(04-21-2021, 11:39 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(04-20-2021, 03:24 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: You can find some Leftist to call them names; that doesn't mean anything. High military spending is not neo-liberalism; it is neo-conservatism. Biden is more of one of those than Trump, perhaps; although specific military actions are being reduced under Biden.
The federal government could never run the entire USA energy industry, nor would it ever happen. But there were municipal energy companies created before the neo-liberal era, such as in Los Angeles and Santa Clara CA. Measures to create these more recently have failed even in liberal cities like San Francisco. But now city companies are partnering with energy companies to produce and offer green energy. I now pay only for green renewable energy, and I pay it to San Jose Clean Energy company, although I get whatever is on the grid, and pay a fee to PG&E for this service too. Actually I don't pay anything to SJCE, because I generate more energy than I use from my solar panels.
The federal government can hardly run itself these days. It spends more time tripping over itself, undermining itself and getting in its own way these days. It's kind of sad but it is what it is which is why it's going to be let go of in favor of a do over and a fresh new start. It's coming dude and I want to see the look on the Democrats face when it happens and see their response. So, what to do think. do you think their arrogance/aggressive and greed will get the best of them?
Efficiency is a good thing unless it serves questionable ends or does evil things to people. The Holocaust was efficient in killing innocent people, and as a rule the most important thing about Rudolf Hoess (rhymes with "hearse") to his legacy is not that he was an efficient administrator of the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Stalin had the most efficient legal process ever known, with people going from seeing people going from unlikely suspects to corpses in a very short time, in view of the infamous sentence of "ten years imprisonment without the right of correspondence". I suggest that one read Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago to learn what that phrase means.
OK, it was cover for nearly-summary execution. The convict was taken away from the court, quickly shot, and of course he never corresponded again. So you need not read any Solzhenitsyn.
By most accounts, the Atlantic Slave Trade was highly efficient.
We sacrifice some efficiency in the legal process (what could be more efficient than a lynching?) to protect the rights of the accused.
By the way -- you (Classic X'er) have admired Donald Trump, and it's a good thing that he wasn't as efficient in destroying human rights and civil liberties as he wanted to be. It's telling that another leader who admitted that he admired dictators of the past was Saddam Hussein, who modeled himself in part on Hitler and in part on Stalin. I see far more similarities in practice (including the body counts) of Fidel Castro and Agosto Pinochet.
It's a good thing that Trump did not get his way, especially on January 6, 2021. Maybe we would have the dungeons or concentration camps, perhaps even with people like me "disappearing".
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.