Is President Biden too old and dated, or is he the gray champion

[pbrower2a]

(09-14-2022, 01:48 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(09-08-2022, 06:09 PM)sbarrera Wrote: I think that Biden's generational archetype clearly shows - he is an Artist, Silent gen, he's a basically nice guy who just wants a fair world for everyone, and yeah, too old to be the Grey Champion. I believe that he is sincere in his statements and don't understand how he gets portrayed in such a negative light by his opponents. It's laughable that the right tries to portray him as a tyrant (same as they did for Obama, who was a reserved, cautious technocrat suited for the 1T.) But I also think it's amusing that the Internet has basically tried to transform Biden's archetype with the "Dark Brandon" meme. It's like the demand was there so the Internet just digitally mastered a Grey Champion out of available materials.

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So far, he and the Democrats have governed more like tyrants than Americans so to speak. I assume that you are a partisan Democrat or Democratic go along like most everyone else here. So, you may not be able to see or managed to avoid the unpleasantries often experienced by those associated with the American right. So, where would  you fit during a war between today's Left and the American right?

What causes you to think of Barack Obama as a tyrant?

Wikipedia gives an overview of what makes a political boss a tyrant:

Quote:A tyrant (from Ancient Greek τύραννος ([i]túrannos)[/i] 'absolute ruler'), in the modern English usage of the word, is an absolute ruler who is unrestrained by law, or one who has usurped a legitimate ruler's sovereignty. Often portrayed as cruel, tyrants may defend their positions by resorting to repressive means.[1][2] The original Greek term meant an absolute sovereign who came to power without constitutional right,[3] yet the word had a neutral connotation during the Archaic and early Classical periods.[4] However, Greek philosopher Plato saw tyrannos as a negative word, and on account of the decisive influence of philosophy on politics,[citation needed] its negative connotations only increased, continuing into the Hellenistic period.


The philosophers Plato and Aristotle defined a tyrant as a person who rules without law, using extreme and cruel methods against both his own people and others.[5][6] The Encyclopédie defined the term as a usurper of sovereign power who makes "his subjects the victims of his passions and unjust desires, which he substitutes for laws".[7] In the late fifth and fourth centuries BC, a new kind of tyrant, one who had the support of the military, arose – specifically in Sicily.

One can apply accusations of tyranny to a variety of types of government:

• to government by one individual (in an autocracy)
  
  
• to government by a minority (in an oligarchy, tyranny of the minority)
  
  
• to government by a majority (in a democracy, tyranny of the majority)
  
  

OK, let's name names. 


As of 2006


Omar al-Bashir (Sudan)
Kim Jong-il (North Korea)
Than Shwe (Burma)
Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)
Hu Jintao (China)
King Abdullah (Saudi Arabia)
Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenistan)
Mswati III (Swaziland)
Teodoro Obiang Nguema (Equatorial Guinea)
Muammar al-Qaddafi (Libya)
Pervez Musharraf (Pakistan)
Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)
Bashar al-Assad (Syria)
Meles Zenawi (Ethiopia)
Paul Biya (Cameroon)
Choummaly Sayasone (Laos)

This is a diverse lot in origins and ideology. It does not include the recent addition to Hell (Idi A-murderin') or a man who would go to Hell on December 30 (Satan Hussein) that year, arguably two tyrants even worse than those on that list. Id did not include the defanged tyrants, the commie Haile Mengistu of Ethiopia and the anti-Communist Augusto Pinochet who believed firmly that those who own the gold make the rules for everyone else -- suffer under the thrall of that gold and its owners. Haile Mengistu has more blood on his hands than any other living person. 

So the pattern is the same, whether the tyrant is an absolute monarch such as Nero, Caligula or Commodus in ancient Rome or a more recent absolute ruler like Ivan the Terrible, an overt fascist like (insert plenty of names) or an overt Commie (insert plenty of names), or someone who believes only in himself. Life under any of those tyrants is helpless horror with no compensation other than survival at the dehumanizing level of livestock. 

Mercifully this is all un-American because we have generally turned away from the siren call of collective rage and had no military figure who thought that he could solve everything through the repudiation of humanistic values. Before one has the arrogance to say that the West is free from the threat, we have had Franco in Spain, Papadoupoulos in Greece... and don't forget all the Latin-American figures including Castro, Pinochet, and Maduro... Latin America is now the cultural core of the West. 

