08-04-2019, 01:31 AM
Brought over from another thread because I thought that the discussion was going away from the topic.
(I am deleting references to Jeffrey Epstein because (1) he is apparently a freak -- a would-be mad science with neither appreciable scientific training nor valid science at his command, (2) his deeds are up to the courts to decide, and I prefer to not discuss criminal cases while they are in contest, and (3) I do not see him in any way as a trend-setter). As I saw in an old issue of American Heritage Magazine on how the planters of the South before the Civil War saw their relationship with slaves... those planters had saw themselves as the best thing to have ever happened to slaves who were beneficiaries of their loving direction and care. Such seems to fit exploiters of any kind; they can always see themselves as benefactors to Humanity as a whole, even to people that they exploit.
People who do real work and have accountability for its completion are in no position in which to exploit others, whatever their generation. Boomer clerks and laborers cannot exploit others. Obviously, sbarrera is not discussing such people as domestic servants, welders and truck drivers. Boomer elites have never shown solidarity with Boomer proles.
We are late enough in this Crisis that the theme of its culmination is already well defined. I see it in the intensification of inequality that will need repression and conformity to enforce its inhuman nastiness. I look at a trend within the Republican Party that involved Lee Atwater, Karl Rove going further down the line, and someone like Steve Bannon as a full-blown fascist intent on destroying democracy in practice while leaving the formality of a Constitution but reality in state terror. Sure, there are elections, but those are rigged so they have no meaning; Congress is responsible in practice to lobbyists instead of to constituents; a secret police enforces the will of some Party on behalf of its corporate supporters.
If I had to choose between a Depression as severe as that of the 1930s or military apocalypse, then I will take the Depression. The last one gutted the power of monopolists and their retainers, and that may be just what we need to revert to an economic pattern compatible with freedom and Constitutional government. Except for the economic elites of the 1920s, life was generally better for Americans in the late 1930s because of a shorter work-day, meaningful retirement pay for people who should have retired (I am guessing that elderly workers in industry had horrible rates of industrial accidents that killed and crippled them), and more equality. Teenagers were more likely staying in high school (the norm of a high-school education began then), which made them more productive workers once they joined the workforce. Ask any employer whether he wants to hire high-school dropouts. Kids still in high school, sure, as their lives still have some structure... but not drop-outs.
But the bureaucracies will be gone. I cannot predict what will happen to the federal bureaucracy except that people will demand activities more likely to create jobs and useful infrastructure, but we can all predict what will happen to the bureaucracy of Sears. People who have managed a business but have no idea of how to do the real work will be at a loss if they must do the real work of starting a shoe-string business. People of long-standing privilege are rarely competent at such. Marx was terribly wrong about the nature of small business: operating one is real work, and the profit to a great extent is more like the wages to the proletariat in quality and quantity than it is like the large passive incomes of feudal lords and the large-scale shareholders of giant, monopolistic, vertically-integrated firms.
War, especially should a fascistic regime conduct it, will destroy America as it has been over the lifetime of the oldest people then living. People will be picking up the rubble and trying to piece their lives back together... and Americans will shed few tears over the people culpable for the ruin who get convicted of war crimes and die at the ends of ropes.
But even without war, a thoroughly-vile social order plants the seeds of its own destruction. Donald Trump is trying to govern like a dictator, and if he can't find enough collaborators he might have to watch his back from law enforcement, the Armed Services, the Intelligence services, the courts, and the media. Our system of checks and balances so far have stopped one effort to establish a despotic President. The biggest check is a free election, and the 2018 midterm election looked very free and fair. The 2020 election has a chance of saving American democracy, but that is only the start of institutional reforms necessary for making America great in ways in which it has never been before.
We still have an economy under the control of people who see the rest of Humanity existing solely to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich at great sacrifices by those not rich. Increasing inequality makes an economy more unstable while throttling growth -- unless the growth is a corrupt and doomed bubble. Such bubbles devour capital and collapse, taking some bloated behemoths down with the corporate bureaucrats incapable of generating anything other than rules and paperwork useless anywhere else. Shareholders get burned, but a class the bureaucratic nomenklatura proves useless. Sure, it bought some nice real estate in the good times, but it will have to sell its McMansions for pennies on the dollar or subdivide them into apartments just to keep formal ownership while downsizing.
