03-24-2018, 03:49 PM
(03-23-2018, 08:07 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(03-23-2018, 06:59 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The only appropriate deal involving a burglar is a plea bargain.
That's funny!!!! What would you offer to give him/them to keep him/them from taking it/whatever they want away from you? A silly police threat or silly religious threat or moral opinion aren't much of a threat or bargaining chip to use with a criminal.
The practical reality is that our economic order fosters sociopaths. This is a crassly-materialistic society in which the commercial and (most of the time) political leadership tells people to dream big and not care how they get what they want -- and have little regard for the welfare of the common man. Just think of the tax 'reform' intended to give America a new Gilded Age that implies much the same suffering without the justification of creating new prosperity. The harsh reality is that the commercial elites want most people other than themselves to live miserable lives that make possible the indulgence of the elites. Those elites now control the po0liticians to a large enough extent that the USA is a cruel, corrupt plutocracy.
I look at the defense of the 'massacre weapon' industry. The small clique of people in the business of making and selling military weapons for the civilian market has well protected itself from legal scrutiny. If a few hundred people die of gun violence, then the profits from dealings in guns are well worth it, as those elites say is the 'patriotic' view of profit and death.
Donald Trump is doing the one thing that no prior President has done -- making Marxist analysis relevant. Someone who believes that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it turns, indulges, and enforces a profit by default makes the extreme pessimism that Marx has in the profit motive and elite consumerism a possible view of the world. The belief that one can inflict no excess of human suffering so long as it leads to personal gain, indulgence, and power as well reflects the garden-variety criminal as it does a plutocrat like Donald Trump.
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.