12-19-2018, 03:14 AM
(12-18-2018, 06:12 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(12-18-2018, 03:50 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-17-2018, 11:21 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: If I lack empathy, I can at least act as if I have it.What are you doing posting here? If you're supposed to avoid angry expressions of profanity or personal degradation, you shouldn't be posting here. You should stick to the rules and find a friendly left wing website that bans conservatives the moment one shows up.
Political hack? We all have agendas, do we not?
This site should be and is politically neutral, but limited in allowing things like insults and obscenity. You have it backwards.
Other sites can be different.
Obviously what passes as 'neutrality' can itself change. This is not the sort of site that attracts what Hillary Clinton calls a 'basket of deplorable(s)'. Such people are not the types who try to systematize reality in order to make sense of it.
We are in a 4T, and historical forces (the Hegelian dialectic?) operates with unusual ferocity in such times. Theses and antitheses collide, and the most adept people at working things out who get power succeed as others fail. It may have been difficult to predict whether the world of 1950 would more reflect FDR, Stalin, or Hitler. Now we know, and we have had it figured out since about 1990, only to realize that our world is going through analogous distress.
Will we have a New Feudalism in which a few get whatever they want and the rest find that even survival is a privilege to be denied or tolerated as elites desire, or will we have the bounty of ease and plenty that the End of Scarcity suggests if the political order is at all just? Those look like diametric alternatives. With Hitler (for Jews) or Stalin (for business owners) the fate for many was cold-blooded murder.
Technology will decide what is possible. Politics will decide what is available.
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.