(10-04-2020, 11:12 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(10-03-2020, 04:52 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-03-2020, 02:26 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(10-03-2020, 12:14 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Constitutional restraints are often all that keeps the majority from dispossessing, enslaving, and murdering the minority. I think of what has happened in other countries... like the Nuremberg Laws that made pariahs out of you-know-who.
Are you in favor or opposed to the Democratic Party significantly altering and packing the supreme court, eliminating the filibuster and the electoral college? Also, are you willing to accept the consequences of them doing so and whatever additional burdens may be inflicted/imposed on you personally as a result of giving them the right to do so these days?
If President Trump pushes a grossly-incompetent, corrupt, or extremist Justice upon us because he can , then packing the Supreme Court may be a necessity. Eleven justices would still give the GOP a 6-5 edge.
So, what's going to happen to you when the Democrats try to push their agenda down our throats?
Throats like yours are not the only throats. If Democrats get huge, honest majorities then they can push change that many people dislike. But note well: I trust the resilience of people like you. Business owners can adjust. Just look at the opposition by Big Business to welfare. Food stamps turned potential shoplifters into customers. I would guess that Wal*Mart, hardly a model of corporate liberalism, can get people on food aid to buy profitable chips, sodas, candy, and deli items. Medical practitioners who once railed against 'socialized medicine' found themselves with plenty of Medicare customers because people on Medicare don't have to choose between food and medical treatment.
Quote:Are you going to be able to afford a loaf of bread?
Foodstuffs remain cheap in real terms. More people have trouble with rent, which reflects that landlords in some areas are able to compel tenants to participate in a bidding war to live in places with vibrant economies. Where rents are cheap, so is the cost of living -- but the opportunities are typically fewer, and in general life is awful.
The World According to Briggs has some tongue-in-cheek videos about bad cities in which to live. This involves the ten worst cities in Pennsylvania from 2016, but you get the general pattern. Unemployment is high, average income for a family is low, crime is high, drugs are readily available, and schools are crappy. These are not places that you even want to visit. (I have been in Pennsylvania, but I have never been in any of these places and I have no desire to ever be in them). Some of them used to be good places in which to live when having a steady job in manufacturing with a solid job was possible for someone with a high-school diploma. That is over. You don't want to live in any of these places; there is no reason to visit them unless to see family; looking for a job in such places is futile; there's not much to do in most of them (although Chester is within range of the cultural attractions of Philadelphia, it is one of the most polluted cities in America); you certainly don't want to raise a family in these places. Inflicting such places upon a child would be child abuse.
Briggs has other similar videos.
Quote:Are you going to be able to voice your opinion without fear of being persecuted or killed?
You have more cause to fear the mirror-image Marxism of a second term of Donald Trump or Mike Pence than you have to fear of a Party that at its most liberal extreme stands for a high-tax, high-service social-market economy that has a vibrant private sector. Donald Trump favors a more purely plutocratic vision than Mike Pence, who offers more of a pie-in-the-sky approach to life; their difference is that Trump offers amoral glitter that elites enjoy in opulent excess and Pence offers salvation in return for economic hardship on behalf of economic elites. What Trump and Pence offer are raw deals unless you accept Pascal's wager that offers misery in This World for delight in the Next. Trump promises nothing but economic gain to the Right People.
You are a businessman. If people in your area prosper more, then you will be able to sell and service more air conditioners in a place (southern Minnesota) where such are now for middle-class and high-prole (skilled labor) households.
Do you see many privileged people accepting Pascal's wager, enduring miserable lives in subordination of all happiness on behalf of the elites that they leave? The elites obviously did nothing to create the alleged delights in the Afterlife instead of the sybaritic excess of America's economic elites. The people who offer such a wager are more likely to offer it on the basis of 'take-it-or-get-nothing', and only rarely (medical missionaries and Catholic priests are possible exceptions) themselves.
As a general rule, the rawer the deal that the System has for the common man (in view of the resources), the nastier is the political system. The worst political orders compel people to accept the dreadful as the sole alternative to the horrific and be show enthusiastic praise for what tiny blessings they get in an exploitative and repressive order, as in North Korea.
Quote:Like I said, we are still being relatively nice and still content with leaving nature to determine the course. You don't seem to realize that you have chosen to be on the wrong side of history which is fine with me. Your senators are supposed to be wiser than they seem these days.
You and people like you do not have the right to treat others badly for disagreeing with you. (Neither do we, aside from our hypocrites who simply want to replace one elite with themselves). We the People have the right to thwart your designs before you come close to organizing shooting pits and concentration camps or compelling forced labor. The people who applaud Donald Trump much like people under dictatorial and despotic orders laud their "Great and Infallible Leaders" have the intellectual shallowness, the spinelessness, the emptiness of spirit, and moral blindness to support a Mao, a Castro, a Qaddafi, a Milosevic, or a Saddam Hussein who needs ebullient crowds to demonstrate their undying faith in their Leader. Donald Trump has exposed that America has such people. That should scare you. Start to show doubt, and you may have a knock on your door at 2 AM by some official who takes you away from your dreary flat to a jail, after which you face a show trial and get hauled off... well, just read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.* Whether the system is the Castro's Cuba or Pinochet's Chile it is much the same. Someone will denounce you just to get your job, maybe a little cash or a vacation, or get to rent your apartment that is slightly better than that of your slanderer. I don't trust people like you with my civil liberties, such little prosperity as I have, and whatever dreams may still be mine.
I prefer a system that expects people to be nice to each other and that tells those who envy others to work harder or longer, think beyond instant gratification, improve their skills, start a business instead of being a glorified clerk, defer more to customers, and give up costly but pointless indulgences to save and invest more.
*Stalinists and Maoists are in practice as cruel, repressive, and exploitative of the masses as are fascists.
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.