Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[pbrower2a]

(12-08-2018, 11:11 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-08-2018, 10:40 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-08-2018, 04:10 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-07-2018, 06:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I just can't understand how anyone can excuse a murderous tyrant like Assad except "he may be a brute, but he is our brute". Even that excuse usually implodes at some time.

It is just tribal thinking.  Assad would only be brutal towards people who he does not consider to be part of his tribe.  He would not consider people who oppose him to count, that morality does not apply to them.

The Enlightenment virtues of equality and human rights do not apply to an autocratic leader.  He might be perfectly a nice guy to members of his tribe, and a brutal autocrat at the same time.

You know, I've heard Trump described in similar fashion: a really nice guy, on-on-one.  Maybe that's a character trait shared by the scumbags of the world.  It's certainly self-serving, which is a universal character trait in this class of sub-humans.

Not just the guys at the top.  I lean blue and am dubious about the people of the middle of the country.  I am ready to believe a lot of them, though, are good people who treat each other and folks they consider like them decently.  If you lean towards extremism, and you judge by attitudes towards blues or minorities, all bets are off.  Suddenly one is in another tribe.  Decency does not apply.  The mythical deplorable has optional morality.  Deplorables are used to being in the majority, and if you are in the minority you are (expletive deleted) out of luck.

I would like to say there are not blue extremists who would apply a flip flop to that sort of...  logic?  I fear there is no lack of the same sort of stereotyping.

I'm guessing that many Germans and Japanese in during World War II were salt-of-the-Earth people who cared about each other and would have never hurt anyone else, but were brainwashed into believing that Churchill and FDR were literal demons who absolutely had to be defeated. There were just enough horrible people who could be gulled into acquiescence into murder. In Germany many of those salt-of-the-Earth people could not imagine that Hitler could be doing anything wrong in Poland, especially the slaughter of the Polish intelligentsia and the bulk of the industrial-scale murder of the Jews -- let alone that their precious offspring could be doing anything other than patriotic duty in the SS. Nazi propaganda had people believing that everything Germans did officially was a great service to Humanity.

I am tempted to believe that much of the problem in 'Red' America is that people see much less diversity than they would in a large urban area. Detroit may be a cesspool of a city, but it has some good people. Work there, and if you are white you will recognize that there are plenty of good black people who differ from you in only the most superficial of ways. So what if you dislike their music? I know plenty of people who hate the music that I love, and the creative people who composed that music are almost as a rule very white, if not American. Live just about anywhere in California, and even if you find Los Angeles a cesspool of a city (Detroit without a real winter) you will find plenty of likable Asians and Hispanics.

'Red' America is often lily-white -- and this applies to some rural parts of "Blue" states, at least as understood as such from 1992 to November 6, 2016. It is because of the "Red" parts of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where multitudes saw Donald Trump as their Deliverance, that America has a President acting like a despot.

Educated people in Germany had the delusion that their nation was so sophisticated that it could never fall for someone so crass as Adolf Hitler. It did despite Goethe and J S Bach. Educated people in America had the delusion that their nation was so sophisticated that it could never fall for someone so crass as Donald Trump. Look for the intellectual gutter and you will find the unbalanced, stressed-out people who in a time of despair will find themselves an unbalanced leader. (apologies to Albert Einstein on that allusion; I stretched it).

So what is wrong in America? Most of what one sees at the end of a 3T -- a splintered culture, an economic order that well serves elites and pretends that the hardships that those elites impose upon the masses are charitable, corrupt political bosses who serve those elites, and of course a speculative boom that goes bust prevail. The elites have their solution: more of the same. Those elites can always find someone that they can trust, someone who tells people that they need suffer for those elites and punish anyone who fails to get the message.

We got Obama when we needed another FDR -- but is it the timing that makes the difference? America got FDR after the plutocracy of the 1920s had lost all attractiveness for creating such pervasive misery and had imploded completely. FDR backed the banks after the bank runs had ravaged the economy in 1931 and 1932. Obama backed the banks before such runs were possible. Maybe that is the difference. In 1932 even those already rich were concerned with survival more than with power. In 2008 they wanted someone to save them from what they recognized as their destructive recklessness in the economy -- and by 2010 they wanted a return to their economic hegemony and got it. Now we have Donald Trump, the purest expression since the 1920s of the conception that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it fosters elite indulgence. That is how I interpret "Make America Great Again" when Trump uses the slogan.

I have a different idea of American greatness, the antithesis of every man for himself. 


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