03-20-2021, 08:46 PM
Posted elsewhere, and it might violate the informal concern for excessive hyperbole:
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.ph...msg8010323
Second-kindest might be an abortion, but that is over the top there.
.....
That thread does not look sympathetically upon any generational cycle. We are still in a Crisis Era, and this one can end in am even grimmer (more severe and repressive) version of the neoliberal era. I cannot assume kindness as a norm among America's economic elites, and there are plenty of people who would do their will. Donald Trump egged on his political supporters for his personal agenda. Just imagine what can happen when people better organized and with a more coherent ideology have their supporters forcing Congress to set aside an election that those elites dislike... and succeeding. It will of course be a temporary measure to save America from some dire fate.
The regime that appeared after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917 lasted for seventy-four years. Sure, it eventually moderated and lost most of its murderous sting, but glasnost and perestroika that suggested an abandonment of dictatorship and central planning still took nearly seventy years to emerge. The "temporary" dictatorship that Lenin imposed lasted far longer than did most dictatorships ever known. North Korea has surpassed the Soviet Union in length of stay upon the Earth, and the People's Republic of China is now similar in age to the Soviet Union upon the demise of the latter. People who took Trump banners into the Capitol building may not have fully understood the consequences of a win on their part, but neither did the Bolshevik Mob that dislodged the inchoate parliament of the fledgling Russian Republic.
We are still in a Crisis Era, and should the last act of the Crisis be the establishment of a "Christian and Corporate State" -- my depiction of a plutocratic regime that uses Christian symbolism to justify its inequity -- then we could have a thoroughly-nasty 1T in which anything that interferes with adulation of the economic and political leadership as an alternative to civic rituals that laud the economic elites might be banned. Who needs Bach or Gershwin when one can instead witness ceremonies that laud the Master Class for its 'wise' stewardship of the potentials of the Nation? Out of their generosity do people get to have "three hots and a cot". Bullhist to that! Ted Kaczynski will get that until the end of his pathetic and wasted life.
We are not through the Crisis. The worst seems past, but how sure are we? Some people have a lust for easy money and what it can buy to which they are no less addicted than some junkie is to heroin. The difference is that a junkie is powerless to ensure a steady, easy supply of heroin.
Quote:There are lessons to be learned about 2010.
1. Do not assume t he repetition of history based on analogues. 2010 looked as if it would be a replay of 1934 to a President who modeled himself much like FDR. It was not a perfect analogue. In 1934 the "economic royalists" were still concerned with the survival of their businesses and weren't going to waste money on political campaigns. In 2010 investment in political campaigns could pay off richly as the elites could find willing stooges to do the political dirty work.
2. It will have been only twelve years since 2010, so expect people who know what they are doing to do what succeeded the last time, perhaps refining the process. The rapacious elites of 2010 still want Americans to endure Scandinavian costs of living on African wages, and if they can get that they will have maximized profit.
3. Mitch McConnell has already telescoped much of the agenda: a national right-to-work law that would eviscerate labor unions so that workers would be helpless against rapacious, all-powerful economic elites, gutting of whatever environmental regulations that there are (they might remain, but only to stifle competition), and more support of privatization of the public sector. It's mirror-image Marxism that creates a Hell for workers -- but the economic elites are much lauded for building castles and palaces while the common people get cold and hungry.
4. America has a heritage of greedy plutocrats who treat workers as badly as possible. It was called slavery. It infested 'only' the agrarian South, but as has been shown elsewhere (most infamously Nazi Germany) industrial workers can also be transformed into serfs unable to contest the power of plutocrats, Do not be fooled: all that prevents something horrible (and it need not have militarism or racial-religious genocide attached). Nazi Germany might be too far along as an ideology, except that the US could become a militaristic police state. Think of Pinochet's Chile, in which dissidents were murdered after torture.
Empathy is not part of the requisite of character of America's plutocrats and executives. Our economic elites are an exclusive club who want no competition even from small business, let alone labor unions in challenging pay and conditions or any consequences of a political arena.