But we have a cycle in history, and as the dinosaurs went extinct in the K-T calamity, niches opened for larger mammals than rats. In the political and social cycle, openings emerge for lean-running small businesses in local markets. Inventories, real estate, and labor will be cheap. Small businesses will include activities in which small businesses once were commonplace, as in restaurants, retail stores from clothing places to grocery stores, and even manufacturing and banking. There was hardly a better time for starting a small business than the 1930s. People must do real work to survive, and community flourishes anew.
Quote: beechnut79
Quote: pbrower2a
Quote: sbarrera
Leave it to a Boomer (Jeffrey Epstein) to want to create a master race via some technological fantasy. At least Kurzweil only wants to help everyone live forever. (Sorry to pick on your generation, there, pbrower).
Boomer elites in Big Business are really nasty and they deserve your contempt. The rest of us are (once one gets past the extremists) aren't so nasty. But we are also powerless against our own elites unless we can subvert those elites. The narcissism that makes people especially competent at success in bureaucracies looks like a low grade of sociopathy.
The Missionary generation had its loud proponents of eugenics, and Epstein seems to have adopted much of its gibberish about breeding an elite. To this I say that there will always be a necessary elite -- that of the competent and creative able to do some real good. Those adept only at gouging and bureaucratic toadying will become irrelevant or even end up destroying the wealth they steward. The Quaker ethos -- they came to do good and they ended up doing well -- is a good model. Or the Jewish ethos -- do things well and worth doing but be righteous, and both God and economic reality will bless you. Society rewards the competent and creative fairly lest it lose them or waste them and be poorer for the loss.
It is practically more difficult, but far more just, to seek extraordinary talent from unlikely places and cultivate it than to try to breed it. I would love to have Stephen Hawking's mind, but not his ALS. I would love to have Albert Einstein's intellectual prowess but not the genes that gave him Asperger's (as someone who has it I would not sacrifice any part of my intelligence to get rid of it because my intelligence is all that I am, but if I had to become black or gay to have a normal life I would make such a choice). By cultivating such talent as there is one avoids the hazards of inbreeding.
But far worse than Asperger's or even ALS is sociopathy -- and in view of what is said of Jeffrey Epstein he seems to be a sociopath. I do not know whether genes have any connection to sociopathy, but that is a risk not worth taking. Considering that he would mostly be impregnating girls who have problems, and that for their sexual indulgence sociopaths typically exploit girls with problems, I would be scared of the results. Female sociopathy often manifests itself in prostitution, and there might be something to the old Spanish insult hijo de la gran puta (son of the great whore).
I doubt that Stephen Hawking ever did anything horrible to anyone, and Albert Einstein had some moral compass. Well, I can judge evil-doers harshly, and I see the defenseless among us as worthy of protection.
..............
Go ahead -- pick on our worst. They deserve ruin, and if they get their way they will achieve their own ruin, either in an economic meltdown as severe as the Great Depression, or at worst a war for profit that turns into consummate calamity. Monopolists and cartels are better at grabbing wealth than at creating it, and bureaucrats that generate only paperwork and rules do not create wealth. Although few people would appreciate their technological and cultural poverty, the Old Order Amish seem to have a very sane and equitable society. The ones in business seem good at what they do -- but those own and operate small businesses with no bureaucracy. Their culture does little to foster narcissism.
Your final paragraph in and of itself is an indication that there are two schools of thought as to how the current 4T will play out. Either the monopolists will continue to score victory (dread), or the modern-day equivalent of the proletariat will somehow find a way to conquer. With the first one, the status quo will continue to usurp power until there is nothing more. The top 3 percent will probably own most everything; perhaps the bottom 97 will be given enough crumbs so that they hopefully ( in their view) will not rebel and create the present-day equivalent of the Bastille or Boston Harbor. The second one gives the proles a better chance at creating a more just society, but this cannot happen unless they allow themselves to stand up and be counted.
(I am deleting references to Jeffrey Epstein because (1) he is apparently a freak -- a would-be mad science with neither appreciable scientific training nor valid science at his command, (2) his deeds are up to the courts to decide, and I prefer to not discuss criminal cases while they are in contest, and (3) I do not see him in any way as a trend-setter). As I saw in an old issue of American Heritage Magazine on how the planters of the South before the Civil War saw their relationship with slaves... those planters had saw themselves as the best thing to have ever happened to slaves who were beneficiaries of their loving direction and care. Such seems to fit exploiters of any kind; they can always see themselves as benefactors to Humanity as a whole, even to people that they exploit.
