03-11-2022, 01:40 AM
(03-10-2022, 08:21 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I know what I've been voting for over the years. I've been voting for my freedom along with millions of others on the American right. What have you been voting for, keeping poor people poor and reliant upon Liberals and the states they control? Who taught you all the crap that you say about Us? How much of the crap you say is true? We don't say crap about you, we say what we know about that we obtained from you. So, what do you do and what's your stake in the game? You seem to be a player. So, what's at stake for you? You keep telling me you're liberal but I don't see it. I see someone who acts likes/looks he has a stake in the game. Me, I have a stake in an American country like seventy some million (probably a lot more than that today now that Biden's been in office) Americans. Ok. You are seeing another prelude of what's to come here. Biden has already shown us he has some Putin in him with the senseless mandate and his failed attempt to undo most everything related to Us. You say you're not a neoliberal but you sure seem like one or seem like a useful tool to me. So, who is the largest manufacturer of car batteries, is it Us or China right now? Other than the inner workings of the Democratic party and politics in general, I don't think you have a flipping clue about anything important to the American people, Like I said, you part of the problem not the solution. We're the solution and you'll find that out as we continue moving through the 4t. I've already seen the way you use terms and seem to be using the term authoritarian the same way.
Even Nazis claimed to stand for freedom -- from the 'slavery' of the Versailles treaty and from the alleged Jewish conspiracy against gentiles. Commies spoke often for freedom from capitalist exploitation.
We need a healthy mix of incentives to promote small business which does much more to create jobs than do giant organizations. The net growth in employment by Fortune 500 corporations, the ones that hire armies of lobbyists to get tax breaks, has been negative since 1940. Technological innovation has been good for reducing the need for manufacturing workers, and the factory has typically been the most reliable escape from poverty.
I don't deny that partisan advantage is cyclical, but one needs remember that some political trends (like homophobia and segregation) die. Who taught us liberals the cause to despise your personal agenda? You have done that well by suggesting the inevitability of horrific violence. You define people like yourself as the only genuine expressions of some vague concept of "America" that excludes a disproportionate number of peoples unlike you in creed and ethnicity. I have heard and seen such rhetoric in America, often by people who prance around in silly robes and burn crosses. I have seen analogies that do much the same in other countries, and when regimes transform such beliefs into public policy one gets horrific results. As a German-American who accepts the ethical teachings of Christianity I must recognize Jews as my brethren for morals and culture.
We have big problems to solve, including bigotry. Our tax system basically rewards people for already being very rich, which is not good for spreading the blessings of private enterprise beyond shareholders and executives who have often found more profit as importers than as manufacturers. As an example, General Motors makes more profit off its lending for the sale of vehicles and comparatively little from sales of cars. We have a mass culture that fosters cynicism and contempt for learning... so it is possible that those who live in cultures that reject such fare better. Because of the wonders of an Internet that can expose us to everything from the masterpieces of 19th-century Russian music and literature to overt porno we need solid liberal-arts education just to make wise choices in life.
Wisdom is freedom. Wisdom allows people to improve themselves and make use of time not at work. We can produce and manage all that we need in far less the forty hours a week that seemed so necessary in the 1930's. You manifestly lack it.
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.