09-13-2018, 02:39 PM
Some tangential polling data...but take a note of one of my concerns:
Americans back Democrats 52-38 for Congress in November.. even men back this.
Congressional approval: 18 approve, 72 disapprove.
Congress to be more of a check on the President (58), is it adequate (27), or to be less of a check (4)? Don't know -- 11
The news media:
Part of democracy 69
ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 21
Neither 5
Don't know/no response 6
NOTE: If you wonder why I put that one phrase in screaming, dark-red, bolded all-capitals text, then please read on.
Serial mass-murderer and tyrant Josef Stalin used the phrase ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE as a description of his opponents and rivals to be eliminated. There must be something wrong with civics education that fails to tell Americans how that phrase came into existence and what purpose it served. That 21% of the American people can accept the President using such a phrase against those who rebuke his incompetence and dishonesty suggests that about 21% of Americans are vulnerable to a totalitarian ideology of the Right.
Anybody with a left-wing tendency might want to consider whether they would accept the phrase against a demagogue who tells them what they want to hear. At least 21% of the American public has shown with this answer that they would be comfortable with a totalitarian dictatorship so long as it spares them of having to see its dirty work.
I do not know whether President Trump knows the source of ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, but I certainly do.
This phrase is to be distinguished from "Public Enemy" as used against such criminals as Dillinger, the Barrow-Parker gang, "Pretty Boy Floyd", and the like. Those people themselves were murderous marauders .
I am disgusted that fully 21% of Americans would be amenable to a right-wing dictator so long as the really-nasty stuff was done away from their more attention in K-12 education so that people find terms like "enemy of the people", "ten years without right of correspondence," (a usual euphemism for a death sentence in Stalin's Soviet Union, or "liquidation of *name the group of pariahs of the day). Those comprise but three monstrous uses of language, and those were in Stalin's nightmarish Soviet Union.
People need to learn the danger of a government that turns words into lies in their own right. Governments that butcher language have a tendency to butcher people.
Americans back Democrats 52-38 for Congress in November.. even men back this.
Congressional approval: 18 approve, 72 disapprove.
Congress to be more of a check on the President (58), is it adequate (27), or to be less of a check (4)? Don't know -- 11
The news media:
Part of democracy 69
ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE 21
Neither 5
Don't know/no response 6
NOTE: If you wonder why I put that one phrase in screaming, dark-red, bolded all-capitals text, then please read on.
Serial mass-murderer and tyrant Josef Stalin used the phrase ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE as a description of his opponents and rivals to be eliminated. There must be something wrong with civics education that fails to tell Americans how that phrase came into existence and what purpose it served. That 21% of the American people can accept the President using such a phrase against those who rebuke his incompetence and dishonesty suggests that about 21% of Americans are vulnerable to a totalitarian ideology of the Right.
Anybody with a left-wing tendency might want to consider whether they would accept the phrase against a demagogue who tells them what they want to hear. At least 21% of the American public has shown with this answer that they would be comfortable with a totalitarian dictatorship so long as it spares them of having to see its dirty work.
I do not know whether President Trump knows the source of ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE, but I certainly do.
This phrase is to be distinguished from "Public Enemy" as used against such criminals as Dillinger, the Barrow-Parker gang, "Pretty Boy Floyd", and the like. Those people themselves were murderous marauders .
I am disgusted that fully 21% of Americans would be amenable to a right-wing dictator so long as the really-nasty stuff was done away from their more attention in K-12 education so that people find terms like "enemy of the people", "ten years without right of correspondence," (a usual euphemism for a death sentence in Stalin's Soviet Union, or "liquidation of *name the group of pariahs of the day). Those comprise but three monstrous uses of language, and those were in Stalin's nightmarish Soviet Union.
People need to learn the danger of a government that turns words into lies in their own right. Governments that butcher language have a tendency to butcher people.
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.