10-07-2020, 09:13 AM
(10-06-2020, 10:03 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(10-06-2020, 07:22 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Which stage of grief are you now in?
I'm not the one who is reliant upon a political system that's unsustainable. I already accepted the inevitable and the death of America as we still know it today a long time ago. You know what you are to me, you're the absent minded Democrat who finds himself stuck in the middle of a war between the American Right and the Left.
Your language is little different from that of segregationists scared that their assumption of whites getting all the breaks and blacks having to defer on all public matters was the foundation of the life that they know. Such was the same in Kukluxistan or South Apartheid.
The question is now whether the neoliberal idea that nothing matters except the enrichment of economic elites is the sole purpose of any American life, and that the poor somehow can expect improved lives by being squeezed more and more. Neoliberalism has wrecked much of America. It's only a matter of time under neoliberal economics and politics before your Twin Cities become another Detroit, Cleveland, or St. Louis
Maximization of inequality leads to proletarian revolutions. When such happens, your survival could depend upon being a real-life Victor Komarovsky, a character from Doctor Zhivago who, lacking any moral compass but knowing that power is everything and that power depends upon using one's competence to serve the brutal needs of whoever is in charge is essential for surviving and thriving no matter who is in charge. Victor Komarovsky was as ready to serve the Whites as the Reds.
I have never been to the Twin Cities... but I know a little about it. The climatic classification is borderline between Dfb (warm but not hot and rainy summers, but snowy winters, something like Green Bay) and Dfa (fire and ice climate with no real dry season). That is roughly the border for summers in which, as in Kalamazoo or Detroit, an air conditioner can make life much more pleasant. Air conditioners are a luxury in the Twin Cities, Kalamazoo, or Detroit. They are necessities in Kansas City, St. Louis, or Indianapolis.
I know what your business is. You would fare far better if more people could afford air conditioners.
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.