM)gabrielle Wrote: Well, if all the "reds" know how to hunt and fish, then when the shit goes down and America dissolves into total socio-economic collapse you guys will instantly assemble into a sustainable hunter-gatherer society and everything will be hunky-dory, right?  Perhaps you can start raising crops to buy protection from local warlords against the roving brigands.

Here's the Bigger Picture: Lift social distancing too soon and the virus surges back, even stronger.  The health care system is overwhelmed, and we have "many more body bags," as the director of the WHO put it.  A large number of those in the body bags will be health care workers, a generation of medical expertise that cannot be replaced.  If you think the suffering and sacrifice we are dealing with now is bad, just you wait and see how much worse it can get.

I keep going back to the red tendency to not see problems that require a big government to solve, and to deny science which says the problems will exist.

Rachel Monday night ran will a little “Earth One” vs “Earth Two” theme.  I think it is DC Comics that went for a while with two parallel story lines, with different characters, uniforms, plot lines, histories, etc….   (DC is not alone.  It is a common theme in SF, for example Star Trek has it’s Mirror Universe.) The two realities had nothing to do with each other save for a few cross reality plot lines.

One thread in science fiction is alternative history, one in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War , in which Wilhelm II is able to establish a lasting New Order in Europe, or in which the Axis prevails. My idea is that the Axis Powers win, but Germany and Japan are the Good Guys who defeat a Klan-dominated America, a fascistic France, a fascistic Britain, and Stalin's Soviet Union. Churchill and de Gaulle become partners, and India breaks from the fascist Britain much as Brazil broke from Portugal in the Napoleonic era with a member of the British royal family finding Indian nationalism a way of saving his dynasty. (Is it worth writing?)

Quote:Rachel suggested the real world and the conservative world are like that.  If you don’t want to spend money to solve a problem, the reds can save money by pretending the problem doesn’t exist.  Bridges collapsing, global warming, pollution, guns, lots of problems exist more in more densely populated regions, or only develop slowly enough to pretend they are not looming.  Thus it is quite possible to say if a problem is not confronting them directly, they aren’t going to pay for anyone to solve the problem.

One fault is that the 'conservative' world is losing its old virtues without gaining any new virtues to replace them. The urban areas hostile to the provincial, inequitable right can rot while people resembling the old agrarian elites become dominant where the right-wing ethos prevails. So starve the cities and starve the working poor (but give the working poor promises of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die to those who accept the poverty, inequity, and despotic management of the economic elites... the elites need do nothing for poor kids who die of hunger when their parents are expendable, of people who die in preventable industrial calamities, and they get to live in air-conditioned palaces in which they simply use more fuel to keep life tolerable for themselves. 

The world that they create and impose is one of gross injustice and social failure. Whether those elites can enforce such through shootings on a large scale or torture chambers on a small scale as is the norm in failed states is much in question. 

All in all, something like a 1T agenda shows why it succeeds; the common man needs a stake in the system if he is to support it and not simply tolerate it out of fear of torture or summary execution.   

Quote:This attitude was quite possible to extend itself indefinitely before Coronavirus.  Again, I was deep into creating an Information Age variation of S&H for what happens when there is a Crisis without a Trigger and Regeneracy.  With nukes making a Crisis War unlikely, what would come along that would be comparable to a Lexington and Concord, a Fort Sumter, a Pearl Harbor?

People must accept the necessity for some time of an economy operating at a level characteristic of the 1930's or the late nineteenth century for a couple of years just to avoid tens of millions of pointless deaths. CORVID-19 has been killing Americans on a scale characteristic of a bungled war -- maybe not a war so bungled as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, the Eastern Front in World War II, the Sino-Japanese sector of WWII, or the First World War with their human-wave assaults that achieved nothing other than the slaughter of large numbers of cannon fodder until one side ran out of cannon fodder. But it is killing Americans on a bigger scale, so far, than did World War II per day. We have the mass death of a very bad war, and if we handle COVID-19 badly we could lose tens of millions of people and end up with lasting dislocations of our economy.   

Quote:Right now, some reds are very hesitant to embrace the Conoravirus as the Trigger, as seeing the Unraveling ethic of selfishness and problem denial as rendered obsolete.  The virus is significant, scientifically provable, and culture changing.  They are trying to pretend the problem out of existence as they have so many problems in the recent past.  They are not willing to accept the medical worker and other first responders as heroes, and a culture where you are expected to sacrifice for the common good.  They want to (with apologies to Aerosmith) Dream On.

