(03-07-2021, 08:50 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Huh? That seems contradictory. You can’t be a respected writer using that style of writing.
I doubt that I get much respect as a writer because I am not in the same league as Victor Hugo, Bertrand Russell, or Julius Epstein (screenwriter of Casablanca). My style is pound-pound-pound, and that may not be well liked.
If I saw such writing in a Freshman Composition class I would give it an "F". Maybe in high school one can get a decent grade for such gibberish because such writing shows the level of diligence often completely lacking in high0school students, but in college, quality becomes more important than sheer quantity. The Brothers Karamazov is a literary masterpiece despite its length and not because of it. A short poem can also be a masterpiece. Mahler's Third Symphony is a musical masterpiece despite its length (it takes an entire concert to perform it in full), but so is Chopin's Minute Waltz (it does take more than a minute, but so it is tiny). Good writing requires structure, purpose, and rationality; anything less is disrespect of a reader. How do I know this? After getting A's for all my writing projects in K-12 education I got some bad grades in Freshman Composition. I learned that I was working under a different set of rules the hard way. Among lessons that I learned were don't try to be cute; write with a plan that is at least a list; and stay clear of any attempt at humor unless you are legitimately the new Mark Twain or Woody Allen because
(1) you are not that good, and
(2) a jest is good for only one telling to a person and gets stale after one telling in writing.
Quote:Civil War II seems to be aborted with the police taking red violence seriously. Twice now the police have picked up chatter of a January 6 repeat, which resulted in the police getting ready for it and the insurrectionists taking one look and chickening out.
People are on trial in Michigan for a right-wing plot to kidnap the Governor. I have yet to see any approval polls on the January 6 insurrection or on Trump involvement, but I can easily imagine many conservatives who still believe in domestic tranquility and the rule of law agreeing with liberals who have taken domestic tranquility and the rule of law for granted as necessities for a workable political system.
Quote:Conservative values generally fade in a crisis heart. To a great extent we should move towards the same page. At the moment, the Big Lie of voter fraud is slowing that movement, but Trump’s lies have a shelf life, Obama was not born in the US? Mexico will pay for the wall? COVID is a hoax? 2020 voter fraud is just a repeat. As the Lie fades, we will shift to a new culture as we always have. The high will force conformity to the crisis solutions as usual.
People discover what must be preserved and what must be scrapped. Obviously, institutions that have become objectionable over decades or centuries (the Divine Right of Kings and chattel slavery) are especially prone to repudiation, and Crisis Eras are the times in which such dubious institutions die. So died the "Peculiar Institution" during the American Civil War.
Abraham Lincoln got it right:
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Quote:My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.
Abraham Lincoln
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The Union Army recognized the economic basis of slavery in feeding the Confederacy. As it advanced into slave territory it ended up with the most remarkable contraband possible: slaves. It was not going to return slaves to their recent owners because slave-based agriculture was feeding the Confederate Army. Slaves were "stealing away to Jesus"... which had meant Up North but now to the Union lines. It was the Union Army that made a full abolitionist out of Lincoln. After the Civil War the Union could return confiscated property from railroads and rolling stock, livestock, and confiscated foodstuffs to recent owners. Slaves were out of the question. The Civil War solved a logical contradiction between "a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Slave owners thought that they resolved the contradiction by denying the humanity of slaves.
.....Not only do old depravities die in a Crisis Era; most of what disappears of more recent vintage, coming largely from the preceding Third Turning. In the last Crisis Era, the last traces of an aristocratic order in agricultural economics vanished in Europe (OK, I concur with Einzige on that being a good thing); so did the idea that all-powerful political leaders could make and break treaties and murder at will. Colonial rule and empire-building became shown as more of a peril than a boon to colonial powers and lost its luster. Much of what died was of newer vintage, such as the speculative boom of the 1920's, vindictive treatment of the defeated, and the "scientific" racism that manifested itself in the Holocaust. The sorts of ideologies that bedeviled Germany, Italy, and Japan during World War II would be obliterated once and for all.
Quote:That will be better. Turning theory is about how cultures change and grow. While no one wants to live through a crisis, they are hard times, confronting and dealing with the issues centering the crisis has forced us to change, allowed us to grow.
Practically all bad habits have an investment behind them and become ingrained in personal and national character. Freeing oneself of them involves writing off the investment or selling the investment off cheaply. What else can we do? As a nation and as persons we will need to cease pretending that personal debt is not itself poverty. If people are to have wholesome old age (and at this, Generation X is truly burned), then people will need to relearn the arts of thrift and of low-yield, long-term, illiquid investment that makes a better world so that people can have a retirement fund and not depend upon loving relatives or the welfare system for survival past retirement age. Many will need to rely upon entrepreneurial activity instead of upon gig-like jobs in which one functions as a glorified clerk because one cannot imagine being a 'mere' worker. Every big project, private or public, is a labor-intensive activity, whether a railroad, a highway, a bridge, a shipping dock, a canal, a skyscraper, a pipeline, or some giant factory.
Bureaucracies do not create prosperity; they can at most manage prosperity. Here's a hint: the Old Order Amish live without bureaucracy, and they have few white-collar jobs. They have limited education and technology, but I can imagine far worse ways to live. They can prosper by standards of most of the world. They don't have televisions or sound equipment; they don't have video and music collections; but lacking those is far better than having collections of soul-rotting pornography or cynical rap music.
Quote:This is done in part through democracy.
Flawed as it is, democracy is so far the only political system that does not depend upon the fundamental decency of a ruler. The democratic institutions built into our system frustrated Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and they stopped Donald Trump during the last four years from doing all that he wanted to do. Rule of law and checks-and-balances may be more essential than democratic elections. People can still elect someone whose commitment to democratic norms is suspect. Remember well that the Iranian regime, one of the most egregious violators of human rights, initially had an elected parliament and President.
Crises are hard times... but they are necessary for keeping people from doing certain follies. Sometimes people must have their delusions shattered, including their class pretensions, their image of personal competence, the dogmas of the recent past (Lincoln again), their transitory will, and even their valuation of safety and comfort. Sometimes the best course of action for a well-educated person who expects an easy life is to take a job that works him to exhaustion on near-starvation wages, exposes him to the reality of mortal danger of death or crippling at any moment, that offers neither economic security not obvious prospects of long-term gain, and has harsh and demanding management while testing the physical part of life for which a sophisticated education does not prepare one. Welcome to the Army, soldier! Hitler and Tojo want you dead, and we might be unable to stop that. You will need to do your best just to survive without making a disgrace of yourself.
Maybe this time we will have big infrastructure projects that depend heavily upon raw labor. Construction work is hard and dangerous, and it is usually done in harsh conditions. So perhaps (and I am thinking of the biggest such highway project that I can imagine) transforming US-83 into an Interstate. Maybe kids who got putrid education in bad urban schools will learn how to use shovels, and kids who learned how to discuss The Brothers Karamazov will discover that while operating construction machines or doing surveying that there is more to learn than what a college education can teach. Such might forestall a depression.
Quote:Taxes and laws are still legitimate.
Just to protect the formality of property, such is the cornerstone of capitalist (or even socialist) prosperity, taxes and laws are essential. Property rights require police, courts of civil and criminal law, and prisons -- all of which require government.
Quote:I could go on. The bottom line is that you don’t become a respected writer by listing lies. You only expose your ignorance.
I'm not sure that I get respect as a writer, but I at least fact-check and try to recognize paradoxes and violations of such rules as the first, second, and third laws of thermodynamics which apply as much to economics as they do to chemistry and physics.
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.