01-11-2018, 01:03 AM
(01-09-2018, 11:00 AM)David Horn Wrote: Occasionally, the broken clock hits it right.
(01-09-2018, 12:25 AM)nebraska Wrote: Which came first? The chicken or the egg?
Did Americans become immoral before "Midnight Cowboy" or after?
We made a massive transition from hyper morality (of sorts) to anything goes. If the GIs had been less dogmatic, the problem may have been avoided ... but they weren't.
Boomers can be as self-righteous as any generation. So said my shrink -- about me. That goes with Asperger's syndrome.
nebraska Wrote:The elites want everyone poor except themselves.
The 1% want Americans in prison and dead. Who gives the campaign donations to the politicians? Who makes money from wars and private prison quotas?
Of course they do, in theory. If it actually happens, they will be the new aristocrats being lead to the guillotine by the howling mob.[/quote]
Of course. Hunger is not a civic duty. Revolution against brutal oppressors becomes rational at times, as in the French Revolution -- when people got too rational for their own good.
Capitalists saved themselves from repetitions of the Bolshevik Revolution by turning the proletariat into avid consumers instead of the sullen masses that Karl Marx expected them to be. Of course we may have found our way into a situation in which we can no longer need rely upon crude consumerism as motivation for mind-numbing, soul-crushing toil.
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.