12-29-2019, 10:46 AM
(12-29-2019, 02:14 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Pity..You still seem to be stuck on the Russia thingy. Yeah, if that illegal shame had only worked out for you. You'd be in a much better place than you are today. But, since it failed horribly and since the other side is not all that friendly towards any of today's Leftist politicians or any leftist groups now associated with them these. Me, I don't pay much attention to the low end shit on social media these days. Do you think I'm going to cry or feel bad for the self absorbed, unwise brat who owns Google or owns Facebook or owns Amazon when they're bankrupted or killed for being irresponsible because liberal Government doesn't have the balls to do what should be done for all of us.
Our political process is at stake. We liberals know well that as the judiciary fills with ideological activists from one side of the political spectrum, when political discourse becomes invective, when a personality cult forms around a terribly-flawed person, when a big chunk of news becomes a propaganda machine, and when the President admires dictators instead of democratic leaders... then human rights and civil liberties are in danger. When the leadership acts like a Marxist stereotype of capitalists, then we can expect no semblance of equity but instead a world in which the masses are responsible to people who show no responsibility to any but themselves. Let Donald Trump and the GOP entrench themselves, and democracy dies... and, worse, the social order increasingly resembles a country on the brink of a violent revolution.
I concede that you are wise to recognize social media as completely unreliable sources of news and information on politics. It is good for keeping up with classmates, sharing recipes, and arranging family reunions. OK, I get some occasional material from the erudite David Kaiser who used to share his ideas on the old Fourth Turning forum. For good reason I prefer the erudite material to the unvarnished fare from people who respond with little thought to a meme that extremists have emitted for public consumption -- and such is often no better than the soapbox speeches of extremists, cranks, and lunatics. Still, you sound as if you have assimilated the manipulative swill that emanates from FoX Newspeak Channel and the like.
I have heard right-wing pols promise that they will make the "tough choices" that others dare not execute. It is far easier to do certain things, like give tax cuts to the Master Class while raising taxes on the non-rich or abandoning the poor and disabled to the harshest calculus of social Darwinism. Those tough choices have created more prosperity for a few and misery for far more... and they often come with efforts to entrench the power of the sociopaths and narcissists prone to do bad things to good people because such is good for the only people who matter to them -- themselves or those who have them as retainers.
I look with trepidation on what I think you think "should be done for us". Monopolizing the economy so that we simply work more and pay more for whatever we get? Wrecking a large part of America no longer useful to economic and bureaucratic elites? Those people have arrogated all the economic gains that scientific and technological innovations, cultural creativity (intellectual property is becoming a larger share of GNP while manufacturing is shrinking as such) and economies of scale. What do we the non-rich get in return?
Nothing -- but having to work longer, harder, and for less so that a few can live like the Saudi royal family similarly amoral and unprincipled. The Saudi royal family believes in strict observance of religious norms for the masses, but this is the same hypocrisy that I note in the reactionary part of our economic elites.
I recognize the potential for capitalism -- so long as it is open to competition. If anything, the solution to the economic chaos that would follow the overthrow of nominally-capitalist rulers and bureaucratic elites as the retainers of those elites is a wide-open economy that fosters small business. Not everyone can be a capitalist, but at its best capitalism has done more good by accident than even charity has done by design. Capitalism under the dominance of corrupt, cruel, selfish, rapacious, amoral people will degrade Humanity; such is fascism.
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.