07-04-2019, 01:54 PM
(07-04-2019, 09:19 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:(07-04-2019, 05:17 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:Was the lakeside town you are talking about Benton Harbor, which in recent years became saddled with poverty while neighboring St. Joseph went upscale? There was a fairly well-known book written about their disparity. Know that there were efforts to gentrify at least parts of Benton Harbor.(07-04-2019, 03:49 AM)taramarie Wrote: Ill keep it short and sweet and to the point. Evil grows in an insensitive cruel environment bred by years of bashing sensitives "snowflakes" I hear foolish Americans call sensitive people. Sensitivity isn't the problem. It is how it is used and abused. That is how you have a cruel leader. Either it is forced onto a society terrified and forced to obey or it is conditioned in the culture and mindset of people bashing and bullying people to not be gentle and sensitive. The society becomes insensitive and its like the toad in hot water. It doesn't know its in hot water as it has heated up over time and it is the new norm. Don't let him become the new norm. He is a symptom of a sick society.
...and it is those 'snowflakes' who make life tolerable in view of the economic necessity and bureaucratic reality.
In America I have heard plenty of right-wing politicians claim that they will make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions that 'make things work'. After they get elected hey make those harsh decisions, and they hurt people while enriching, pampering, and empowering the economic elites. So why can those pols claim to be able to make the 'hard' or 'tough' decisions? Because someone else will feel the pain! So it was with the recent Governor of Michigan: he found a city struggling with its finances but that has a nice park that a bunch of real estate developers would love to transform into 'luxury lakeside condominiums'. Bye, bye park! Paradoxically it was bequeathed by some plutocrat about seventy years ago...
You may have heard of the Flint water crisis... to cut costs the city was obliged to use a source of water but not treat it properly. From that decision came lead in the water supply and Legionnaire's disease. As elsewhere in America about every problem has its source in poverty, and where there is some attempt to squeeze the poor one gets harm to the poor. Flint is poor because it has lost a big chunk of the once-lucrative auto manufacturing industry.
It takes time for people to get wise to the most dishonest use of language, the attempt to make words mean something in practice other than what people understand. That's where Orwell becomes relevant.
Precisely. Contempt for the poor became stock behavior of the GOP with Ronald Reagan. With Trump the only 'good' poor are white people who think that white privilege is a treasure to be protected even at the cost of damning themselves to poverty even more severe. Aside from overt criminality, the behavior most likely to damn one to poverty is to hold formal education in contempt. Trump seems to endorse such (little surprise, as despotic and dictatorial regimes fare best when people have enough learning in which to read and do simple math, but not enough with which to recognize the absurdities in propaganda. Tellingly the dissident movements in the old Soviet Union became troublesome about as the regime needed well-educated people to manage the complex technology of such things as nuclear submarines.
Poor blacks and Hispanics respect formal learning, on the whole; their natural leaders, the black and Hispanic bourgeoisie, encourage such as the only viable way out of poverty. Poor whites rarely have mentors.
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.