(10-07-2018, 11:53 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(10-06-2018, 02:54 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(10-05-2018, 11:10 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The obsession which you reds, Classic Xer, have, is entirely due to brainwashing. Taxes were not a big concern until Reagan, Prop 13, etc., the sleepening that happened near the end of the last Awakening 2T. That's ALL it is. It's neo-liberalism, libertarian economics, supply side, whatever you call it; it is nothing but BULLSHIT. YOu are brainwashed into thinking you should not have to pay taxes, because government is the problem, taxes are theft, taxes are coercion, job creaters create jobs, yadda yadda yadda, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. And it's is the main cause of all our problems today in the USA. And you Gen Xers grew up knowing nothing better than what the charming actor and his successors and followers have told you
Brainwashed? That's funny. A brainwashed left winger accusing me of being brainwashed is funny. First of all, I'm not a young Libertarian voter or a clueless anarchist of some sort that you became accustomed to tangling with on a regular basis. I'm a real life middle aged American who has paid lots of taxes. Right now, you are stupid for not being able to figure that out, stupid for not being able to accept that as being me and stupid for trying to convert me to socialism and for trying to convince me that socialism would be better for all of us than capitalism has been for most us. I'm telling you that the best you can hope for is a socialist system for blues and a capitalist system for reds with a national border existing between them and separate currencies.
I would not say the word 'brainwashed' is appropriate. That to me conjures the image of a bunch of true 20th century fascists with sensory depravation tanks, or however it is that evangelicals confronting homosexuals do it today. Attempting to coerce people into thinking another way is not happening here.
In the case of Classic X'er, he may simply have had his core beliefs reinforced. For many of the rest of us it may be having beliefs challenged and replaced at a critical moment -- election time. A decision made then can stick for two years with most elective offices, four with the President, or six with the Senate. Voting is the maximal participation that most of us have in the political process.
The Hard Right has done its job well in three of the last four Presidential and midterm elections. This election determines whether it has the ability to consolidate even more power this year and entrench itself permanently. It has the money, and I am astonished that it has yet to use it.
Quote:What is happening is that both sides cling their perspective as uniquely true, and both sides will cling absurdly to their parodies of how the other thinks. Both sides have world views, and will habitually reject the other side's, will demonize, will make no attempt to understand.
The Right used to be a default in the event of liberal failure. It was then known as conservatism, an ideology that recognized the value of tradition, faith, natural law, and social diversity. It believed in economic opportunity for people to lift themselves out of poverty.
Such is not the meaning of the word conservatism today. It now stands for class privilege, superstition, Machiavellianism, and a social hierarchy. It is all about power, having adopted the ruthlessness of its long-time arch-enemy Marxism-Leninism. Maybe it is not so crass as to foist any such garbage as "99% of the eligible voters voted in the election, and 99% voted for the Party list", It is more clever. It wants that there be a weak opposition party that thinks itself on the brink of winning, only to find that it just barely lost enough to allow the Hard Right to remain in control. If it tried to outlaw the opposition it would face a civil war, so it is best that there be a display of electoral activity as a show of formal democracy every two years, with the other side always losing, and in between elections, the Right gets to force upon us its attitude that people are nothing more than their economic roles except in such harmless activities as church, hobbies (if they aren't too poor), or perhaps a civic or fraternal organization.
I see God as an accomplice; hobbies are wastes of time, and civic and fraternal organizations empty. One might as well watch a movie as participate in those.
Quote:Now I have my own slants. I lean blue. I will see the arrow of progress pointing in one direction. I see a rejection of science by the reds. I am seeing in the Southern Strategy a clinging to prejudice, a staying away from the Enlightenment idea that all men are created equal. I am seeing an identification with the way things have always been, a rejection of new perspectives. I am seeing in part a classic Marxist class conflict, with people identifying with their own class and seeking to maintain or alleviate their own perceived interest. I am seeing a good deal of self interest, that it is to ones perceived advantage to cling to the way things have always been done.
I have the same slant. But I recognize also that history is an obscene tale written in the blood of innocent people murdered by tyrants, fanatics, and corrupt officials. The parchment is the once-precious flesh of those innocent people.
Maybe people do not change their ways until they see their world in doom from its own failures -- like wars for profit that bring great human losses or for glory that turns into ignominious defeat. More likely will be an economic downturn as severe as that of 1929-1932 that discredits the economic, administrative, and political elites that took everything and left the rest of us with nothing. Maybe we would replace our narcissism with humility. Maybe we would end up doing what many did in the 1930s, looking to the opportunities that we look to last -- low-yield, long-term investments that we must work hard to protect. That means small, start-up businesses to germinate in the interstices of a wrecked economy. People did such in the 1930s because there were no jobs to take. It is far easier to be a well-paid clerk than to start a business -- if the jobs for well-paid clerks are available.
Should there be a revolution toppling our elites, then we will need to create the most pro-business society and culture possible -- but unlike the current right-wing paradigm in which the only people who matter are the heirs and executives, it will be the commonplace small businessperson who must succeed. Such is the person hiring relatives who have been down and out, and the one rebuilding loyalty among customers.
Quote:I know how things are going to come down in the end, assuming the progressive bias of the Industrial Age will continue to hold in the coming age. That is not obviously true. My arrow of progress was a thing of the Industrial Age, of the Enlightenment. The elites may have learned a thing of two of to reverse it. I am counting on old prejudices being released, in people seeing the new problems.
It is easy to see positive trends -- America becoming more diverse and having to become more tolerant just so that people don't go after each other's throats. The Religious Right apparently isn't holding its kids to its smug view of the world as winners and losers. After all, if the kids have little to read but the Bible, they will read it and draw conclusions that their parents didn't have.
The idea that life is to be suffered and hated for rapacious plutocrats and selfish bureaucrats is easy to debunk in life itself. That may happen too late for me. I live in a community that I despise, bored, lonely, and broke. I may be stuck with a job that I hate for the rest of my life (I am 62)... but I know something that I can work for -- the last thing that anyone really needs. (no further hints) I have seen everything that I care to see in this dreary hick town, and if I can see nothing else I might as well leave such resources of the world as I consume to people who can better use and appreciate. Maybe there really are people genuinely "Happy to serve you!" Some people really are easy to brainwash.
Quote:What I am not seeing is irrationality, of people clinging to things other than how things have always been. The elites may have no need to overturn an older group of elites, to make promises to the People. Cultures attempt to perpetuate how they have been. They resist change, attempts to deal with serious problems, if only by claiming the problems don't exist.
But grasping onto an unsustainable past, just like reaching for a star light-years away, is itself futile and irrational. The culture of elite greed is itself damned for an extreme materialism that it demands that others accept as the rightful role of those elites, and poverty as the reward for obedience to those elites. Philosophical absurdities always implode -- but one can never predict when they will implode.
The Republican party has put up a "Make America Great Again" sign. It has not changed. Maybe we are discovering what the GOP thinks was great in the past. 70-hour workweeks and 40-year lifespans for the working classes? Manifest Destiny? Social hierarchy? People suffering in This World for vague promises of Pie in the Sky When You Die?
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.