08-09-2020, 01:49 AM
(08-09-2020, 12:55 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(08-08-2020, 09:19 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I really hate to bring up the infamous forgery that asserted that a small group of people has a conspiracy with which to dominate the world. Truth be told, if you want to achieve something, including economic gain, then don't rely upon a conspiracy to make it work. People who really get things done with excellence, people who run circles around us all without exploiting and degrading us are more likely to be described in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. To do extraordinary achievements in fields as disparate as painting, acting, sports, writing, music (composition or performance) or engineering one needs about ten thousand hours of early preparation before one reaches the necessary level of sublimity. The vast majority of people either get directed to something more banal out of economic necessity or don't get the chance. Can you imagine many parents allowing their kids to put four hours a day on a violin playing repetitive exercises? Few could tolerate that.
10,000 hours is about the time it takes to become an attorney or physician or get a PhD. There is no cheap way around it these days. The high-achieving dilettante is no more in a time in which practically everything not at a modest level of skill is banality. Maybe a machine paces the production or the clock paces driving a truck. It is noteworthy also for what one does not do. Musicians in first-tier orchestras are infamously immature at dating. That's 10,000 hours for you.
Conspiracies are comparatively easy to form. Even if they are devious they are usually scatter-brained efforts to do what others can't do, like deal drugs, pull off a terrorist act, or arrange a murder for hire. Or perhaps a bungled coup in some unfortunate countries. But their scatter-brained character makes them easy to pursue after they do something horrible.
We have a President scatter-brained enough to think that he could get away with a conspiracy to murder American democracy.
You do realize that Trump was elected. The day the Democratic party decided that it was a good idea to tie votes to government benefits and advancements and wealth is the day democracy died for you and everyone one on your side. I hope your ready for the advent of natural law because that's what's going to decide who ends up under what system down the road. Dude, if a baby doesn't matter them. What the fuck makes you think that you matter them. So, have fun living in hell before you die.
Trump got a smaller share of the vote (45.93%) in 2016 than did...
Romney (47.15% in 2012)
Kerry (48.26% in 2004)
Ford (48.01% in 1976)
Nixon (49.55% in 1960)
and not much better than McCain (45.60%) in 2008, Dukakis (45.65%) in 198, or Dewey (45.89%) in 1944 -- all of whom lost in elections in which their opponent won 365 or more electoral votes.
Try to convince me that the election of Donald Trump wasn't a freak.
...by the way -- if you wonder who gets the benefits, then it is white people who collect the vast majority of welfare, and that it is Appalachia, the Ozarks, and the Deep South that have so many poor people eligible for welfare and disability benefits. Many such people are terribly under-educated... and poor, under-educated white people vote heavily for Trump.
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.