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Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!
(01-18-2019, 01:59 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: (exchange redacted for brevity)

So, you prefer politicians making backroom deals among themselves instead of being open or transparent as we say and debating issues among themselves in front of the public like they should these days. I mean, do you think Obamacare would have been passed without the backroom deals that resulted in the elimination of the Democratic super majority and the bulk of the GOP establishment as well. Pelosi didn't want to discuss details with Trump in public. She preferred to discuss details in private. Why? I assume that she felt uncomfortable and concerned about Trump hammering her with the truth as it relates to illegal immigration and facts as they relate to illegal immigration and the use of walls and so forth.

I defer to the expert on the topic:

[Image: th?id=OIP.Cy5oKgX3KhcqwqfanIKQRAHaEr&w=1...d=3.1&rm=2]

Churchill may have been a piece of work, but at least he wasn't the fascist pig that Donald Trump is -- let alone the man for whom he would be the arch-enemy. He knew what was going on under Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Franco, and didn't like such. He also knew about monarchical absolutism from the British historical experience. He knew enough about the tin-pot military dictators who exuded spit-and-polish machismo yet proved brittle under the false front.

Democracy does not mean that people get their way at all times, but instead they get a workable approximation. As important as the formality of democracy is the rule of law. For an exercise of democracy at its worst, just contemplate a lynching: all decisions by a lynch mob involve strict adherence to a majority vote.

Direct democracy is impossible in a society more complex than a tribal community in which property is void except for the tools of a hunter-gatherer. We have representative government because few of us can spend the time in the political process or have the focus on legislation that trustworthy experts have. We the People have the responsibility to choose the most reliable experts. Republicans had the House of Representatives for eight years and have proved inadequate. In a little less than two years, Republicans will have had the presidency for four catastrophic years and the Senate for six dreary years. Do you want to guess how that will turn out?

Donald Trump is a My-Way-or-the-Highway sort of executive which we can tolerate in business because business has the narrow objectives of turning a profit and protecting assets without committing outright crime. A company that can't make a profit eventually eats its assets just to survive (Studebaker), loses its customer base due to demographic change (Sears, Big Boy Restaurants), endures a killing lawsuit and judgment (Texaco), or a company that becomes a criminal enterprise (Enron, Madoff) collapses from both a lack of internal controls and an unwillingness of people who have alternatives to deal with it. If you are responsible to shareholders above all else, then you had better push salesmen with quotas, compel people to adapt to change in consumer desires, make sure that the production lines operate effectively but lean if your firm is to survive. If you don;t like the way things are going at JC Penney, then there is at the least Macy's and Kohl's... or maybe you can pass the postal exam and become a letter carrier or decide that doing the vehicle repairs is as good a career as you can hope for. 

My Way or the Highway is impossible for a government unless it is willing to exile, enslave, or murder people. It is not the prerogative of a leader of a formal democracy to tell people that he dislikes to 'find another country'. When 57% of the American people say that they do not want to vote for Donald Trump again, then maybe the problem is Donald Trump.  Maybe we would be better off with a parliamentary system that has an even better constraint on a wayward executive -- the vote of non-confidence (Teresa May survived such a vote -- instead of the more convoluted and difficult process of impeachment. (Of course I know the reason for our system -- our Founding Fathers recognized the corruption of a British parliament  in which many MPs were simply flunkies of the King and that the system was unrepresentative due to the infamous rotten borough.*

Quote:I'm fully aware of technological advancement and the impacts that it's having on America today. Would you be open to socialist ideas or ideals, if there wasn't computer's and databases that can do what you're still view yourself as being good at doing today? I'm not concerned about computers replacing me or replacing tradesmen/women anytime soon. One couldn't program a computer or a machine to do what we do and deal with as a normal part of our jobs. Technological advancement has become part of our way of life and an important part of what we do as far as our careers these days.

