(12-19-2018, 12:15 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(12-18-2018, 06:01 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: No, you are lying again. I will report violations of rules, regardless of the political affiliation of the violator, and regardless of whether the violation targets me. You are only making me inclined to be more persistent about it to be uniform. This site should be about politics and history, not about vendettas. The rules should be and as far as I know do apply to all equally.
If I had a personal vendetta, you're life here would be miserable because I would be a full time poster like Eric coming at you viciously like Devils Advocate. He had a vendetta. Me, I viewed it more as business and I approached it that way. At what point do come to gripes with reality and give up the fight/dream? The blue flag alone isn't powerful enough to replace our flag.
You used a particularly-vile, pointless insult using the infamous F-bomb. You will notice that I do not use such language in this forum. I wish that you would apologize for using it, as much for its pointlessness as for its offense. I have known of sites that expel posters for such. Surely you will remember what I did to kia 67 when he urged someone to commit suicide. Such is not a vendetta; such is basic decency. I may not be the nicest person in existence, but I recognize the desirability of treating people humanely. It does more good and causes less pain.
The bold-faced you specifically means Classic X'er. I rarely discuss posters, but in this case such is necessary.
I have no desire to replace Old Glory. Forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes marched into Dachau and Mauthausen, signaling the end to some of the most shameful things that people have ever done to others. Old Glory marched with people who sought to end segregation in the South. That flag ideally stands for what is best in our character as a People. I simply want it to stand for such again, and I do not want it shamed with evil deeds of our leaders.
Quote:I watched a show the other evening on HBO about the financial crisis. I think Bush summed it up pretty well, as the nation stood on the brink of the next Great Depression, he had a choice between Hoover or Roosevelt, he chose Roosevelt. The guy wasn't that stupid after all. If you have HBO, you should watch it. I think you'd learn why things haven't turned out as planned and off as far as following to script.
I do not have HBO; I cannot afford it. Historical analysis has suggested that FDR was right and Hoover was demonstrably wrong. Even Dubya knew this.
I look at the generational cycle, and I can conclude that it explains why the risk of another Great Depression would not emerge until the Double-Zero decade. Dubya promoted the real-estate bubble that would have been impossible in any decade from the 1930s to the 1990s, so he is in part culpable for the doomed boom.
As the conservative economist Friedrich Hayek (1898-1992) said of speculative booms, the devour capital, taking it away from investments in activities such as additions to plant and equipment in productive enterprise or in the formation of small businesses that could create more sustainable growth -- growth that does not depend upon people continuing to believe that something cannot be overpriced. The financial system fostered the idea that there never was a better investment than real estate even after the signs of instability began to appear.
People born as late as the early 1920s still had memories of the promises of new and unending prosperity, the New Era economics that the GOP rode under Harding, Coolidge, and (for a few short months) Hoover. Prosperity for the economic elites of the time would solve all problems of inequity, and the common man was a fool if he did not grasp onto the rear bumpers of limousines with V-12 engines. As long as people born as late as the early 1920s were around they made certain that pie-in-the-sky speculation was not the norm. I remember when bankers followed the dictum that people should spend no more than 35% of their disposable income on real-estate costs (including interest on mortgages). Today people may be obliged to spend 70% of their income on rent that is an investment in little more than the enrichment of real-estate barons like Donald Trump.
During a Crisis Era, the unsustainable tends to implode. The juxtaposition of economic plenty that prices people out of Silicon Valley and offers no prospects in places like Detroit that was the equivalent of Silicon Valley today in the 1920s is a gross imbalance. We need to revitalize places like Detroit and St. Louis if we are to have a prosperous society that doesn't simply funnel the bounty of technological miracles as easy money to people who did nothing to create the wealth that they enjoy now.
I see President Trump as thesis and antithesis, and almost the political equivalent of matter and antimatter. That is what one gets with a demagogue who promises everything to everyone without concerning himself with how he can make the logical contradictions meld harmoniously. Many Americans recognized what a disaster Trump would be and have since proved right. Many hoped that he would give them what they saw of his offering that they wanted without bringing about the harm possible.
Truth and falsehood are both possible as faith, but not together. Matter and antimatter cannot coexist; they destroy each other. I already see my prediction of Trump vindicated. I am still terribly unhappy. The fellow who drove away from the party after having had too many drinks and crashed his car into a tree, taking a couple of his buddies with him, might well have heeded my advice that he call a cab or call a reliable friend to pick him and his buddies up. Instead I get to attend the funeral.
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.