Trump's people have founded their Party:

[pbrower2a]

(09-14-2021, 12:09 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: [quote='Eric the Green' pid='78728' dateline='1631550948']


The point of the saying is, money (or who has it) should not solely determine policy. Policy (the rules) should be based on what is best for the country. Not to protect someone's gold.

Your side will take more loss, because the blue side pays more in taxes, and the red side gets the most spending and welfare. That is well-known, although the fact contradicts your anti-welfare for the poor philosophy.

If the two Americas, red and blue, split up, with some additional geographic adjustment, it means each side will have more freedom to set its own policies about many things. If we part ways agreeably, there will probably still be trade between the blue states and the red states; why not? The intellectual property from the blue states will still be available to people in red states, and the agricultural products from the red states will still be available to the blue states. There may be tarriffs, or there may be a free trade zone. We even may be military allies. We still share much in American traditions. 

We may even re-unite, once you see the errors of your ways. I would predict a sharp decline in GNP and living standards in the red states, which are already lower than in the blue states. Many ethnic minorities will leave the red states, and blue states will benefit from immigration. The brain drain from red states will continue too, and a severe labor shortage too. You guys will come crawling back.

The big corporations, whose leaders now live in blue states, but whose political power comes from red states, will see their bosses have to move away from their residences on the coasts and go live in Alabama and Texas, like Elon Musk did. They will then pay lower taxes, which could benefit them, but their business will receive much less in social capital like education and physical infrastructure that benefits them.

As for global warming, I might assume that while the blue states are now free to make rapid shifts to renewable energy, electric cars, and reforestation, and reform their industries and what they make, the red states will contribute less to global warming too just because of their severe economic decline in all their sectors. They have less industry to begin with.

Quote:I can tell that you're not using much logic

Logic (as reasoning) is necessary, but it isn't enough.  It's necessary to also have a solid factual basis and appropriate values. If you want a literary or cinematic example, then just recall Forrest Gump, whose  namesake character has conventional values and reliable logic even if he lacks an understanding of nuance and is utterly naïve about the consequences of integrity and observations of the obvious. 

Much of the nuance that many of us have is wrong. As with his childhood sweetheart Jenny, one can think oneself into trouble and have dark secrets in the past that mess one up. Forrest's mother at least taught him right, and Jenny's father taught her the very wrong lessons by sexually molesting her. Everything that Forrest does turns out well... but Jenny ends up dead from promiscuity and drugs. HIV/AIDS, of course.  

Quote:and showing obvious signs associated with brain drain too..

You do not understand what "brain drain" is. Brain drain is the condition in which a country loses its Best and Brightest, its creative people and technical experts because smart people seek to leave because the political system makes life uncomfortable for smart, talented, and creative people. The system requires that people accept as truth indefensible or objectionable ideas that frustrate what those smart people do, humiliates them, or restricts their activities. Maybe the taxes are too high or the system offers a horrid educational system (smart people typically want their kids to be well educated.  It could be a populist devaluation of intellectual activity. It could be an ideology that demands that people pretend to believe in pseudoscience or superstition. It could be perverse taxation or a scheme to underpay them. As in Nazi Germany it could be religious bigotry. 

A hint: in the 1920's, Germany and the USA were rivals in cinematic achievements. In both countries Jews were big players in cinema as writers, directors, and actors. Beginning in 1933 Josef Goebbels ousted Jews from German cinema. Most of those Jews ended up in the USA, and many of them fared quite well. Those German Jews strengthened American cinema in the middle-to-late 1930's... and later. While German cinema lost its spark, American cinema went into its Golden Age. Jews played a huge role... and many of those had recently been part of the glory of German cinema. Today you can still watch American cinema from around 1940 and, despite the primitive special effects, recognize a consistently high quality even when the movies had to accommodate a rigid code on on-screen behavior. 

Among such people were the actors Peter Lorre and the actress Hedy Lamarr (Jewish parents, so she was considered "racially" Jewish and thus to be murdered if she had stayed in the Devil's Reich) and Karl Freund, a cinematographer of the highly innovative Metropolis of 1926 and 1927 (a definitive masterpiece of pre-Nazi German cinema) who created the flat lighting technique introduced on I Love Lucy  still in use nearly seventy years later. Desi Arnaz, who was not Jewish but fled in another brain drain from Cuba, saw what Karl Freund could do with his cinematography on the model sitcom.   

I still love that cinematic aesthetic.           

Quote:Do we think at all alike or do we think differently and tend to view things the opposite way?

You, Classic X'er, obviously do not think as we do. At least we know that there is much that we do not know.  You exemplify the Dunning-Kruger effect of not knowing your limitations.

Quote:Dude, whatever the blues do, the reds will be doing the opposite.

Doing the opposite of the smart people is something to be done only with great care and while convinced that people usually right are  wrong at that time. When it is effective, it is almost invariably smart, learned people who well know the limitations of the existing level of expert knowledge who 'break the rules' successfully. Efforts by cranks almost invariably fail and usually prove impossible by existing standards of knowledge. My side typically relies upon such things as peer review, double-blind tests, and statistical  measures of the likeliness that we are right. "Right" and "wrong" in the world that I wish that I were in has margins of error and percentages of likelihood of error. 

As an example, magnetism and electrical attraction are understood in physics (those two phenomena are related), and so is gravitation, which is not so clearly related, dissipates as the square of the distance  from the attraction. That square is an exponent, and the college physics text that I had in the 1970's  told me that gravitation, electric charge, and magnetism act in accordance with an exponent that has been measured to a precision of one in one billion. The measure may be more precise now, but that is convincing. If you want to believe that the exp0onent is something other than 2 then it can't be off by much.   

