01-13-2017, 09:59 AM
(01-13-2017, 08:54 AM)David Horn Wrote:(01-12-2017, 05:51 PM)radind Wrote:(01-12-2017, 05:29 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:(01-12-2017, 03:30 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(01-12-2017, 09:29 AM)radind Wrote: I now have great hope.
you like fascism.
At least he's hopeful. I mean, say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, AT LEAST it's an ethos!
I have no use for fascism. I don't see Trump as a fascist.
I just try to see the man under the mask. He's a poor-little-rich-kid who never got told 'no'. Yes, I know he attended military school. Do you think that had any impact at all? Nothing was ever asked of him, nor did he give willingly. He's the narcissist his upbringing created.
We have four years to live with the guy. It won't take that long to see how this will play.
...Just as addicts typically deny that they have problem with substances, narcissists fail to recognize their pathology. One need not call oneself a fascist to be a fascist. To be sure, practically everything about fascism is pathology, and the nastiest systems that have ever existed have pathology defining them. It's the pathology, and not the label, that matters. Donald Trump is accustomed to ordering people about because in his business world, he can. "Military school" is often full of rich kids with problems. The idea is that the partial simulation of the ways of a military academy can give someone discipline and respect for authority. Once out of it, he is back to his 'normal' for him.
If we can elect someone like Donald Trump, then we have a problem. Electoral college? It could have gone the other way. If Hillary Clinton had gotten just under 46% and Donald Trump had gotten 48%, and Hillary Clinton had won, then our nation would still have a problem with character. We should find it unthinkable to vote for a mean-spirited demagogue. We should be able to ask whether a politician has made promises that contradict themselves and whether his view of the world is too simplistic to match reality.
I have heard plenty of people say that 'we need government run like a business'. The discipline of profit and loss is good for deciding which restaurant succeeds and which fails, and whether some manufacturing effort keeps going or fizzles. Profit and loss i snot how we deal with criminal law, diplomacy, national defense, or the welfare of the economically-distressed.
Donald Trump is a management-by-fear type... and he will soon find that he has no power to dictate how media cover him, what clergy say in their sermons, whether people decide that they owe their economic masters unpaid overtime, or whether lab results come out as the President or his flunkies want them to come out. He can deny global warming all that he wants, but he can't change the temperature readings. He cannot make college professors re-interpret American history or institutions to be prophecy leading to his Presidency. His command is itself limited, as it may apply to some extent in Detroit but not in Windsor, and in San Diego but not Tijuana. Some of us Americans will find the calls of the Pope more attractive than those of someone who brags about grabbing women by the crotch. It's 2000 years of dealing with ethical issues (and what is more full of ethical issues than economics?) against some 70-year-old who believes that the world revolves around him. Any Jews out there? Your religion has been dealing with that for an even longer time. No Jews, and no Jesus.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.