01-28-2017, 07:23 PM
Quote:Black people know well that they cannot successfully rise against "Whitey" and survive. Black people are right to challenge police forces where such is possible (media, protests, and official inquiries) for being more trigger-happy with black suspects than with white suspects. Provoking the police is not good for survival, whatever one's ethnicity. If after the last good President, black lives are somehow less precious than other lives, then we have some huge soul-searching as a nation.
Except that they aren't really more trigger-happy with blacks than they are with whites. And I think you underestimate the aggressiveness of a minority of progressive "activists". I do agree that it would be incredibly foolish and counter-productive for them to do so. We will see how things go.
Quote:It won't. The further back I go in discussing history the more neutral I get, and the more I notice patterns. That's one good reason for studying other nations and other times. History around the time of Julius Caesar could be very relevant to contemporary America. A big difference: we abolished slavery.
Slavery served largely the same function in the Classical world that automation/mechanization serves in the Modern West. And I don't think we are quite THAT late in the Republic. More the era of Sulla than Caesar, if you will, though I don't think a search for direct analogues would be fruitful.
Quote:More of a concern is that the Republican Party, closely attached to the most rapacious interests and to the most superstitious sentiments, might decide that it dare not lose. It is far too early to say whether there will be a free and fair general election in 2020. The model of the winners enriching themselves at the expense of the losers of a political struggle hardly causes domestic tranquility. People with nothing to lose in the event of defeat, people who know that they will be imprisoned or allowed to starve, people who believe that should they lose all dignity and freedom that death solves all their problems, are the most dedicated revolutionaries.
I have told you before, and will tell you again, that I don't think this sort of thing is good for you. How is that widow doing? Did she go to the march after all?
Quote:President Trump's victory allows him to do what politicians of the worst kind have always done -- using the government as patronage for supporters and $crewing the rest. If the President has a plan, then it is heavily in show projects from which favored contractors will wax fat and for which the rest of us will pay dearly. His economic policies might create more jobs -- but through pay cuts that spread more work, but less pay around.
Tariffs are taxes. Never forget that.
So, business as usual, then?
Tariffs ARE taxes, indeed, they were the primary form of federal taxation for most of our history. I haven't forgotten.