Socialist ideas? Which form of socialism? If you are speaking of Marxism-Leninism, it seems to have relied upon the technology of a century ago to overthrow an infant democracy that could neither wage war nor achieve peace and was incapable of reforming away the legacy of an absolute monarchy. Marxism-Leninism has such baggage as the absence of responsible government  -- and where ever it has emerged, an inexcusable body count. If you are discussing other manifestations of socialism, such as the racist socialism of the Strasser brothers or the benign social democracy of some countries, both developed before there was a computer. People have been discussing how to change society in coffee shops just outside good universities for a couple centuries now -- and often without a computer present.

If anything, it is the computer that may have slowed the emergence of socialist ideas in America because many people have found it satisfying than the old 'idiot screen' on which one viewed vapid sitcoms and dramas with plenty of T&A. T&A? Think of what Playboy Magazine has to offer in a centerfold, except that the FCC demands that the T&A be covered out of a superstitious respect for 'decency'... after all we don't want suggestible people to see literal T&A. Yes, there is porn on the web, and plenty of click-bait. But yes, I have read both The Communist Manifesto (which should scare anyone about revolutionary socialism) and Das Kapital -- both in dead-tree editions. No computer was necessary. 

But this said, what Karl Marx said (and the more pathological the social order, the more relevant Marx gets), the role of religion as the opiate of the masses has gone to mindless mass entertainment. Let us also remember that it is the capitalists, executives, big land-owners, and their intellectual flunkies who decide whether Marx describes economic reality or loses relevance.

Quote:Dude, I've seen electric hand held drills and most other electrically operated hand tools be replaced by modern battery operated hand tools. I've seen the advancement in heating and air conditioning equipment and so forth. I'm not a stranger to technological advancement or a stranger to the idea of experiencing changes to the norm either.

I cannot know about your specific skill set as you do. As a skilled worker you can see the results of your efforts as a semi=skilled punch-press operator who sees only one process in thousands can't. Most people see their work as nothing more than what they do for a paycheck, and exploitative elites who live in opulent splendor while trying to get more profits through harsher management or through monopolization and privatization -- and as they see such and hear such insensitive rhetoric as that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it serves their greed and indulgence they might see a Marxist-Leninist body count as a small price to pay for   a more just society.

Do you really admire Donald Trump? He is little more than a landlord. Sure, we need them if we have a housing shortage, but I can remember when the middle class could buy its own housing. It was happier then. He is no innovator bringing tangible improvement in people's lives; he simply milks housing shortages in places that have economic opportunity that places like Detroit and St. Louis used to have and no longer do. His forays into entertainment are mindless, as is his sick foray into politics.

He does not understand how American politics works. Maybe Russian political life is easier to understand -- the Big Boss gets rich off sweetheart deals and privatizes the public sector off to his political allies as a reward for complicity in his corrupt dictatorship.  Well, Russia is a country that many want to leave, and you cannot blame that strictly on the remaining heritage of the Soviet system. Communist rule has been gone in Russia for 27 years even in its mildest form (by the way -- the last couple years of Gorbachev were more democratic than what is in Putin's Russia now).

I do not want the Russian political system here. I do not want a system that simply allocates profits to people well-connected so that they can facilitate a dictatorial order. This said, Donald Trump is only the latest of political villains who have found the seams in our political institutions and exploited those seams in efforts to establish dictatorial rule. Lee Atwater... Newt Gingrich... Tom DeLay... Jack Abramoff... Karl Rove... and now Donald Trump. Maybe we would do better with a parliamentary system; Canada seems to do fine.

Quote:Once again, you haven't adjusted your view of me and reds in generals as not being backwoods reds that aren't quite up to speed with modern day advancement or technological advancement.

The problem with Red America is not that it has too few i-devices or self-driving, electrically-powered vehicles. Wal*Mart has its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas; it has succeeded by the application of information technology to retailing. I consider Wal*Mart a very sophisticated operation for being able to replace a pair of mass-market navy slacks with the size 34x27 in a store within a couple days after someone buys it. One can get very sophisticated electronics and housewares at Wal*Mart. But technology does not itself bring intellectual sophistication. One can have an excellent PC and alternate between FoX Newspeak Channel, porn, and mindless video games. That is not a way to improve oneself as a person.

