09-22-2020, 12:07 PM
(09-22-2020, 12:37 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-22-2020, 12:02 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Bob, you seem to be saying that W.E.I.R.D. = blue zone. So what happens if the red zone takes over in 2021? Is that the end of the West?
As usual, things will get worse until it is decided to do something about it. Trump being reelected is pretty much guaranteed to make things worse. As Churchill allegedly said, America will eventually do the right thing, once they have tried everything else. He did not mention doing a wrong thing twice.Quote:It's hard to see Trump as an iteration of any prior US President. I see him more like Rafael Trujillo or Slobodan Milosevic. We always have the possibility of replicating to a large extent the Crisis that some other country had. I saw the regional and sectarian polarization of America in the 1990's and saw an unwelcome parallel in Spain in the 1930's. That, a political order that bounds from Left to Right before one side becomes able to win a military struggle against the other and impose its way in victory for an indefinite time is becoming less likely each year.
His debasement of the language of political discourse is Newspeak without a clear program. His economics is neoliberalism taken to its preposterous conclusion: mirror-image Marxism that I call "Sadonomics". He is an incredibly vile person; not long ago the sort of things that he says you would be expected to take home if you brought him to an Elks Club or Moose Lodge. By the time most of us were teenagers most of us knew enough to not ridicule the handicapped. When I was a child, the fellow in a wheelchair might have lost his legs at Guadalcanal or Bastogne as one of those "suckers", "losers", and "dopes" who did his duty to keep America from coming under the rule of Hitler or Tojo. Most of us could put together a historical reality that included ourselves going to war and getting crippled in the protection of our Republic. "Grab her by the..."? Yes, I would vote to convict some thuggish young man who did that to some female without her consent in a jury trial in Michigan for "criminal sexual conduct".
Quote:I don't think a population to try to keep an unravelling going, to keep operating on the values of selfishness once the problems have surfaced. I suspect the Democrats will triumph. You are correct to worry, though.
Unraveling eras typically collapse in economic meltdowns or wars. We did get the economic meltdown, but Obama at least did what Keynes prescribed as a solution. The problem is that we as a people learned nothing. If Trump cannot do right with an epidemic despite the resources obviously available in America, then I can only wonder how he would do in an economic meltdown or a war. I can see Donald Trump as the worst sort of leader short of a fascist butcher in a big war, using the war to glorify himself and enrich his cronies while he treats the "dopes", "losers", and "suckers" who believe in something nobler than he is, like the principles upon which this country was founded or on principles that are obvious corollaries as cannon fodder i a war that he would bungle. Neither Lincoln nor FDR liked war, but they got it. They ended up seeing victory as the only way to peace, and they saw decent treatment of the defeated as a way to keep the peace.
I look at America's young adults, and I largely see people sick of Unraveling ways. They recognize that those ways hurt themselves and their children.
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.