Hard sciences such as physics and chemistry may be close to exact, but not absolutely exact. (Absolute exactitude is for mathematics, which works with perfect ideals. The material world is messier than that), With social sciences things get murkier. Human nature is incredibly complex. Even with such imprecision one can be very, very wrong, about like a baseball catcher going backward as if to catch a foul pop fly when the ball is hit as a home run. 
 

Quote:You think I'm backwards minded.  I think you're backwards minded and that's the way it's been all along.

 
On this you are completely wrong. Tradition is a valid fallback when things go terribly wrong. In classical music, many great composers have turned to the folk tradition (and even bird song, which is older than we are) to get melodic and rhythmic coherence when music gets excessively cerebral for enjoyment. One religious tradition has been debating the fine points of morality for over 2500 years. Would that the Germans have heeded these people between 1933 and 1945 instead of consigning them to shooting pits and gas chambers! (Yes, yes, yes... I know that German cuisine is heavy on pork sausages, but that is not a problem with Reform).  Let's not forget that the United States is not so much a graveyard of traditions as it is a place with multiple traditions that in our multicultural world do not merge. Many of us who don't have a particular tie to any one of those traditions pick and choose. One of my cousins has a beautiful Japanese-style rock garden. No, I have no close relatives of Japanese origin even by marriage.     

Quote:What's the chance of an amicable split occurring these days? I'd say the chances of that are none at this point.

Have you considered the possibility that one side or the other will become irrelevant as it loses supporters and fails to win new ones? The current GOP skews old, white, and unlearned. Consider a consumer product or service; if its customer base is aging, then that commodity must have one group of aging people supplanting those who die off. As an example, music of certain performers (Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, etc.) has lost its clientele. Their GI and early Silent audiences have largely died off, and such music does not appeal to any younger groups. Records of such music end up in thrift shops as donations, and they do not move even if cheap. Oddly, Big Band music does have some younger listeners who can buy CD's of such music. Then again, Big Band music typically works at several different aesthetic levels at once, so it is "evergreen". See also "Haydn" and "Mozart", both of whom wrote music with similar qualities. If you wonder why Montgomery Ward is gone, Sears is practically gone, and JC Penney is on life support it is because those stores ended up with customer bases that got increasingly "old". In the 1980's it mattered little that the average customer was in his late 50's because such people were the customers. Today such a clientele is mostly deceased. 

Ghosts are not a reliable customer base -- in case you are backward enough to believe in ghosts. .     

With political agendas, the GOP is becoming increasingly old, white, and ill-educated as America becomes less white and better educated... and the GOP is not finding new younger voters to replace those dying off. This is the opposite of the demographic reality in the 1970's through the 1990's when the New Deal coalition (largely GI) died off without replacement. Boomers, especially in the Mountain and Deep South abandoned the rational, service-based agenda of the New Deal for something amenable to Fundamentalist Christianity. 

This is 1976:

   

This is 2020:




That's a difference of nine electoral votes between 1976 and 2020 in total, but a very different look on the map. It is safe to say that "the map" of a bare D win of a Presidency in 2020 is very different from a bare D win in 1976. Carter won every former Confederate state except for Virginia, but nothing west of the Mississippi River except for Hawaii and Minnesota. 

America is becoming better educated as more people get college degrees. Although white people and men as a whole are predominantly Republican, even white males now vote majority D. Voters over 55 are the base of the GOP, but younger voters are not replacing them in the electorate. The Millennial generation is heavily D, and its voting rate is rising... as usually happens with any generation approaching middle age. As Millennial adults start entering races for high offices (House, Senate, state governorships) and start taking Cabinet positions, such will intensify the D trend. America is becoming less white through miscegenation. To put it as bluntly as possible, black men can obviously do everything that white men can do except to sire white children, and black women can do everything that white women can do except to bear white children. Biracial adults so far are more loyal to the politics of black people than to te politics of white people. As for Hispanics, Hispanics are able to assimilate white spouses into their political culture. 

Something worth knowing about well-educated voters is that they are not swing voters.   

Quote:It's pretty clear that the Democrats want/need control over everything because they need to gain control of everything to ensure their system remains in place and stays above water so to speak.

No. Parties that hold the Presidency usually lose seats in the House and Senate in midterm elections, and nothing so far indicates that anyone can expect any difference from that patter... at least so far. We had three two-term Presidencies in succession with an alternation of the Presidency after the two-term Presidency, and 2020  was close to giving Donald Trump a second term. I expect Republicans and especially Republican front groups to exploit every possible weakness in any incumbent Democrat. If 2010 and 2014 are any indication the Republican nominee will run a plain-folks campaign (show the family and say banalities) while the GOP front groups do character-assassination. The front groups will support the most reactionary politicians possible, ideally those who most fervently believe that the political ideal is 

He who owns the gold makes the rules.

Plutocracy, plutocracy, Rah-rah-rah! Those front groups dream of a world of crony capitalists who can wax fat off privatization on the cheap and super-cheap labor that has no union or sympathetic government to protect them.   Those front groups are mirror-image Marxists, the sorts of people who believe like Marxists that capitalism is grave suffering for the masses on behalf of irresponsible elites, and differ from Marxists only in believing that such is good. The front groups will be flush in cash, and in recent decades,. money does not talk in politics; it shouts and it rules.