02-01-2017, 11:51 AM
(02-01-2017, 10:16 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: And now you're firmly back in crank territory. You've even brought back "Wagnerian bombast, adulation of the Roman Empire, and samurai shtick", word for word.
You keep saying this is about Trump, but you were making the exact same posts back in 2013, just after Obama was re-elected. You've even brought back some of the same lines.
I bring this up as Donald Trump and a Party show themselves beholden to people whose idea of government is rule of the economic elites, by the economic elites, and for the economic elites for eternity. Anyone outside of the winning coalition is to just accept the change as a permanent reality beyond any challenge. Such may be strictly the ethical hollowness of Donald Trump -- but his practices resonate in people who see the working man solely as someone to exploit and degrade for the gain of economic elites.
You are right -- I hate the man viscerally. I see him as a renunciation of just about everything that I have admired in America. He considers the greed of elites the highest expression of human nature, and anything that gets in the way something to be rendered permanently irrelevant, if not obliterated. His moral values are pure egoism. He rejects the Enlightenment valuation of open inquiry when such challenges the agenda of profit maximization. He seeks a rigid class structure in which people have value to the extent of their proximity to economic power. His style of management is dictatorial, and he admires dictators. He has said flattering things about Vladimir Putin, Moammar Qaddafi, and even Saddam Hussein. His political appeal that associates his desirability as an economic steward ignores that he has gotten rich largely by exploiting permanent shortages in real estate, one of the easiest ways to get filthy rich. Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and especially Trump University have been fiascos, demonstrating that he is not so much an entrepreneur as he is a rentier. I have heard of how he does business -- shake hands with him and make sure that you do not lose a finger. He has stiffed many people who have dealt with him. Media star? I have never been able to watch much of his output. I can think of far better uses of viewing time than The Apprentice -- like reruns of Bonanza, M*A*S*H, I Love Lucy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Star Trek, The Honeymooners, Taxi, Home Improvement, Perry Mason, The Andy Griffith Show, The Simpsons, Twilight Zone... classic movies or maybe a sporting event. Sure I have a bias against people who ridicule the quest for intellectual enrichment and aesthetic delight, for I am little else.
If one is a conservative one could do better with praise for Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher; they at least do not have blood on their hands as do Putin, Qaddafi, or Saddam. He lacks the spine to reject someone so venal and bigoted as David DuKKKe, whose ideology is an attempt at synthesizing Ku Kluxism and Nazism. (OK, Ku Kluxism and Nazism share white supremacy, antisemitism, economic hierarchy, extreme nationalism, and contempt for workers' rights).
All people are flawed. We will never get the perfect leader. That is why we need liberalism with its free and competitive elections, government responsible to the People, openness to cultural diversity, and political transparency.
This is no longer 2013. We do not live in the same moral and political environment, at least in the USA, that we had six months ago. I look at the Trump agenda and I see something that could cause me to hate life so much that suicide could be an option. I am too old to do sixty hours of toil that taxes the raw stamina of people a third my age. I see a political order that can turn on me fast, not because I am a thug, but because I am a good person. He used a campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" that he offered as an objective beyond any need for explanation. So far as I can tell, that 'greater' America is one in which ethnic minorities know their (subordinate) places in the context of white supremacy, in which natural resources are simply objects for sale, in which women are baby machines that must work to exhaustion if they are not rich, in which plutocrats and bosses have complete power, and in which greed is recognized as a virtue but only if it is by the rich and powerful.
It is an endorsement of the 'Twenties -- the 1920s, a time that most people who knew them from personal experience had no desire to return.
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.