03-23-2017, 12:51 PM
(03-20-2017, 05:41 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(03-20-2017, 03:38 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(03-14-2017, 10:26 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(03-14-2017, 08:14 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Cold War Daily?
Yeah someone didn't get the memo that the USSR collapsed in 1991.
Russia has a dictatorial regime hostile to democracy anywhere.
What Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko dreamed of doing and all failed at -- installing a regime similarly undemocratic and obedient to the interests of the Kremlin in the USA... Putin has succeeded in doing.
Cool theory bro, but there's one problem. I don't think the Russians want a democracy. If they did they'd have one. On top of that I don't think a country with a GDP less than Italy's is a problem for any of the EU countries unless we're talking like Slovakia or some god forsaken postage stamp country in Europe.
Also how did Putin install Trump? Did he mind control most of the states going for him? Did he use some sort of radio wave thingy? Seriously PBR you're not usually into tin-foil hat theories. You should leave that to the experts like Alphabet.
Only rarely are the political, commercial, and intellectual elites so rash as to support an agenda that looks like a conspiracy hatched in some tin-foil mind. Those elites like people to be complacent about the rapaciousness and snobbery of those elites. They generally prefer that people not be rifted along lines of ethnicity, religion, or class and thus amenable to the demagogic appeals of someone like Donald Trump. Those elites, the Establishment, have generally wished that the common man see himself having a stake in the system -- for when the common man has no stake in the system he is vulnerable to extremist ideologies like fascism and communism or to religious panaceas that threaten the ways of life of the Establishment.
Yes, the economic order has been doing badly for the white working class. 3T individualism supports a culture more prone to risky and exploitative behavior. Big Business has been trying to eviscerate labor unions for years with the argument that if workers have no compulsion to pay union dues they might have a few more presents under the Christmas tree this year. Of course, weak or non-existent unions imply that workers have no collective bargaining or grievance process to prevent the race to the bottom in pay and working conditions.
Demagogues, supposed Men of the People, usually end up betraying the people who fall for their appeals. They create enemies instead of finding solutions. They often sell out to the elites who initially show disdain for them. Many have such crazy ideas of how to run things that they resort to dictatorial methods.
Donald Trump successfully played mass resentments and fears. He has solved nothing.
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.