Self-interest can prevail over narrow selfishness and self-indulgence. Their ideal of self-sacrifice is on behalf of the loanshark, the gouging landlord, the executive paid lavishly to treat subordinates badly, the monopolist gouger, and political leaders who offer Newspeak as reality. The better we deal with COVID-19 the fewer human losses we will endure (think of how we dealt with HIV-AIDS) and the sooner we will be able to return to an economy that we can understand. To be sure, we have an underlying change in the economy, COVID-19 or not: the end of material scarcity, a scarcity that mandated of making more and consuming more just to achieve more happiness. We cannot support a world of hoarders just to keep production at a peak.    

Quote:I don’t see them making pretend well enough.  That apparently doesn’t mean they won’t try.  In the three last Crises, there were ugly times when the Crisis War seemed long and hard, and the best way to solve it was to surrender to the forces of royalty, slavery or fascism.  America didn’t quit the last three times, and I doubt they will quit now.  This does not mean that a few blind fools will cling to the old way of looking at things, cheering on the kings, slave owners and dictators.  I talk of Atlanta during the Civil War and Berlin during World War II as necessary prerequisites for submerging the old world view.  World views are that stubborn.  It takes a major disaster to change a culture, a proof that the Old Way will not work, that a change is necessary and to be forced.  

Despots, slave-owners, and dictators can always find the intellectual equivalents of whores to praise their cruelty. Such intellectual whores get a mental disease far worse than the syphilis or gonorrhea that literal whores risked -- and, like the whores who lease their bodies to satisfy lust risk being killed by a serial killer who finds whores vulnerable because nobody will miss them, the intellectual whore (who really does much more harm) who decides to not put out will end up dead. Those intellectual whores flatter the leaders and fool the common man for a while. But as the Germans find American, British, or Free French troops going into their towns, maybe that "master race" stuff becomes unsupportable.  Oh, you get to find out what happened to the local Jews? (With the Soviet occupation of Germany unfortunately came rape and pillage, which suggests a difference between revenge and breaking the will to fight).

The most successful conquerors are those effective at taking the will to fight from a recent enemy.    

Quote:I do not doubt the virus has the capability for similar disaster.  The concept of creating an “Earth Two” alternate view of a world were no problems can exist if the perfect blindfold is worn will become much more unpalatable when the problem bites the blindfolded people in the rear.  Then, but only then, will they consider taking the blindfold off.

Maybe.

Someday.

Eventually.

Because we are undergoing a Crisis we cannot return to the "old" normal. We can at best find a new normal. We will find that old ways of labor-management relations will be void. White people are going to find that they start acting more like the model minorities who in many ways have shown the wave of the future in American life than like the superstition-laden Trump supporters... or doom themselves to poverty and awfulness in many other ways. In persons, reason will prevail or they will fail. 

COVID-19 will be the Big Event of America in 2020, with the second-most important event being the election. COVID-19 may have already decided the 2020 election by making the Reagan-Trump paradigm unsustainable and irrelevant for the future except for personal consequences. Some of us will be hurt badly. 

I predict that we will drift into a social-market economy by default.

[Classic-Xer]

(04-22-2020, 01:39 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 01:17 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: At this point, I'd be more likely to say it's the trigger or initial cause and say that we are now entering the 4T. In my opinion, big government hasn't done a very good job up to this point.

I would go further.  I would say the economic thinking daydream believers who ignore science when they don’t want to believe a problem exists failed miserably and are still protesting to make the disaster more complete.  

I think you see the Coronavirus well enough, but you are still unwilling to see, say, global warming.  It is not quick enough.  I does not force itself on you as much as the virus does.  Some see neither, but stand ready to ignore the science, to cry hoax or fake news and do nothing.  They won’t until the scale of the disaster is of the Atlanta or Berlin scale.  I don’t think the rest of us want to let it get that big.

In case you aren't aware, we have a compound crisis that's going on right now. I think we are all aware that COVID19 exists and the threat that it represents to the lives of some people. The liberals seem to be stuck on the COVID19 crisis and not paying as much attention to the growing economic related crisis that's going to financially cripple some states and cause all kinds of problems. Personally, I don't care if you go to your graves with your blindfolds on and blame us with your final breaths.

