10-22-2017, 10:15 AM
(10-21-2017, 05:16 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(10-21-2017, 04:39 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-21-2017, 08:59 AM)David Horn Wrote:(10-17-2017, 07:12 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Good point. I was wondering today how much convenience I am really willing to give up for the collective good.
... and that's it in a nutshell. As a nation, we aren't ready to suffer even minor discomfort -- not yet anyway. What will take us there and when are both open questions. I'm still in the not-this-time camp. We may have to suffer greatly to benefit greatly. We're too old to suffer the worst of it, and will certainly not be around to witness the best either. I do fear for those much younger. They didn't make the mess, but they'll be the clean-up crew.
We will be able to make great sacrifices when going along with a trend that economic elites have imposed upon us violates our core beliefs. Do you believe that America would have done an invasion on the scale of D-Day (the most lethal day in American history except for some in the Civil War) except that we found defeating the Nazi menace a compelling necessity?
We will make great collective sacrifices when the menace is individual evil for almost all people. If one sees 'our' economic elites as menaces to our freedom, prosperity, and personal dignity then even we American swill turn against those elites.
Right now, you are a bigger menace than the elites you claim are the ones keeping you/us down. You're the menace because you're one that we can see. Eric is another menace that we can see as well.
So how am I a menace?
The real menaces are people who see no higher purpose in life than their gain, indulgence, and power -- an objective that they can enjoy and for which other must suffer. Those people, their brutal enforcers, and their cynical propagandists will have to go if we are not to find that what passes for prosperity is subjection. Maybe the most extreme narcissists who can get away with such (like Donald Trump) are a Boomer phenomenon that will die out and become irrelevant -- or maybe they will set a persistent pattern in life.
So you see nothing wrong with government by corporate lobbyists, the political reality of contemporary America? That sounds like a new form of tyranny to me, something that could easily become as objectionable as the capricious despotism of George III. It could be more dangerous because it is more systematic and rational. It now has weapons and prisons as potential enforcers. All it needs is a Gestapo-like, KGB-like, or Mukhabarat-like (secret police of Satan Hussein) to ensure that people who dissent are killed or subjected to a worldly Hell.
The powerful gangsters who proved the menaces to American democracy during the last Crisis Era, the ones who operated from Berlin, Tokyo, and Rome, would have had to conquer America to impose their sick dreams upon America. Today the ones who can inflict their sick dreams operate in corporate board rooms, sold-out law firms, and the dens of iniquity known as lobbying firms. We could hold off Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini well enough that we could keep our institutions intact. Today the enemy is among us.
Were I German, Italian, or Japanese I would recognize how horrible were the fascist thug regimes my country had had around 75 years ago, and would be glad that the US had defeated them and given their conquests back to the Peoples of their countries while extirpating the root causes of fascism. I would have considered America a largely-benign influence, perhaps a bit clumsy enough to pose an occasional inconvenience (the 800-pound gorilla, so to speak) -- until Trump became President and said things that I would have never expected an American President to say. The 800-pound gorilla has morphed into an 800-pound bear.
American culture? Nothing that a little Bach, Puccini, or Hokusai couldn't enrich. American politics? Scary. It is beginning to resemble something all too familiar. The method may be different. But were I German, Italian, or Japanese I would want to stick with what the Americans left us in the 1940s than what they now have. I would also be scared of a country armed to the teeth that needs only a Gestapo, Ovra, or Kempeitai to compel obedience to people with God-like powers but at the same time a demonic lack of conscience.
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.