07-14-2016, 07:50 AM
(07-14-2016, 07:12 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: There are some who are not here and from my perspective not missed. The stronger moderation seems to have improved things.
I may be imagining it, but there does seem to be a tendency to entrench in partisan perspectives here, though. This might be the presidential election cycle? I seem to recall that as the major elections approach, people double down on a need for their values to triumph. I can understand, but for me it results in shrill and shallow reading.
I saw a bit of American politics on C-Span (used to be intriguing, and now it is sickening) in which the Republicans voted to give only a handful of nays and the Democrats gave less than a handful of yeas. Maybe if the issue were something trivial, like renaming a post office for a local war hero, it would not be so polarized. Anything substantive shows how monolithic the two main American Parties have become.
I have little good to say about the Republican Party as it now is constituted, so I can be as shrill as anyone. I can imagine America after the end of the Crisis as the sort of place in which the rich get the pie and the poor are promised "Pie in the Sky When You Die" in return for Hell on Earth. I can imagine an economic equivalent of Apartheid, an exaggeration of the reality that started to appear as Ronald Reagan became President. The nastiest social orders require the most brutal repression for the enforcement of the will of the elites. Already there is so much easy money for a few and so much hardship for so many.
In the current issue of Consumer Reports, a young woman laments having ruined her life -- not by drugs, booze, or either an STD or an unplanned pregnancy, but instead by going to college and going heavily in debt. But what alternatives are there if one is to have a chance at the American dream of at the least a white-collar job without abject subjection?
If I were much younger and had children I would consider emigration because America seems to be going down the path to a society polarized between two different realities, one of indulgence characteristic of oil sheikhs in the Arabian peninsula and one of privation and debt-bondage for the masses. The easy money for a few implies great suffering for the many. Just read Les Miserables to get an idea of what America is becoming.
On the other side.... California is so far to the Left because of exorbitant rents. How does $2500 for a single-bedroom apartment sound?
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.