03-26-2018, 07:04 PM
(03-26-2018, 12:35 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(03-26-2018, 01:08 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(03-25-2018, 07:38 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Not so. The command and control systems in this country are the corporations. The bosses are the ones in control of our top-down system, and that extends to most non-profits and family-owned and smaller businesses as well. Just like Donald Trump so famously does, they hire and fire you, tell what to do on the job, and set your wages and benefits. Meanwhile, traditional religions keeps male adults in power at home too. The government, on the other hand, has its locus of power in the voters, even though the real command and control system (the wealthy, the church and the corporations) wield outsized influence in the government and are able to deceive the red voters into supporting them and their top-down trickle-down policies.As I've told you before, your masters have trained you well grass hopper. You were a boss. Who made the decisions for your business, you or someone else you paid to make the decisions for you? It will be interesting to see what your answer is so I can see what kind of business owner you were at the time.
But the people can and will take their government back in the 2020s. When it acts for the people, the government's command structure acts to control the excesses of the bosses. The bosses complain that this infringes on their "freedom." Deceived red voters believe this tempting tripe. The red politicians promise them lower taxes and traditional values, and the red voters swallow the bait.
Honestly, I don't really care about how people run their business's or their households or which sex makes the final decisions. I know women who wear the pants and make the bulk of the decisions for the family. I don't believe traditional religion decides who has the power at home either. The women in my family were quite capable of making decisions themselves and their families. That's how our young women are being raised today. We are raising them to think for themselves and we are preparing them to be decision makers and become strong independent women.
(Responding more towards Eric, but to both...)
I see the cycle as favoring conservatives most of the time, but it favors the progressives really a lot occasionally.
The old pattern in the Industrial Age was that new values are declared in the awakening, debated and compromised in the unraveling, with trial and error taking place in crisis to implement the new values, and frozen, set in stone during the high.
But the Industrial Age is over, with computers and nukes, at about the end of WW II. The old patterns are questionable, and never held well outside of Anglo American civilization.
That will shape how this Crisis Era unfolds. At the worst, a harsh reality of economics can so debase the value of labor that living standards will plummet for all but elites. In such a case, social conditions revert to what they were in the early-industrial era with workers suffering for owners and bosses. Of course that means that Marxism becomes relevant again due to extreme exploitation and degradation of not only the industrial and the agrarian proletariat, but also the intellectual proletariat. That implies political instability that lurks beneath the surface of brittle, authoritarian regimes infamous for corruption, cruelty, and inequity. Note well that conservatives of a certain time promoted the consumer economy as a means of ensuring that working people had something to lose other than their chains. Those intelligent conservatives may or may not be the true Whigs of recent times. (I am tempted to believe that the conservatives with conscience and reason circa 2050 will owe far more to Barack Obama than to Donald Trump.
Quote:New values were proclaimed in the 1960s awakening, but implemented almost immediately. The blue GIs made big changes, enough that I am looking to an awakening pattern to dominate values change in the next age. The red had Future Shock. Little change has happened since. We are stuck in a see saw pattern, with the red and blue governments tick off the opposite people and are unable to work their respective agendas. We have had no regeneracy yet. While both agendas are defined, pushing them too hard has angered the people of one ilk or the other. No one value set has dominated.
We still ended up with Ronald Reagan. But even the liberals never quite accepted the "dope" part of "peace, love, and dope". And now we have Donald Trump, who has accepted the most sordid forms of personal indulgence (cocaine would not surprise me) without making any effort at moral perfection.
Quote:Almost. The established politicians of both factions were disliked by their rank and file in 2016. Division of wealth, to much productivity and global warming are killers. They are problems that will have to be solved, and the blue people have more chances of real solution. Refusing to see the problems will not solve them.
We have had too few entrenched reforms. I see Donald Trump endorsing a reversion to the values of the 1920s except perhaps for equality of same-sex relationships (which I cannot imagine being undone) and the refutation of Jim Crow practice (too messy). A hint: one of the few good things about the Second Amendment as interpreted by the guns-for-everyone group is that armed black people are the best reason for the KKK types seeking to return them to subjection or for Nazi-like scum trying to ship them off to concentration camps.
Quote:But they can delay addressing problems, which makes them worse.
Or they can go full-bore reactionary, accelerating the 'progress' (in the sense that metathesis of a cancer is 'progress') social rot and hasten a violent revolution. I can imagine the Millennial young adults at their possible worst as imitators of destroyers of every person, institution, and sentiment that gets in the way of what they consider pure rationality.
Quote:So I am still a Whig. I see progress, but often progress delayed by the powers that be.
Donald Trump may be making me a Troy in the sense of questioning whether that nasty discord between 1775 and 1783 was such a good idea.
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.