01-14-2022, 04:22 PM
(01-14-2022, 03:01 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I am always amazed that right wing zealots like Classic Xer denounce "billionaires and donor class/aristocracy" when it is their Party which does everything possible to boost their interests and hurt the rest of us. It amazes me that Classic Xer can turn his own faults around and shove them back at us. But that is always what liars and tyrants do.
High tech is not so heroic to him, but Big Oil, utilities, defense contractors, and agribusiness are closer to being his heroes than are those who innovate in communications and entertainment. Big Tech allows people to share ideas that he dislikes, so that is the problem.
Let's look at Koch industries: it has typically bought low-tech businesses that are lucrative but well past prime. Paper. Oil. Plastics. Minerals. Chemicals (some former DuPont ). Livestock ranching (really, really low-tech). It is not a technological innovator on the cutting edge. One cannot fault it for that, as we all need the stuff that Koch supplies, although there is typically another provider. The objectionable feature of Koch industries is the effort to subordinate the political system to it, one sell-out pol at a time.
Koch is heavily involved in the purchase of the American political system as an owned-and-operated subsidiary. That is scary. Democracy entails representation of voters irrespective of status. Government representing wealth or bureaucratic power? That is feudal if low-tech; fascist if it has the means of modern communication under its thumb. I once saw a proposal of the long-past oil baron H L Hunt suggesting that government represent asset owners only because they alone achieved anything. People like he would be represented.
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.