(01-15-2021, 04:32 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-14-2021, 11:03 AM)David Horn Wrote:(01-13-2021, 08:04 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Once again, if you weren't so into tribal thinking and associated with a tribe and guilty of thinking in terms of us and them and being divisive, you'd have some integrity/credibility to fall back on at this point. The WEIRD might (I say might) care about values such as democracy, equality, human rights and the rule of law as they pertain to themselves and their tribe. Are the WEIRD in trouble for ignoring existing laws that equally pertain to them and crossing American boundaries that rational/sane people would never cross and placing themselves at risk being stripped of all protections right now? As I mentioned before, I'm not a member of the GOP tribe. I'm a member of the American tribe that's well over 5 times their size that tends to support them these days.
C-Xer, you seem to be determined to be obtuse. You write about real America and the like, but never show how you arrive at your numbers. At the moment, roughly 40% of the US still believes in the irrational world created by RW media and coopted by DJT. Note: believing something doesn't make it so. Existing outside the truth-paradigm, preferring one created for you, doesn't produce anything but strife. Taking one obvious point: Trump lost the election, and no mental trick can change that. And the insurrection at the Capitol was just that. It wasn't a righteous uprising of patriots. Wishing other wise won't change facts.
The group that stormed the capitol was a mixed group of individuals who got involved for various reasons.
It was very well organized -- better organized than the more successful storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917 (supposedly a spontaneous revolution according to Soviet hagiography that remains murky) or the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923. Many of the people had special military and police training. Many had body armor, and some had zip-cuffs. The training for counter-terrorism is much like that for doing terrorism.
Donald Trump fosters cranky beliefs (and he really is a crank). Cranky beliefs are silly when they have no force behind them. With force behind them, those cranky beliefs bring horror.
Quote:Law enforcement is in the process of apprehending them and figuring all of that out right now.
The FBI is expert at getting, examining, and interpreting criminal evidence. Many Special Agents are accountants, arguably the ones most expert in forensic accounting. They can follow the money in acquisition and spending. That is good for connecting people through travel. The plot is unraveling rapidly; conspiracies break when conspirators compete to save their skins.
Quote:I accepted Biden was going to be the next President a long time ago. I'll never give him credit for winning fair and square.
There was plenty that was screwy in 2016, but nothing that one could trace definitively. So on that we two are even.
Quote:I don't believe he truly earned it or really deserves to be the President either. I think his election is going to turn out to be a major mistake/blunder since it occurred at the wrong time in history.
Not as big a blunder as Donald Trump. So long as his health holds, Biden will more likely rise to the occasion. He has better instincts for politics than anyone. Nobody better knows the system than he does.
Quote:A pivotal time is not the time to elect an old man with dementia or a token VP or a bunch of arrogant morons who have been protected by a system with double standards for years.
Joe Biden probably knows already that he is a one-term President... for reasons of health. The job takes much out of a person. Note well that we also have a precedent for a President in serious decline: the President takes a largely ceremonial role and competent subordinates do the rest. You tell me: Trump has mental problems, whether those relate to age or are inherent in his character. Did you see any Casper Weinberger or George Shultz in the Trump Administration? Biden seeks the antitheses of tokens -- people competent in their own right. I've met tokens, and they don't impress me. They call attention to what they are, but they seem to have sold out. One can never quite figure out what they do well. They travel to lots of company picnics for photo ops. There is plenty of talent among America's Model Minorities.
Quote:As I've said, I'm not much of a wishful thinker or one who clings to false hopes or laurels associated with bygone eras. I don't believe what occurred with election laws in some key battle ground states was legal. If 40% equates to 70 some million Americans who ain't going to budge or concede then your in trouble when the the shit hits the fan and it starts to really heat up. AS I mentioned, social justice is a double edged sword that cuts both ways. I've also mentioned that the left is playing with fire and walking on thin ice and waking a sleeping giant.
But 81 million budged against an incumbent President and elected a new President who won 306 electoral votes. Electoral laws had to be adapted to the reality of COVID-19 which would have scared people away from voting. I see COVID-19 as an aggressive and omnipresent enemy that has already invaded and occupied America, and kills even more effectively than an occupier's Gestapo, OGPU, or Mukhabarat. At least if some militia comes close to a polling place and starts threatening voters, the police can come and break that activity up.
Donald Trump is already disgraced as no ex-President (which he soon will be). Yes, I recognize that Joe Biden will face stern opposition from the large minority GOP, and if that is not effective enough for America's plutocratic pigs, then I expect those plutocratic pigs to open the spigots in support of reactionary politicians who believe as they do that no human suffering can ever be in excess in the service of elite power, indulgence, and gain. America's plutocratic pigs are no nicer than the hypocritical, ruthless, domineering, exploitative pigs in George Orwell's political fable Animal Farm.
I concur that poor white people in America, especially in the Mountain and Deep South, are oppressed. If I had to choose between being a poor Mexican-American kid in San Antonio and being a poor white kid in rural West Virginia I would pick being the Mexican-American because there is at least an organized Mexican-American community in San Antonio. San Antonio at the least has jobs for people who falter in school, which is more than I can say about Appalachia. If you remember my old threads about comparisons between states... statistically, although blacks were worse off than whites in all states, blacks in Maryland (even if it contains dreadful Baltimore) fare better than whites in West Virginia.
I have seen a documentary about life in dying Ohio cities (much like rural West Virginia) on Deutsche Welle... and the documentary looks like something that one might have expected as anti-American propaganda by old DDR media. If the old East German media went after phantoms of American evil (mass culture, militarism, and capitalism)... mass poverty is a legitimate disgrace. It is no phantom; it degrades life.
Nearly 90 years after the New Deal for America and 75 years after the Marshall Plan (modeled heavily after the New Deal) for a war-ravaged Europe, the American Mountain South and Deep South needs the equivalent of one or the other. Donald Trump never offered anything like either. He offered nothing but resentment toward the well educated, especially in minority groups. Joe Biden knows his history, and that is enough promise for my liking. He expects an extreme test of his abilities. History will judge whether he meets those challenges.
Donald Trump couldn't condemn violent bigots as Ronald Reagan did. He could never meet the extreme social stress of a respiratory disease from which prosperous, advanced societies are supposedly exempt because he could not call for sacrifices to meet the need of the time. I do not know definitively whether he was complicit in the insurrection of January 6, and I will leave that for criminal investigations underway.
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.