Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[pbrower2a]

(07-03-2019, 03:36 AM)taramarie Wrote: A cynic on human nature but he knew exactly how to manipulate people and he did it so well and he was correct that as long as the people have their eyes shut to actual truth, he can feed their already formed bias or create it. He was a master puppeteer. I wish that your country could learn from that. Evidently not. Any country is prone to have that happen again in one form or another. No country is immune. Perhaps thinking can save huge amounts of frustration, but for some they don't give a crap. Most don't. Its easier to feed bias. Which explains many things throughout history. Racism, sexism, political bias, gang violence, tribalism, you name it, people like to feel they are part of something and any sort of threat perceived because of what others tell them what to think is easier to take on board than rather understand it for ourselves. What is feared is safety and the unknown. 




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If people are not to be fleeced by advertisers (and that is the most benign form of mind-control), turned into cannon fodder in Wars for Profit, and cruel enforcers of an unconscionable order, then they must do their own thinking. To not think is to be a tool of thugs who command the State and the economic power.

Before Trump, I thought that every country has one manifestation of fascism to have some fit to the culture. For America that seemed to be the KKK. No, the KKK is not more benign than Nazism; I can easily imagine Kluxists doing killings parallel in scale, wars of conquest and enslavement, and brutality similarly horrific. I have thought of writing a science fiction novel that inverts the roles of good and evil  for Germany and Japan on the one side and America goes evil due to a takeover by the 1914 Klan. The bigotry of the Klan and Nazis is much the same. I see the conflict ending in utter defeat of America with a Cold War forming over the wreckage after the Germans and Japanese, among others, have kicked KKK a$$ all the way to the midsection of America. Sony vs. Siemens?

Parallels are necessary for making sense, and an image much like this appears as a monumental statue:



except that the statue is in Tokyo, the flag is the Rising Sun Flag, and the mountain being depicted is Mauna Loa in "liberated Hawaii".

I see much of the evil in our society in privileged elites believing that the rest of Humanity exists for the enrichment, indulgence, and power of those elites and that the proles are to obey or die if they fall short of the demands upon them. They might starve slowly or be killed, should they show any sign of rebellion, in some gruesome manner. I see much of the fault in a theological position that the rich and powerful are especially blessed, but the rest of us can suffer for those elites with the expectation of nothing more than Pie-in-the-Sky-When-You-Die.

Cruelty is not the sole cause of evil, but I cannot see anything other than evil arising from cruelty. Dracula was a cruel man; Ivan the Terrible was a cruel man; Hitler was a cruel man; Stalin was a cruel man; Idi Amin was a cruel man; Saddam Hussein was a cruel man. Such matters more than whatever philosophical system any one of these held. Yes, Donald Trump is a cruel man. He may not get away with as much as the horrifically evil men that I mentioned before him, but such is only because our institutions so far stop some of his worst.

Some. More relevant is the example of Italy under Mussolini. Italian political institutions were much stronger than the nascent democracy of the Weimar Republic. Mussolini had to transform Italy slowly into a monstrosity; the full horror of a fascistic America would more likely appear under some right-wing successor to Trump. Clerical fascism meets the inequality of old plantation South and the managerial elitism of Henry Clay Frick -- and a reversion to Manifest Destiny, with nukes as tools of diplomatic bullying. America ends up with a brain drain because, among other things, it is impossible to do biology or archeology if one must do so under the strictures of young-earth creationism.