The Partisan Divide on Issues

[pbrower2a]

(04-21-2020, 10:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(04-21-2020, 07:27 PM)gabrielle Wrote: Well, if all the "reds" know how to hunt and fish, then when the shit goes down and America dissolves into total socio-economic collapse you guys will instantly assemble into a sustainable hunter-gatherer society and everything will be hunky-dory, right?  Perhaps you can start raising crops to buy protection from local warlords against the roving brigands.

Here's the Bigger Picture: Lift social distancing too soon and the virus surges back, even stronger.  The health care system is overwhelmed, and we have "many more body bags," as the director of the WHO put it.  A large number of those in the body bags will be health care workers, a generation of medical expertise that cannot be replaced.  If you think the suffering and sacrifice we are dealing with now is bad, just you wait and see how much worse it can get.

I keep going back to the red tendency to not see problems that require a big government to solve, and to deny science which says the problems will exist.

Rachel Monday night ran will a little “Earth One” vs “Earth Two” theme.  I think it is DC Comics that went for a while with two parallel story lines, with different characters, uniforms, plot lines, histories, etc….   (DC is not alone.  It is a common theme in SF, for example Star Trek has it’s Mirror Universe.) The two realities had nothing to do with each other save for a few cross reality plot lines.

One thread in science fiction is alternative history, one in which the Confederacy wins the Civil War , in which Wilhelm II is able to establish a lasting New Order in Europe, or in which the Axis prevails. My idea is that the Axis Powers win, but Germany and Japan are the Good Guys who defeat a Klan-dominated America, a fascistic France, a fascistic Britain, and Stalin's Soviet Union. Churchill and de Gaulle become partners, and India breaks from the fascist Britain much as Brazil broke from Portugal in the Napoleonic era with a member of the British royal family finding Indian nationalism a way of saving his dynasty. (Is it worth writing?)

Quote:Rachel suggested the real world and the conservative world are like that.  If you don’t want to spend money to solve a problem, the reds can save money by pretending the problem doesn’t exist.  Bridges collapsing, global warming, pollution, guns, lots of problems exist more in more densely populated regions, or only develop slowly enough to pretend they are not looming.  Thus it is quite possible to say if a problem is not confronting them directly, they aren’t going to pay for anyone to solve the problem.

One fault is that the 'conservative' world is losing its old virtues without gaining any new virtues to replace them. The urban areas hostile to the provincial, inequitable right can rot while people resembling the old agrarian elites become dominant where the right-wing ethos prevails. So starve the cities and starve the working poor (but give the working poor promises of pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die to those who accept the poverty, inequity, and despotic management of the economic elites... the elites need do nothing for poor kids who die of hunger when their parents are expendable, of people who die in preventable industrial calamities, and they get to live in air-conditioned palaces in which they simply use more fuel to keep life tolerable for themselves. 

The world that they create and impose is one of gross injustice and social failure. Whether those elites can enforce such through shootings on a large scale or torture chambers on a small scale as is the norm in failed states is much in question. 

All in all, something like a 1T agenda shows why it succeeds; the common man needs a stake in the system if he is to support it and not simply tolerate it out of fear of torture or summary execution.   

Quote:This attitude was quite possible to extend itself indefinitely before Coronavirus.  Again, I was deep into creating an Information Age variation of S&H for what happens when there is a Crisis without a Trigger and Regeneracy.  With nukes making a Crisis War unlikely, what would come along that would be comparable to a Lexington and Concord, a Fort Sumter, a Pearl Harbor?

People must accept the necessity for some time of an economy operating at a level characteristic of the 1930's or the late nineteenth century for a couple of years just to avoid tens of millions of pointless deaths. CORVID-19 has been killing Americans on a scale characteristic of a bungled war -- maybe not a war so bungled as the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980's, the Eastern Front in World War II, the Sino-Japanese sector of WWII, or the First World War with their human-wave assaults that achieved nothing other than the slaughter of large numbers of cannon fodder until one side ran out of cannon fodder. But it is killing Americans on a bigger scale, so far, than did World War II per day. We have the mass death of a very bad war, and if we handle COVID-19 badly we could lose tens of millions of people and end up with lasting dislocations of our economy.   

Quote:Right now, some reds are very hesitant to embrace the Conoravirus as the Trigger, as seeing the Unraveling ethic of selfishness and problem denial as rendered obsolete.  The virus is significant, scientifically provable, and culture changing.  They are trying to pretend the problem out of existence as they have so many problems in the recent past.  They are not willing to accept the medical worker and other first responders as heroes, and a culture where you are expected to sacrifice for the common good.  They want to (with apologies to Aerosmith) Dream On.

Self-interest can prevail over narrow selfishness and self-indulgence. Their ideal of self-sacrifice is on behalf of the loanshark, the gouging landlord, the executive paid lavishly to treat subordinates badly, the monopolist gouger, and political leaders who offer Newspeak as reality. The better we deal with COVID-19 the fewer human losses we will endure (think of how we dealt with HIV-AIDS) and the sooner we will be able to return to an economy that we can understand. To be sure, we have an underlying change in the economy, COVID-19 or not: the end of material scarcity, a scarcity that mandated of making more and consuming more just to achieve more happiness. We cannot support a world of hoarders just to keep production at a peak.    

Quote:I don’t see them making pretend well enough.  That apparently doesn’t mean they won’t try.  In the three last Crises, there were ugly times when the Crisis War seemed long and hard, and the best way to solve it was to surrender to the forces of royalty, slavery or fascism.  America didn’t quit the last three times, and I doubt they will quit now.  This does not mean that a few blind fools will cling to the old way of looking at things, cheering on the kings, slave owners and dictators.  I talk of Atlanta during the Civil War and Berlin during World War II as necessary prerequisites for submerging the old world view.  World views are that stubborn.  It takes a major disaster to change a culture, a proof that the Old Way will not work, that a change is necessary and to be forced.  

Despots, slave-owners, and dictators can always find the intellectual equivalents of whores to praise their cruelty. Such intellectual whores get a mental disease far worse than the syphilis or gonorrhea that literal whores risked -- and, like the whores who lease their bodies to satisfy lust risk being killed by a serial killer who finds whores vulnerable because nobody will miss them, the intellectual whore (who really does much more harm) who decides to not put out will end up dead. Those intellectual whores flatter the leaders and fool the common man for a while. But as the Germans find American, British, or Free French troops going into their towns, maybe that "master race" stuff becomes unsupportable.  Oh, you get to find out what happened to the local Jews? (With the Soviet occupation of Germany unfortunately came rape and pillage, which suggests a difference between revenge and breaking the will to fight).

The most successful conquerors are those effective at taking the will to fight from a recent enemy.    

Quote:I do not doubt the virus has the capability for similar disaster.  The concept of creating an “Earth Two” alternate view of a world were no problems can exist if the perfect blindfold is worn will become much more unpalatable when the problem bites the blindfolded people in the rear.  Then, but only then, will they consider taking the blindfold off.

Maybe.

Someday.

Eventually.

Because we are undergoing a Crisis we cannot return to the "old" normal. We can at best find a new normal. We will find that old ways of labor-management relations will be void. White people are going to find that they start acting more like the model minorities who in many ways have shown the wave of the future in American life than like the superstition-laden Trump supporters... or doom themselves to poverty and awfulness in many other ways. In persons, reason will prevail or they will fail. 

COVID-19 will be the Big Event of America in 2020, with the second-most important event being the election. COVID-19 may have already decided the 2020 election by making the Reagan-Trump paradigm unsustainable and irrelevant for the future except for personal consequences. Some of us will be hurt badly. 

I predict that we will drift into a social-market economy by default.