The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(02-19-2020, 10:39 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-18-2020, 01:32 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(02-18-2020, 08:45 AM)David Horn Wrote: The primary process is starting to look like a circular firing squad. First, they winnow the field in two remarkably unrepresentative states. To aid in this selection, several shoot-from-the-hip debates are held, each with a cast of thousands. No one gets to stand out, so it’s open to media hype more is typical. So far, there is a rotating cast of characters keeping the process media friendly. 

I hope you’re right and the next two contests start to focus on a final candidate, but I’m skeptical. With Mike Bloomberg out there, this could go all the way to the convention. That doesn’t bode well for the party of cats.

It must suck having Bloomberg in the mix today. I mean Bloomberg represents everything about the elites that you guys claim to hate. I mean, an actual oligarch running to be your president who has the money to buy and influence every politician/lawmakers on your side with the exception of Bernie maybe.

Actually, you also have to add Tom Steyer. The Dems are at least conflicted about this. The Republicans are all-in for the phony oligarch come carnival barker they elected (sorta) in 2016. His main goals: enrich himself (his fortune may be just about gone by now), and destroy the country’s institutional infrastructure, so he can get away with his first and primary goal. 

Why are you attracted to scum?

Donald Trump is scum. Were he born into the middle class his acquisitive desire would have made him a used-car salesman at a tote-the-note lot. Or maybe he would set up a rent-to-own emporium in which he sells schlock furniture and electronics to unsophisticated customers at high retail and with an implicitly high interest rate. In view of his sex drive, I could imagine how he would get attractive young women short of cash the down payment. I will leave that to your imagination; I do not do pornography.

The middle class conforms, goes disreputable, or sinks into the proletariat (where the work is real and generally ill-paid unless one is a skilled worker). But it does not enter the economic elite except perhaps through marriage -- you know: be Miss Missouri and some Texas oilman might find you sexy even if he is forty years older.

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Back to the generational theory: a 3T brings institutional rot that at the least wise or nearly-wise (I put myself in the latter category) readily see. Culture becomes loosey-goosey, and people start acting as if nothing matters except personal bliss. "Sex and drugs and rock-and-roll"... with material comfort and bureaucratic power to go with it. Families splinter, institutional loyalty vanishes, entertainment becomes increasingly mindless, politics degrade into identity politics, religion often becomes the Prosperity Gospel or offers theatrical excitement, people scrap rational judgment and business practices go into the sewer, and people are looking for the quick gain on Easy Street. An infamous depiction of such came in the 1920's with the article "Sex O'Clock in America" in the Saturday Evening Post. 

Institutional loyalty vanishes so the only way in which to get reliable customers is to destroy consumer choice. The only way in which to make the profits that the economic elite wants is to fleece people who have no meaningful choice and to underpay people so badly that they must become machines of meat. Economic inequality intensifies, and it further breaks down the fabric of society. Economic hardships multiply and magnify while a few get to follow the sick dictum of Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt. Someone else will endure the consequences of one's economic, sexual, cultural, and political depravity.

Politics of a 3T tend toward the reactionary -- not the conservative. Institutions rot underneath the impressive edifice, and the solution is not some more gilding or a new paint job. The economic and philosophical contradictions intensify, any sense of community crumbles (except perhaps among people who have traditions 'not for export' even if those traditions include some habits worth emulating. A 4T can go well for a model minority (let us say American Jews in the 1930's) if the political and economic leadership heavily adopts the benign ways. A 4T can go catastrophically badly, as for German Jews in the 1930's, if the political leadership chooses to abuse and dispossess people that have become pariahs. Some German and (in a short window) Austrian Jews fled to America to get away from Satan Incarnate and made solid contributions to American science, culture (especially our cinematic Golden Age), and business. All I can say of Nazi Germany is that there was nothing wrong with the German people that Judaism couldn't  have solved.   


The social and economic collapse comes just in time to show the rakes of the 3T how wrong they were by inflicting upon them the consequences that others were compelled to endure. People who have been indulging themselves on Easy (if tainted) Money find that the gravy train has not only stopped -- but been destroyed.  America reacted well to the great economic meltdown of 1929-1932 with nearly everyone doing his allotted role well, whether in government, business big or small, and labor. The people who didn't?


 

Go too far the wrong way, and you will be blown away or put away. Such came earlier in America than in the gangster world of Nazi Germany, which really went the wrong way. But here is what happens to the highest-ranking member of the Nazi security apparatus to have survived to be captured:



American prosecutors shaped the Nuremberg trials to resemble a prosecution of gangland figures such as some members of the Dillinger gang. The hanged man above was Ernest Kaltenbrunner, the man in charge of the Nazi concentration camps, the most blatant example of organized crime to have ever existed. (American gangsters who killed in the line of their criminal enterprises were electrocuted instead of hanged; the Nazis never introduced the electric chair). 

We are in for some rough times. We have a Crisis Era coming at the very stage of economic development in which making more stuff is no longer a sure way of achieving prosperity. Many of us will be wise to downsize, and the technology that we have allows such. As an example, if one has a laptop computer and even transitory access to the Internet one can get a rich library at one's disposal in Project Gutenberg. YouTube makes an abundant supply of music available to anyone who simply searches. (OK, some of the greatest music ever written has no catchy title, so maybe we need some education to discover that). If one has a giant TV screen one will be able to have a simulation of a desirable view of San Francisco Bay  even if one is in Kansas -- or Kazakhstan. The giant TV screen that simulates a bay window in size is less expensive in real terms than a color console TV of the 1980's because we have better technology at our disposal. 

So how do we adapt? I do not know -- but Donald Trump is certainly a non-answer. We will need more formal education just to cope with the potentialities of a post-scarcity time. We will not have to work as hard to meet basic needs, and those who can exploit a scarcity will probably face high taxes. This is sure: even the oligarchs well know that if the common man has no stake in the system, then the common man will see red -- "red" as in socialist revolution, the sort that dispossesses, exiles, or slaughters a class that exploits, abuses, and humiliates the poor that it treats as livestock at best and vermin at worst. 

Note a big difference between Mike Bloomberg and Donald Trump: Trump has made his reliable income off real property; Bloomberg has made his wealth off intellectual property. Who said that capitalist elites cannot have their own conflicts?