10-19-2019, 10:04 PM
(07-15-2019, 10:45 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:(03-14-2017, 09:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary is 1000 times more honest, good looking and authentic-sounding than Con-way, who cons her way all the time.
It's time to toss another log into this fire. One never knows where the Epstein rabbit hole will go.
https://www.ecosophia.net/the-long-view/
How about a long, stair step bounce down ?
Thank you for the excellent link.
It is telling that at one time the well-educated studied Latin. Even if declining puer and puella or conjugating habere and amare had little practical use, the well-educated got to see how badly a society that seemed to have much going for it could so waste its capabilities. (The really-well educated learned classical Greek, and got to learn how wonderfully a civilization could work).
The Romans really did fcuk up. They went from an agricultural order based upon yeoman farmers to one in which practically everyone was a serf because the Master Class decided that taxes were the responsibility of the little people to pay.Does that sound familiar? The Romans had slavery, always a degradation of life for all but slave-owners and a sure way to suppress enterprise and innovation. (America did solve the problem of slavery almost four score years after enshrining that great goof and crime in the Constitution... today if we had slavery we would have a well-funded industry hectoring all of us on how humane and necessary slavery would be, and that slavery creates needful progress and feeds the slaves wou would be unable to take care of themselves. Do you not believe me? Look at how special interests promote the most expensive method of medical payments in the world and defends the possession of AR-15's and AK-47's. The specific gain of a tiny minority is more important in America than the good of us all.
OK, the example of Germany at the start of the last Crisis Era exemplifies what happens when the Master Class (tycoons, executives, and big landowners) decided that they would be better off if they dispensed with labor unions, political competition, and small business, creating one big happy plantation on behalf of crony capitalists and the managerial elites within. Adolf Hitler promised those elites exactly what they wanted, including a highly-profitable program of re-militarization as a bonus. I am tempted to believe that those elites (the right-wing German Nationalist People's party was antisemitic if not as ferocious as the Nazis) saw the Jews troublesome because of their presence in small business and in their ability to expose the amorality of elites that never accepted them. (The Nazis hated the Jews not for their vices, but not for their virtues!)
In a short time the Nazis knocked out a model minority who seems to have well fit Arnold Toynbee's description of a creative minority and created a workers' Hell. Then Hitler started spreading his nightmare into places where it was unwelcome with the aid of an economy dedicated (after the profit, power, and privilege of the Master Class) to military expansion. Hitler and the plutocrats revived an institution abolished long earlier in other countries -- slavery, and indeed slavery at its absolute worst. For a slave in the Third Reich, survival was a privilege with no semblance of a blessing.
As far as I am concerned, the plutocrats who exploited slave labor from the camps were as deserving of ropes around their necks as the administrators of the camps. Keeping people on the brink of starvation as a reward for working to destructive exhaustion with the threat of stopping the food to the laborer who faltered is as much a murderous act as is leading people into gas chambers. Everyone was going to falter at some point.
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We need to remember that we Americans are where we are not so much because of Donald Trump, but instead because of the depravity of what Toynbee calls a dominant elite -- here, plutocrats no longer innovative and providential. The Koch family relies heavily upon low-technology items in making money -- paper, fuels. asphalt, cattle, old chemicals, and now glass... nothing high-tech here. This family was among the biggest donors to the Hard Right that won big in elections of 2010 and 2014. To get sponsorship of the Koch family and others one needed to establish that one held a firm belief in the idea that no human suffering short of slavery can ever be in excess so long as such allows a new or enhanced profit. Much of the focus was on taxes, but in the same timeframe, labor unions have been taking a beating.
The winners of 2010 mostly got re-elected in the Senate in 2016, and now we have Donald Trump, who fits well as a pure crony capitalist. I wish that he did not bring out my worst tendencies toward cynicism, but he is treating many in America badly; he debases public discourse with vicious stereotypes. I am tempted to believe that his erratic foreign policy is likely to get us into a very nasty war if such is not reversed. Donald Trump may not even approach the roguishness of Adolf Hitler, but somehow I prefer that my politicians not ridicule the handicapped (I found such offensive when I did not realize that I had a severe handicap that has messed up my life badly), let alone brag about grabbing women by their...
So how would detachment go with me? If I could telecommute, I would rather live in a country in which people appreciate freedom because they know what life was like without it. Maybe America will have some resemblance in that respect to places like Chile and the former Czechoslovakia, where people remember how degrading a dictatorship could be even if it quite murdering people after it ran out of dissidents. Transcendance? One finds religion -- one different from one's heritage. Many who became Protestant Fundamentalists found their way from mainline Protestantism. Oddly, Fundamentalism is a comparative innovation in American religious life -- it dates from the 1920's! Contrast what seems new -- Mormonism -- and Mormonism is approaching the two-century mark in age. But back to transcendence: recognizing that the rest of the world does not matter. Transcendance poses some risk to the elite in that people could find the 'wrong' vehicle for transcendance. Neopaganism? Islam? Buddhism? Futurism is futile because daydreams about a radically-different world advanced far from the present will not materialize.
After Trump and the Tea Party pols (and they may well go down together) we may be stuck with an archaism in the sense of reverting to what we used to do well... OK, do not re-establish Jim Crow, let alone slavery... and do not turn back LGBT and women's rights. Even if I am a liberal I have some ideas that are reactionary in some ways -- like returning to the liberal arts as an objective in post-secondary education rather than as a direction to go for people who flunk out of technical specialties. (Make sure that the technically-trained get some liberal arts, too). We need to learn how to live so that we can adjust to the plethora of entertainment that includes comparatively little culture and far more schlock. With few exceptions, the old Western canon remains rich in usefulness, and if one adds the likes of Mann, Kafka, Ellison, Orwell, and Kundera -- fine. It is tempting to believe that the people who voted for Trump were less likely to have familiarity with Orwell.
Words have meanings; images (if not simply decoration) have even greater meaning than mere words. (If I have to explain what is in a photograph with a caption other than to identify the time and location, then I did not take an interesting photograph). Ideas can be base (practically anything by Hitler) or noble (practically anything by Martin Luther King), and the choice is as much everyone's as is the choice between good and evil.
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.