According to science, the State of Minnesota was covered by a thick sheet of glacial ice at one time. According to science, the deserts of Africa and the Middle East were fertile plains at one time and portions of sunken ancient cities were above water at one time too. According to science, the continents used to be one gigantic land mass at one time as well. I referred to the issue of global warming as climate change before climate change became the issue. Also, according to science, China is still twice as bad as us right now. You can't blame us for China.

[Tim Randal Walker]

"Compound crisis"? Does that mean multiple issues are playing out at the same time?

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-22-2020, 11:29 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: "Compound crisis"?   Does that mean multiple issues are playing out at the same time?

I would say yes, and the entire blue agenda is waiting in line behind them.

[pbrower2a]

COVID-19 and a nasty meltdown of the economy together? Yes. Add to this that we may be seeing the discreditation of a President and his Party.

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-22-2020, 11:24 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: In case you aren't aware, we have a compound crisis that's going on right now. I think we are all aware that COVID19 exists and the threat that it represents to the lives of some people. The liberals seem to be stuck on the COVID19 crisis and not paying as much attention to the growing economic related crisis that's going to financially cripple some states and cause all kinds of problems. Personally, I don't care if you go to your graves with your blindfolds on and blame us with your final breaths.

According to science, the State of Minnesota was covered by a thick sheet of glacial ice at one time. According to science, the deserts of Africa and the Middle East were fertile plains at one time and portions of sunken ancient cities were above water at one time too. According to science, the continents used to be one gigantic land mass at one time as well. I referred to the issue of global warming as climate change before climate change became the issue. Also, according to science, China is still twice as bad as us right now. You can't blame us for China.

Yep.  Plant life took carbon out of the atmosphere, and thus greenhouse gasses, made oil and gas, and made things cooler as a byproduct.  It took a long time to get from global jungle to engaging the Milankovitch cycle ice ages to now.  We just put a lot of those gasses back in the atmosphere, and are thus looking to return to the jungle pattern and dinosaur compatible sea levels.  Mind you, you have jumbled a lot of eras together in the above review.

You want to make the change instantly with no planning?  We have built cities on a lot of places that were once underwater.  You want to drown them?

I’ll nitpick science saying China is twice as bad.  That is a moral judgement, and science is bad at those.  If S&H and the arrow of progress could be considered sciences, maybe.  I don’t know that we are there yet.  But, yes, on the arrow of progress, China is still autocratic and elite centric, closer to the old ways, so saying twice as bad is reasonable.

I would also question that we are all aware that COVID 19 exists.  Some reds are denying that too, treating it as a hoax or fake news at Trump's direction.  Same as you with global warming.

[Classic-Xer]

(04-22-2020, 10:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I would suggest the red are closer to nature, the blue more civilized.  They represent different places in man’s cultural evolution.  The red are not the beginning, are well civilized.  The blue have not reached the end point, are moving on continuously.  If both could leave each other alone and not see one as superior to the other, we might be better off.  Unfortunately the federal government likes one size to fit all, and the two wind up bumping heads.

I'd agree that the blues are much more domesticated and needier than the reds are these days. I wouldn't say the blues are more civilized than the reds at this point. I'd say the reds are actually more civilized as a group than the blues at this point. I agree that the blues would be better off leaving them alone instead of alienating them the way that they do all the time. So far, I haven't seen one size fits all mentality prevail over the American based to each their own mentality. Unfortunately, a portion of the federal government is still clinging to a one size fits all philosophy.

[Bob Butler 54]

(04-22-2020, 12:40 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 10:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I would suggest the red are closer to nature, the blue more civilized.  They represent different places in man’s cultural evolution.  The red are not the beginning, are well civilized.  The blue have not reached the end point, are moving on continuously.  If both could leave each other alone and not see one as superior to the other, we might be better off.  Unfortunately the federal government likes one size to fit all, and the two wind up bumping heads.

I'd agree that the blues are much more domesticated and needier  than the reds are these days. I wouldn't say the blues are more civilized than the reds at this point. I'd say the reds are actually more civilized as a group than the blues at this point. I agree that the blues would be better off leaving them alone instead of alienating them the way that they do all the time. So far, I haven't seen one size fits all mentality prevail over the American based to each their own mentality. Unfortunately, a portion of the federal government is still clinging to a one size fits all philosophy.

