09-30-2016, 07:27 AM
(09-29-2016, 08:05 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-27-2016, 11:42 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: "Thin-skinned and angry" -- much like medieval kings who started destructive wars over what now seem minor slights. Just imagine the catastrophes possible in foreign policy.
Donald Trump's performance was execrable. But there are people who like their politics that way. Donald Trump tells many what they want to hear... maybe his ideology is to my political values what Ultimate Fighting is to my taste in sports. As you can imagine, I can't stand that ugly spectacle. But it has its fans. Donald Trump's rhetoric and behavior have their fans.
Just to be fair to the medieval kings, war could be profitable in the era of muscle powered weapons... at least if you won the war. I suspect a lot of the 'minor slights' were excuses to start wars for power, land and profit.
These days, war is generally not worth it.
Now we have jet aircraft, nuclear submarines, ICBMs, and nuclear weapons. Attempts to get the human touch out of war-making now create computer-driven systems suitable for hacking that can destroy the controls of the systems. I don't know the technologies that well, and if I did I would not telegraph any ideas that might be picked up outside the USA. Loose lips sink ships.
Add to the weapons, any political order that gets ensnared in a war that goes badly faces the risk of a proletarian uprising. Plutocracies like China, Russia, and even the USA might be more vulnerable than social democracies that do better at resolving the inequities of social orders better at enriching and indulging elites than meeting basic human needs. Maybe we Americans are more vulnerable to a Christian version of Khomeini than to a Lenin... not that either offers much promise for political decency.
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.
