The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(01-13-2020, 11:21 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Hint...Irrational people don't deserve much rational thought and responding to irrational people doesn't require thought either. He's playing tit for tat with irrational liberals and never Trump and he's winning by showing America how irrational the two of them really are these days. The funny thing is that the folks that he's been playing liberal games with are supposed to be professionals.

By lying?  By changing his lies day by day until he finds a lie that works?  Trump would only be convincing the irrational people, which are more apt to be his base than liberal. More likely to be unskeptical clueless believers.

I will try again to say something I have said many times before in different ways.  The old world and the new took different paths.  East Europe and Asia took an unfortunate diversion into fascist, nazi, and communist philosophies.  While fascist and communist philosophies may be rated as very different along the left - right axis, both attempted to reap the technical benefits of the industrial revolution while not touching the benefits of the Enlightenment.  They remained autocratic, ignoring things like democracy, division of power and human rights.

The English speaking West took a very different path.  They embraced both elements of technology and Enlightenment political virtues.

Attempts do describe Western systems using old world terminology fail.  Pretending to not be able to see the difference between the two systems is pretending to be ignorant.  Really being not able to see the difference between the two systems is to be really ignorant.

Socialist?  That sort of means government for the people, which is hardly an insult.  The problem is that the old world groups that called themselves socialist were more often not socialist by the above definition.  They were for their own elites, the party, those that controlled the means of production.  Therefore, they failed.  They could not compete with the West, and have not yet learned, repeating their mistake.  Their current attempts to mix capitalism with autocracy will eventually run into similar problems.  In the process of their lie about being socialists, however, they put an ugly connotation on the word.  If I thought you weren’t playing on the ugliness I would not object very much to the word.  There is really nothing wrong with a government that is trying to work for the people as opposed to a party that thinks themselves above the law.