Not sure about needier. The reds are closer to the biblical ‘God gave Man dominion over the Earth’ perspective, while the blues are far more ecological.

We could argue about the definition of civilized. I’ll stick with what I call the arrow of progress. Further along seems to be away from nature and more civilized. There are other ways of defining civilized that give different results.

[pbrower2a]

(04-22-2020, 12:40 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 10:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I would suggest the red are closer to nature, the blue more civilized.  They represent different places in man’s cultural evolution.  The red are not the beginning, are well civilized.  The blue have not reached the end point, are moving on continuously.  If both could leave each other alone and not see one as superior to the other, we might be better off.  Unfortunately the federal government likes one size to fit all, and the two wind up bumping heads.

I'd agree that the blues are much more domesticated and needier  than the reds are these days. I wouldn't say the blues are more civilized than the reds at this point. I'd say the reds are actually more civilized as a group than the blues at this point. I agree that the blues would be better off leaving them alone instead of alienating them the way that they do all the time. So far, I haven't seen one size fits all mentality prevail over the American based to each their own mentality. Unfortunately, a portion of the federal government is still clinging to a one size fits all philosophy.

The Red-Blue divide depends upon the Right telling the Reds that middle-class Blues are oppressors and that the distant, rapacious elites that the Blues never meet are benefactors in the struggle against exploitation and humiliation. The right-wing rhetoric is a game of deflection.

[Tim Randal Walker]

I recall mention of the Authoritarian Right in the paleo 4T site. In USA todays version of the Authoritarian Right is a plutocratic group.

They were largely contained during the last 1T, then started to gain traction with Reagan's presidency. So we have seen decades of rot.

I would be careful not to pigeon hole all of the Right with the Authoritarian Right-there is also the Libertarian Right.

[Classic-Xer]

(04-22-2020, 12:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Red-Blue divide depends upon the Right telling the Reds that middle-class Blues are oppressors and that the distant, rapacious elites that the Blues never meet are benefactors in the struggle against exploitation and humiliation. The right-wing rhetoric is a game of deflection.

Who are telling/teaching the middle class blues that we are their oppressors and promoting and establishing themselves as their protectors/saviors these days?  It's you and others here and the so called liberal Democrats who are doing that today not us. So, who are the primary benefactors in that scenario/ type of relationship?

[Eric the Green]

(04-22-2020, 03:01 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 12:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Red-Blue divide depends upon the Right telling the Reds that middle-class Blues are oppressors and that the distant, rapacious elites that the Blues never meet are benefactors in the struggle against exploitation and humiliation. The right-wing rhetoric is a game of deflection.

Who are telling/teaching the middle class blues that we are their oppressors and promoting and establishing themselves as their protectors/saviors these days?  It's you and others here and the so called liberal Democrats who are doing that today not us. So, who are the primary benefactors in that scenario/ type of relationship?

We are just telling the truth. Your side is just offering delusion. The benefactors are those who tell the truth, and those who listen.

[Eric the Green]

(04-22-2020, 01:16 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I recall mention of the Authoritarian Right in the paleo 4T site.  In USA todays version of the Authoritarian Right is a plutocratic group.  

They were largely contained during the last 1T, then started to gain traction with Reagan's presidency.  So we have seen decades of rot.

I would be careful not to pigeon hole all of the Right with the Authoritarian Right-there is also the Libertarian Right.

The proper word rather than "Authoritarian" for that pole on the political compass or Nolan grid is "statist"

The libertarians today are mostly apologists for the Reagan plutocratic right. They are anti-statist, but they are certainly plutocratic and thus authoritarian.

The political compass and Nolan grid are basically the same and mutually derived, but remember that the poles are placed in different directions on the two maps.

Libertarians (libertarian right) are at least supposed to be not so socially conservative as the nationalists, racists, xenophobes and theocratics (right-wing statists). Under Trump, though, the two right wings are joined at the hip.

[pbrower2a]

(04-22-2020, 03:01 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 12:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Red-Blue divide depends upon the Right telling the Reds that middle-class Blues are oppressors and that the distant, rapacious elites that the Blues never meet are benefactors in the struggle against exploitation and humiliation. The right-wing rhetoric is a game of deflection.

Who are telling/teaching the middle class blues that we are their oppressors and promoting and establishing themselves as their protectors/saviors these days?  It's you and others here and the so called liberal Democrats who are doing that today not us. So, who are the primary benefactors in that scenario/ type of relationship?