I've known middle-wave GIs (born in the 1910s) who grew up in hardscrabble times compared to what we now enjoy, who grew up if lucky with a crank-up phonograph and an early radio if they were fairly-well off. They did not get as much formal schooling as was the norm for youth who grew up even in the Great Depression (the government was encouraging kids to stay in school in part so that they would not compete with adult bread-winners for jobs). Some of those people, who might have grown up on farms or in what would now be horrid urban slums, were far more sophisticated about literature, science, and music than many youth today.

In case you think technology the driving force in moral improvement -- fascists and commies both love technology for what it can do for creating war machines and suppressing dissent. Hell -- and the Nazis created Hell in the form of their concentration camp system
--  the Nazis used the most sophisticated machinery then available to do the Holocaust.

Quote:You're not alone, most blues seem pretty clueless when it comes to actually knowing who the reds (the Republican voters) are as far as it's voters go these days. Remember, we aren't the ones voting to go backwards and return to large scale use of labor to build stuff like the good old days or the idea paying lots of people to sit around and strum themselves while the other half works, pay their own bills and contributes the bulk of the taxes to accommodate their presence and support their welfare lifestyles either. No, I figure we'll opt to go separate ways and opt to move on without the liberals. I'm sure Reddish America will let liberals decide whether a war of liberation will be necessary or whether they'll be willing to let go and go with Europe.

You are discussing as much old norms of manufacturing that made the stuff that people needed in five-day weeks of eight-hour shifts. The forty-hour workweek in manufacturing, wholly inadequate around 1900, was appropriate in view of the manufacturing technology of the 1930s. We can make all the stuff that we need in far less time. We can no longer go back to the old norm in which most people put as much effort into manufacturing as they did eighty to ninety years ago, let alone 120 years ago. We would simply produce more stuff than we need. Humanity has yet to fully adapt to that -- and so it is also with our political and commercial institutions.  My favorite discussion of technological improvement  is with color televisions:

[Image: westinghouse_h840ck15-hd.jpg]


If you were a real early-adapter you would have paid $1,295, or equivalent to $12,082 in 2018 (Wikipedia) in 1954 to buy one of these, and only if you lived in Greater New York City, for this Westinghouse H840CK15 model in 1954. Few people did; it cost in real money what a low-end automobile cost. It was neither very useful or reliable. The 32" flat-screen LED television that you can buy at Wal*Mart is far more useful and reliable. Few bought it.

Quote:As the Appalachian and Ozarks kids, I don't view them as deplorable or speak of them or view them or treat them as if they're dirt either. As far as you and blues in general, I haven't seen anything of value coming from blue minds and mouths that I consider worth sacrificing or worth paying the ultimate sacrifice for either at this point.

When Hillary Clinton spoke of the infamous "basket of deplorables", she referred to adults -- not children. She was talking about adult proud of their arrogant ignorance, bigotry, and fanaticism that Donald Trump exploited -- and won on. We can all regret that people that she so labeled often took pride in that label. Maybe it is not so sick as the "1%" patch of outlaw biker gangs proud to attract sociopaths who traffic in sex and drugs, let alone the death's-head insignia of the SS. But the word 'deplorable' is not intended to flatter.

By the way -- those children deserve better than what they are now getting than what the deplorable right-wing politicians offer them. The only thing uncharacteristic of the Third World in much of Appalachia and the Ozarks is that the people are mostly lily-white. By the way -- what is Donald Judas Trump doing for them?

*The British eventually solved the problem of the rotten borough with apportionment of Parliamentary representation with a Census as the United States established in its Constitution. The system became adequately representative, and as dominions such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand because the Westminster-style parliament worked adequately in those countries.
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.


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Messages In This Thread
Basket of Deplorables - by John J. Xenakis - 09-10-2016, 11:06 AM
RE: Basket of Deplorables - by pbrower2a - 09-10-2016, 02:01 PM
RE: Gringrich - by The Wonkette - 10-27-2016, 11:29 AM
RE: Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can! - by pbrower2a - 01-18-2019, 06:30 AM

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