Let's start with the obvious: to be an America does not believe that one believes in an ideology similar to yours. Thank God -- or more precisely our Founding Fathers and others who have supplemented democracy for white, property-owning males with votes for women, removal of property qualifications for voting, and of course the consolidation of voting rights for blacks. Those supplements have made democracy more inclusive without debasing it. Freedom only for like-minded people? Tyrants have typically given much leeway to those who figuratively kiss their @$$es and more literally do their dirty work. Such a pretense of freedom is but a sham, one that requires mass suffering of helpless people.  Property rights can be taken away at the whim of a ruler. A career can vanish, especially if one does not have an international career (think of Greek liberals Melina Mercouri and the recently-deceased Irene Pappas in Greece who could at least act and sing outside of Greece).

Considering that the USA has great diversity in ethnicity and religion, it is best that no group of people gets to decide what it means to be an American. I have good cause to believe that neither the New England WASP nor hick German-Americans can impose their norms upon others who have different traditions. (My philosophical, political, and cultural values ill fit the New England WASP way or to hick German-Americans who comprise the vast majority of my ancestry, but that is a different story, and I would want neither of those to dominate America. In accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a significant number of people associated with Mexican settlement became American in voting rights and formal equality to other Americans. Some hold tight to those traditions, and people can be proud of those. Their traditions are as valid and viable as mine. Let's not ignore the small but significant Jewish population which has had subtle but pervasive (and almost entirely favorable) influence upon American life far out of proportion to its numbers. Let's not forget the blacks who to the extent that they cannot hide their origins in the dehumanizing horror of slavery have created a way of life that, however artificial (they have no cultural heritage from Africa -- only genes), has proved distinctive and creative. 

I'm sure that you consider Barack Obama a tyrant because he does not fully satisfy your dreams of making life especially rewarding for you and your kind at the expense of everyone else. Obama may be the rarity of an American who is the son of an African immigrant and a white* American supposedly of old white American stock, but he recognizes (as I do) the validity of traditions other than mine. Recognition of the validity and worthiness of traditions neither dominant nor one's own is obviously inconsistent with tyranny. Obama is close to the political tradition essential to democracy in which give-and-take is the norm if one is to accomplish anything. A dominant clique getting everything at the expense of others is far closer to the norms of tyranny, as was so for non-whites under Apartheid in South Africa.  He did nothing to prevent Republican majorities to form first in the House and then in the Senate, with a Republican replacing him as President. You can call that weak leadership in contrast to what someone like Fidel Castro did, ensuring that he had a reliable majority in an obedient legislature full of ideological myrmidons. Maybe Obama could never achieve his full agenda.  Donald Trump won in what we must all accept is a free and honest election even if we have some question of secretive manipulation. 

If Obama had decided in January 2017 that he would thwart a lawful transfer of the Presidency to Trump with the aid of a delusional mass movement and had succeeded, then you would be right to call him a tyrant. I have no idea of what Trump would be like in a second term, but we got a foretaste in his adoption of deeds consistent with tyrants of other places and times. The Republican Party, whose ideology is identical with that of the  insane John Birch Society, would surely acquiesce in establishing an order in which those who own the gold make the rules for us all, and those rules include the obligation to all but worship the figurative gold and its owners or retainers of those owners. Suffer with a smile! I have known that all too well in your supposedly-glorious capitalism. Plutocracy looks like Plato called the tyranny of a minority. Think also of Apartheid in South Africa. 

Common with tyranny is a Cult of Personality. If Dubya took kitten-like steps in that direction, Trump took a leopard-like charge.  You tell me. The general assessment of President Obama is close to that of Dwight Eisenhower,  arguably the best analogue to Obama in conduct, temperament, and in effectiveness as President (somebody has to be most similar to Obama), and even having an electoral maps more analogous to each other than Obama's maps of victory were to any prior Democrat.      

Trump's ideology sounds like "We the Elite take everything desirable, and you peons or proles get the beatings". He ordered violence toward protesters. He cultivated support from the violent Three Percenters and Proud Boys. A hint about the Proud Boys: forget about taking any trip to Canada or New Zealand, where you will be turned away as a member of an organization designated as terrorist. Add to this the Qult known as QAnon. Oh, so Obama hurt your feelings! A real tyrant can hurt far more than your feelings. 

Much as I despise him, Donald Trump is still an American. I must of course recognize that the serial killer BTK is still an American. 


*in fact Stanley Ann Dunham, his mother, has been shown to be 1/16 of sub-Saharan African origin through a slave ancestor, but she did not know that for much of her life; by the one-drop rule, was black).