We're WEIRD. Get over it.

[pbrower2a]

(10-08-2020, 02:23 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(10-08-2020, 10:23 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(10-06-2020, 11:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Dude, the Democrats always have an excuse for not doing their jobs or addressing dire problems.

Ah! Something we can agree on.  Yes, the Dems are truly horrible at that.  They're the Hamlet Party.  Then again., the GOP is the Macbeth Party, which is worse.  We need an alternative.  One is unlikely to arise on the Right.  That leaves the Left.

Let's hope we don't have to wait for AOC to come of age and run for the top office.  She' 30 now, so her earliest run would be 2028.

Well, the GOP is quickly becoming the American party (you obviously don't see it that way but that's fine). The Democratic party and what's left of the Republican establishment are becoming the party of Hamlet and MacBeth as you say. It seems like every Democrat opposed to Trump and impeached Trump are using Trumps America First message/rhetoric today. I don't belief them or have faith in them but that's what they're all doing these days. How pathetic is that? I'm sure it's not pathetic to a pathetic person. So, who is still going to be around to clean up the Democratic mess and deal with all the chaos associated with failed states? I doubt you'll find many Americans who are interested in doing the job or find many who are sympathetic or want/feel obligated  to keep them either. Is AOC going to be much different than her Marxist  predecessors? Do you think her pretty brown eyes and pretty face is going to make Marxism more appealing to American tax payers?

My understanding of Macbeth is of an illegal usurpation of power with Macbeth killing King Duncan and becoming a King. Macbeth exemplifies thug government, and Shakespeare seems to suggest that thug government destroys itself in the end by creating implacable enemies. Macbeth is consummately ruthless in his deeds, although his wife seems to be the evil genius prodding him. (Think of Magda Goebbels, wife of Josef Goebbels and through her influence upon him having had the potential to be a major defendant at the main Nuremberg trial along with Goering, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, et al.) Ruthlessness without moral compass leads to ruin. Macbeth is a commonplace object of K-12 English literature, and it offers an ideologically-neutral expression of a needful lesson in political reality: thug rule is ruin as well as horror for innocent people.

As for claiming that one Party is becoming the sole expression of what a country is, I need remind you of what NSDAP Deputy-Fuehrer Rudolf Hess aid in 1934:

     „Die Partei ist Hitler, Hitler aber ist Deutschland, wie Deutschland Hitler ist"

The (Nazi) Party is Hitler, Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Hitler!

Hitler is the best-known (to Americans) of thug rule at its most definitive, as he offended the sensibilities of the vast majority of Americans with his persecutions and mass murders. Figure that he sent to America a large number of political and "racial" refugees who were never going to give him a break and would gladly distinguish between being a German and a Nazis. Saddam Hussein got similar treatment as a fascist gangster.

Social orders recently delivered from thug rule would be wise to include Macbeth in the common school syllabus. 

As for Hamlet -- it is the GOP that has so many elected officials that seem excessively indecisive about Donald Trump. 

......You, Classic X'er are welcome to hold me in contempt as a pathetic person. I do not fully like what I am, and I would like to change much about myself. At my age, major changes in character are nearly impossible other than degradation of mind from organic disease.  Others covered for me thinking that my quirks were mere eccentricity. Autistic tendencies are all over my family. My parents were close to the straight and narrow, but they lacked any personal warmth. That describes me well. If I ever have anything more than a superficial crush, then that will imply acting that on stage would get much applause. I must act like a stage or screen actor to seem normal. The best that one can hope for with Asperger's syndrome is to get away with it. 

Your narrow definition of what constitutes an American almost suggests a willingness to overthrow what gets in the way of your ideal of a plutocratic  order in which everyone not in the hereditary or quasi-hereditary elite must scrap for everything that makes life something other than a nightmare of fear and poverty. That is how Marxists depict capitalism, and where that depiction fits the local reality, Marxism has the potential of offering deliverance to destitute people and people of morals from a moral as well as economic nightmare that can survive only with brutality. 

I cannot describe the foiled plot to kidnap and (likely) murder the Governor of Michigan as anything other than lawlessness. Such would have brought about chaos. One of the most surprising endorsements of Joe Biden came from her predecessor, a right-wing Republican who is himself a piece of work for his quest to make Michigan a Right-to-Work (for much lower pay) state and for his "emergency managers" intended to take over functions of elected city governments in communities with (largely) heavily-African-American and Democratic-voting populations. Maybe the President's assault on the authority of his liberal Democratic successor offends him as an assault on states' rights as remain intact in the federal conception of power. (The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments deny states the right to treat people as less-than-human due to origins, but that is an establishment of basic rights). Putting all under the control of the President is the antithesis of federalism and the essence of turning the President into a dictator.

Left-wing Marxism has had little effectiveness in changing American government through the electoral process. It has always been on the fringe -- even more on the fringe than the fascistic KKK which ruled whole states and at one point in the 1920s was closer to taking over the USA than Adolf Hitler was to taking over Germany. The hesitant steps toward what you consider socialism were either pragmatic efforts to save the capitalist system in the 1930's or alleviating poverty in the 1960's. Right-wing, or mirror-image, Marxism sees capitalism much as Marxist-Leninists do as an exploitative, repressive, corrupt, and inequitable social order. Mirror-image Marxists differ from Marxist-Leninists in endorsing the exploitation, repression, corruption, and inequity that many non-Marxists would seek to remedy through social reform.