(06-21-2017, 06:52 AM)Odin Wrote:(06-20-2017, 08:45 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(06-20-2017, 06:23 AM)Odin Wrote: Galen is a brainwashed tool, Brower. No amount of evidence is going to convince him. His brain has been turned to mush by InfoWars-grade BS.
True. I have simply lost patience with him. I recognize that his ideology can lead only to a sick society.
Galen can't accept the consensus that the 2016 election may have been hacked...and he even trivializes the consequences in the event that it was hacked, and even of the possibility that subsequent elections might be hacked to the benefit of Democrats. All that matters is that he gets his way, a truly debased level of moral thought.
Senator Angus King (I-ME) was on NPR this morning and was talking about how this is the same shit the Russians been pulling in eastern Europe for years. Of course Galen would just dismiss it as "just another lie by the Deep State" or other such tin-foil-hattery.
The Russians, no longer Marxists, have found how to appeal to the base drives of America's economic elites -- their greed, their exclusivity, and their cruelty. Russia is a good model for them because a few people in Russia have taken over the 'socialist' economy. The Gini coefficient for Russia is very high, indicating the economic and political power of tycoons like Vladimir Putin. American economic elites, whose ideal might be a return to the sort of inequality of the plantation or the early-industrial era (with the seventy-hour workweeks and forty-year lifespans for industrial workers), could align themselves with an anti-capitalist Soviet Union only when the Soviet Union was America's ally against the gangsters of Nazi Germany who intended to steal American wealth on behalf of the Nazi gangsters. But now that Russia is ultra-capitalist, Russia is no problem.
Under the dyed-in-the-wool Reds the Soviet leadership could never appeal to American economic elites who saw Marxism as a bogey. Our elites never really hated Russia; they had no problem with Russian culture. They love hierarchy and bureaucratic privilege. They like an economy that offers at most promises of pie-in-the-sky to the masses who have no alternatives.
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.