03-30-2021, 06:13 PM
(03-30-2021, 10:25 AM)David Horn Wrote:(03-30-2021, 03:56 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(03-29-2021, 06:09 PM)NLVT Wrote: Americans say that anyone who loves freedom supports the police state.
This sounds like computer-generated word salad...
I'm purging this same poster as fast as new accounts are created, but I can only go so fast. Threads (s)he creates disappear in the purge, so consider that before you start a conversation on one. That applies in general. The thread starters are always a headline and a link.
The nonsense character is obvious. It doesn't even parse, yet it pretends to great profundity. "Americans say" is obvious because Americans in no way form a cultural or political monolith unless one has a narrow identification based upon ideology and perhaps ethnic identity. Someone cannot love freedom (unless it is the freedom of some clique to do what it wants to anyone not inside that elite, which is how medieval lords operated) and support any style of police state.
At times the headline often has a provocative, meaty story behind it. Sometimes such leads to a legitimate story. I have started threads that way, but I have typically sought to explain why the story has interest. There might even be random successes in finding such a story. But as a rule, if it leads to something obscure and the conclusion does not match the headline the thread is worthless.
"Word salad" is one of the most common epithets for worthless communications. If something does not make sense and one cannot suggest that its truth is real despite being counter-intuitive, then we have one category of garbage.
This said, I thought that a police state was forming in the last year of the Trump Administration. It has been shut down; President Biden has no use for it even as a parody to do much the same thing. Some people are delusional enough to believe that the attempt to undo the formal election of the President was an act of consummate patriotism instead of a dangerous coup. Many people saw nothing wrong with people driving vans (the ones that I saw in the news media were all Chevrolet Suburban vehicles) with a US flag and a Trump banner. Personal loyalty to the Leader among those doing the dirtiest work of law enforcement typically characterizes dictatorial and despotic regimes from at least ancient Sparta on. Mercifully such did not go far.
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.