Remember well that words offered as self-description of political causes are often contrary to their conventional meanings. "National liberation fronts" are often connected to Communist support for insurrections.  Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party was in no way socialist and stood for gross exploitation of working people on behalf of landowners, financiers, industrialists, and executives. The Horst-Wessel Lied of the Nazi Party and Giovinezza as the anthem of the Italian Fascist Party both extolled their Parties' support for freedom; the national hymn of the Soviet Union begins "Unbreakable union of free-born republics", even all but one those sixteen "republics" were effectively colonies of the biggest of them. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea is in no way democratic; it allows no expression of the will of the Korean people, and it is in practice an absolute monarchy. 

Although it is generally understood that slave-owners of the slave era in the old South were gross exploiters, it was commonplace for slave-owners to speak of themselves as benefactors to their slaves -- the best thing that could have ever happened to Africans and their descendants in America.

...as for some right-wing front groups: Citizens United wishes to polarize America into a 55-45 split forever; Freedom Works! stands for pure plutocracy; Americans for Prosperity is for prosperity only for the economic elite but poverty and harsh management for everyone else; the National Right to Work Committee simply intends to destroy labor unions, the only institutional protection of workers' rights. Make America Great Again? For whom?

The worst lie of all is the Orwellian lie, or Newspeak, in which words meant to express one thing are given the meaning of their opposite.

[Eric the Green]

(04-22-2020, 12:13 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: COVID-19 and a nasty meltdown of the economy together? Yes. Add to this that we may be seeing the discreditation of a President and his Party.

Yes indeed. As of now there's roughly 10% of polling respondents who still approve Trump's job performance, but not his handling of the virus crisis. If the crisis continues for long, that 10% may start to peel away.

[Eric the Green]

(04-22-2020, 03:35 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 03:01 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(04-22-2020, 12:57 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Red-Blue divide depends upon the Right telling the Reds that middle-class Blues are oppressors and that the distant, rapacious elites that the Blues never meet are benefactors in the struggle against exploitation and humiliation. The right-wing rhetoric is a game of deflection.

Who are telling/teaching the middle class blues that we are their oppressors and promoting and establishing themselves as their protectors/saviors these days?  It's you and others here and the so called liberal Democrats who are doing that today not us. So, who are the primary benefactors in that scenario/ type of relationship?

Remember well that words offered as self-description of political causes are often contrary to their conventional meanings. "National liberation fronts" are often connected to Communist support for insurrections.  Hitler's National Socialist German Workers' Party was in no way socialist and stood for gross exploitation of working people on behalf of landowners, financiers, industrialists, and executives.....

As I suggested before, that also applies to the corruption of the word "populist." Right wing racist and xenophobic nationalism is now often called "populist," but populism does not mean whatever is popular among the common people; any ideology can be that. Populist means a movement that seeks to bring more power to the people rather than the elites, and that often means the economic elites: "landowners, financiers, industrialists, and executives....."

James B Weaver and William Jennings Bryan were populists. Eleanor Roosevelt was a populist. George McGovern was a populist. Bernie Sanders is a populist. Trump, LePen, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Orban et al are just tyrants who are popular enough to get some political support through appealing to prejudice. They are perhaps not as tyrannical or efficient as Hitler and Mussolini, but otherwise they are similar.

[David Horn]

(04-22-2020, 11:24 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: In case you aren't aware, we have a compound crisis that's going on right now. I think we are all aware that COVID19 exists and the threat that it represents to the lives of some people. The liberals seem to be stuck on the COVID19 crisis and not paying as much attention to the growing economic related crisis that's going to financially cripple some states and cause all kinds of problems. Personally, I don't care if you go to your graves with your blindfolds on and blame us with your final breaths.

The economic crisis will be with us regardless of the choices we make. If we hunker down and ride out the viral attack, the economy will shrink, many businesses will fail and the recovery will be long and hard. If, on the other hand, we decide to open the economy and the viral attack returns with a vengeance (see the Spanish Flu in the fall of 1918), we'll have to retrench and start over and the economy will be devastated as well. The economic trick isn't how the virus is addressed; its how the government props-up the economy with massive infusions of money … or it doesn't.