People who do real work and have accountability for its completion are in no position in which to exploit others, whatever their generation. Boomer clerks and laborers cannot exploit others. Obviously, sbarrera is not discussing such people as domestic servants, welders and truck drivers. Boomer elites have never shown solidarity with Boomer proles.
We are late enough in this Crisis that the theme of its culmination is already well defined. I see it in the intensification of inequality that will need repression and conformity to enforce its inhuman nastiness. I look at a trend within the Republican Party that involved Lee Atwater, Karl Rove going further down the line, and someone like Steve Bannon as a full-blown fascist intent on destroying democracy in practice while leaving the formality of a Constitution but reality in state terror. Sure, there are elections, but those are rigged so they have no meaning; Congress is responsible in practice to lobbyists instead of to constituents; a secret police enforces the will of some Party on behalf of its corporate supporters.
If I had to choose between a Depression as severe as that of the 1930s or military apocalypse, then I will take the Depression. The last one gutted the power of monopolists and their retainers, and that may be just what we need to revert to an economic pattern compatible with freedom and Constitutional government. Except for the economic elites of the 1920s, life was generally better for Americans in the late 1930s because of a shorter work-day, meaningful retirement pay for people who should have retired (I am guessing that elderly workers in industry had horrible rates of industrial accidents that killed and crippled them), and more equality. Teenagers were more likely staying in high school (the norm of a high-school education began then), which made them more productive workers once they joined the workforce. Ask any employer whether he wants to hire high-school dropouts. Kids still in high school, sure, as their lives still have some structure... but not drop-outs.
But the bureaucracies will be gone. I cannot predict what will happen to the federal bureaucracy except that people will demand activities more likely to create jobs and useful infrastructure, but we can all predict what will happen to the bureaucracy of Sears. People who have managed a business but have no idea of how to do the real work will be at a loss if they must do the real work of starting a shoe-string business. People of long-standing privilege are rarely competent at such. Marx was terribly wrong about the nature of small business: operating one is real work, and the profit to a great extent is more like the wages to the proletariat in quality and quantity than it is like the large passive incomes of feudal lords and the large-scale shareholders of giant, monopolistic, vertically-integrated firms.
War, especially should a fascistic regime conduct it, will destroy America as it has been over the lifetime of the oldest people then living. People will be picking up the rubble and trying to piece their lives back together... and Americans will shed few tears over the people culpable for the ruin who get convicted of war crimes and die at the ends of ropes.
But even without war, a thoroughly-vile social order plants the seeds of its own destruction. Donald Trump is trying to govern like a dictator, and if he can't find enough collaborators he might have to watch his back from law enforcement, the Armed Services, the Intelligence services, the courts, and the media. Our system of checks and balances so far have stopped one effort to establish a despotic President. The biggest check is a free election, and the 2018 midterm election looked very free and fair. The 2020 election has a chance of saving American democracy, but that is only the start of institutional reforms necessary for making America great in ways in which it has never been before.
We still have an economy under the control of people who see the rest of Humanity existing solely to make people already filthy-rich even more filthy rich at great sacrifices by those not rich. Increasing inequality makes an economy more unstable while throttling growth -- unless the growth is a corrupt and doomed bubble. Such bubbles devour capital and collapse, taking some bloated behemoths down with the corporate bureaucrats incapable of generating anything other than rules and paperwork useless anywhere else. Shareholders get burned, but a class the bureaucratic nomenklatura proves useless. Sure, it bought some nice real estate in the good times, but it will have to sell its McMansions for pennies on the dollar or subdivide them into apartments just to keep formal ownership while downsizing.
But we have a cycle in history, and as the dinosaurs went extinct in the K-T calamity, niches opened for larger mammals than rats. In the political and social cycle, openings emerge for lean-running small businesses in local markets. Inventories, real estate, and labor will be cheap. Small businesses will include activities in which small businesses once were commonplace, as in restaurants, retail stores from clothing places to grocery stores, and even manufacturing and banking. There was hardly a better time for starting a small business than the 1930s. People must do real work to survive, and community flourishes anew.
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.