What those elites do not want is apocalyptic war which replaces a ruthless American elite with a similarly-rapacious Russian or Chinese elite. It surprises me that German tycoons and executives did not face the same consequences for exploitation of prisoners in the camps (aside from expropriation in central and Balkan Europe, and damage from air rai8ds and consequences of land war) as the administrators and guards in such camps.
5. Donald Trump still has a cult that sees nothing wrong with despotic government that agrees with them on cultural issues and cannot accept political defeat. Should Trump become irrelevant, then someone else will offer much the same agenda with a different set of personal quirks. Maybe he will be more cautious about using vile language. Maybe that pol will offer more overt religious devotion and a less sordid personal life with no sleazy business dealings. That Trump got away with irreligion, a pattern of sexual perversion that mocks the more conservative values of most Americans, and a pattern of fraud in taxes and business dealings should warn us of the hazard of someone 'cleaner'. The danger of Donald Trump is not in his raw language, his acceptance of a more conventional form of religious devotion ("The Bible says it; I believe it; believe it or burn!) of the fundamentalist Protestant type, who may have been sexually loyal to one spouse from early adulthood, his one-sided business dealings that cheat investors and leave subcontractors in worse shape than before they had dealings with him; it is that he really believes that the common man exists solely to make those already filthy-rich even more filthy rich while living on the edge of hunger, exposure, and homelessness. Trump has his dream of a social order in which the poor (and that includes people heavily in debt with no easy way of getting out from under it) owe everything to those who owe the common man nothing. The GOP has plenty of imaginable candidates who have Trump's economic ideology without the personal abominations.
The political struggle for the dignity of Humanity is far from decided in America. A political equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition based upon economic orthodoxy could be just as brutal as the original in which one could burn at the stake for having a family get-together that has some resemblance to a Seder has not become impossible. The worst deeds that people have ever done have been in the pretense of righteousness; even the Nazis thought they were doing a great service to Humanity through the Holocaust. America's economic elites are consummately ruthless... and convinced of their rectitude. Give them the power that they think that they deserve, and America will be a nightmare in which the kindest thing that one could do for a newborn child (if one is poor) is to offer that child for a foreign adoption.
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.ph...msg8010323
Second-kindest might be an abortion, but that is over the top there.
.....
That thread does not look sympathetically upon any generational cycle. We are still in a Crisis Era, and this one can end in am even grimmer (more severe and repressive) version of the neoliberal era. I cannot assume kindness as a norm among America's economic elites, and there are plenty of people who would do their will. Donald Trump egged on his political supporters for his personal agenda. Just imagine what can happen when people better organized and with a more coherent ideology have their supporters forcing Congress to set aside an election that those elites dislike... and succeeding. It will of course be a temporary measure to save America from some dire fate.
The regime that appeared after the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in 1917 lasted for seventy-four years. Sure, it eventually moderated and lost most of its murderous sting, but glasnost and perestroika that suggested an abandonment of dictatorship and central planning still took nearly seventy years to emerge. The "temporary" dictatorship that Lenin imposed lasted far longer than did most dictatorships ever known. North Korea has surpassed the Soviet Union in length of stay upon the Earth, and the People's Republic of China is now similar in age to the Soviet Union upon the demise of the latter. People who took Trump banners into the Capitol building may not have fully understood the consequences of a win on their part, but neither did the Bolshevik Mob that dislodged the inchoate parliament of the fledgling Russian Republic.
We are still in a Crisis Era, and should the last act of the Crisis be the establishment of a "Christian and Corporate State" -- my depiction of a plutocratic regime that uses Christian symbolism to justify its inequity -- then we could have a thoroughly-nasty 1T in which anything that interferes with adulation of the economic and political leadership as an alternative to civic rituals that laud the economic elites might be banned. Who needs Bach or Gershwin when one can instead witness ceremonies that laud the Master Class for its 'wise' stewardship of the potentials of the Nation? Out of their generosity do people get to have "three hots and a cot". Bullhist to that! Ted Kaczynski will get that until the end of his pathetic and wasted life.
We are not through the Crisis. The worst seems past, but how sure are we? Some people have a lust for easy money and what it can buy to which they are no less addicted than some junkie is to heroin. The difference is that a junkie is powerless to ensure a steady, easy supply of heroin.
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.