Mitch McConnell is already kvetching about the borrowed money, now that the business community is funded to his satisfaction. He misses the point. Propping up the business half of the economy accomplishes nothing if the consumer half is devastated. Consumers can't consume if they're flat broke. So regardless of the open/close decision, keeping the money coming is a must.

[David Horn]

(04-22-2020, 01:16 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: I recall mention of the Authoritarian Right in the paleo 4T site.  In USA todays version of the Authoritarian Right is a plutocratic group.  

They were largely contained during the last 1T, then started to gain traction with Reagan's presidency.  So we have seen decades of rot.

I would be careful not to pigeon hole all of the Right with the Authoritarian Right-there is also the Libertarian Right.

Some on the Libertarian Right are actually not really all that libertarian.  Look at the TEA Party as a prime example.  They're all in favor of the government leaving them alone, but have no compunction about using it as a cudgel against their supposed enemies on the Left.

[Eric the Green]

(04-22-2020, 10:55 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-21-2020, 06:53 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: They are parochial and provincial in their outlook, which perhaps results partly from being involved in those activities; but I suspect that's not the reason, because therefore blues hunkered down in cubicles are just as involved in their activities.

No; insular, parochial and provincial red attitudes result from their restricted views of the world, being stuck in set ways of regressive thinking, inherited and enforced by your parents and/or local community. Blues are aware of the larger world, and thus see the bigger picture, are less authoritarian and more willing to question and see new conditions, and thus are also far less xenophobic than you Trump supporters are, by a long shot. Living on the coasts and near the waters and more urban means we blues are exposed to more kinds of people and ideas than you reds. And of course, more exposed to this virus problem too, although it's everywhere.

Seeing the big picture as we do, we are able to see the virtue of sacrificing for the greater good of society, while conservatives are less able to see this. By and large though, some conservatives are seeing this now too.

Not only am I indeed not the type who could do those things to animals, I am not the type who would. Thus I would not even take the time to learn. My opinion is, let the poor creatures alone and let them live. They can take care of themselves if we leave them alone. Nature now is to be preserved, not exploited.

I would suggest the red are closer to nature, the blue more civilized.  They represent different places in man’s cultural evolution.  The red are not the beginning, are well civilized.  The blue have not reached the end point, are moving on continuously.  If both could leave each other alone and not see one as superior to the other, we might be better off.  Unfortunately the federal government likes one size to fit all, and the two wind up bumping heads.

That depends on how you see Nature, these days. It is not just that the reds are closer to Nature and the blues are more civilized. It's more that the reds live in areas that live off the land through exploiting Nature; while blues are the hikers and adventurers who love Nature, but mostly just visit it and don't live off of it. Reds don't give a flying fuck for the most part about pollution and climate change. Although they depend more on Nature, they are less concerned with preserving it and only care about their property rights.

Blues are largely superior to reds. The latter are at a lower level of evolution, because they have restricted viewpoints on things based on what their family and small community believe: traditional religion, and favoring self-reliance, at least in their minds, rather than "dependence" or being supported and helped by government. Reverence for family, "God" and "country," including support for war and the military. Content with traditional limited pursuits in life, and much inclined to favor and restrict themselves to their own kind rather than willing to associate more-often with, or at least tolerate, people different from themselves. Reds look down on education as elitist or leftist brainwashing, and are not curious about the world. Reds generally don't like hippies and other alternative cultures and lifestyles, even though hippies often like to escape to communes in the country, and even though nowadays it is the reds who most abuse drugs (the opiate crisis).

And of course, where you Bob sympathize, reds are hung up on their guns, and think their "liberty" depends on being armed. That's partly because some rural folks do still depend on hunting and ranching for their livelihood and want to keep the wolves and such off their property, as well as not having police as handy to lower the crime rate. There's also violent "honor traditions" in Dixie, and hotter tempers. And some reds join militias because they don't trust the government to keep the level of order they want, and to oppose gun control, and some dream of civil war or race war and overthrowing or resisting the government.

But this way of life is shrinking, and those who pursue it in red states and counties are tending to get left behind. They are resentful of this, but thanks to gerrymandering, the senate and the electoral college they have power in the USA out of proportion to their numbers.

We still need some rural people, of course, and people who work the land and its flora and fauna. And living in the country appeals to people on both sides. Some reds even prefer city life. The question is how much of the rather-recent extreme ideology that is now dominant in the red states and counties of the USA needs to continue. I say, very little of it.