11-19-2018, 11:14 PM
(11-19-2018, 08:55 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: It is possible to be or simulate outrage when standards suddenly change, when behavior that was once acceptable becomes deplorable, disqualifies one from following ones profession. This seems to have happened here. It is common with 4Ts that what used to be acceptable under the old set of morality is rejected by a more inclusive morality which enlarges "All men are created equal." Women are not playthings anymore. Those who treated them as such have to pay a price.
...and who sets the standards? A political culture can be very slow and incremental for decades and then strike swiftly and harshly upon people who have been getting away with with the recently-condemned behavior.
Quote:"Pinko" seems to be a general pseudo insult more associated with Xer's world view than anything else. The word once meant communist, an association with the old Soviet Union or China. With the word being associated with 'socialism', I anticipate it will be applied to anyone who wants to promote the general welfare, something true Americans used to be proud of, something the US Government is charged to do.
In the murky rhetoric of Classic X'er, it does not even make sense. Marxism-Leninism is practically dead as an ideology in part because it is no longer revolutionary. There are people deluded into believing that it still is a vibrant philosophy with solutions for the nastiness that millions still endure.
Is a 'pinko' someone who dissents with pure plutocracy? The people who believe in the unqualified dominion of asset owners are themselves a tiny minority.
Quote:Those who embraced Trump over the establishment were both tired of Establishment Republicans and their habit of supporting the elites, and deplorables who took cover under the Republican Southern Strategy. I can sympathize with the former, while deploring the deplorables. I can see classic communists favoring abandoning loyalty to the capitalists. Marx did see some real problems, if not the correct solutions. However, communists are not the Trump base or Trump. They are too tiny a minority.
Trump pulled a big con. People who voted for him could not recognize that he cared only about his overweening ego. Many believed him when he excoriated educated people. But instead of "Blessed are the poor" in the Beatitudes, Trump offered "Blessed are the stupid", or as he expressed it "I love low-information voters", as if ignorance were a great virtue. I see great achievements by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, writers, artists, and composers without my life would be far poorer.
Quote:I would like to reject prejudice, and would like it to be un American, but alas prejudice is quite historically American. As American as fighting it.
Bigotry and viciousness are as predictably recurring as resistance to them, just as we can expect warm air masses and cold ones to succeed each other with violent storms in between. I live in Michigan, and I have seen the last winter storms often the worst, with a cold front with 20F air displacing warm, humid 75F air. First comes a severe thunderstorm, and then a cold rain, followed by a blizzard that lays down an incredible amount of snow that may have recently been the 'juice' of the recent warm spell. It seems like defeat. But the sun, getting higher every day and being in the sky ever longer, radiates its heat upon the last gasp of winter. The snow melts and the plants start to bloom, and temperatures become more like those of June than like January.
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.