02-20-2019, 04:04 AM
(02-20-2019, 01:00 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(02-19-2019, 05:14 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:Yep. You might as well get used to the idea of Bowling Alone and paying your own way because America is in the process of further separating right now. You want to live your life sitting on a couch, smoking pot and being paid for nothing then you move to a blue area where living that way is viewed as acceptable as long as you vote Democratic.(02-19-2019, 10:44 AM)David Horn Wrote:(02-18-2019, 11:04 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: (to Classic-Xer) I wish you were a bit sharper; you might realize that being more concerned with white people and white males in particular, just because you are white and male, is a narrow-minded attitude and best, and a racist attitude at worst. A truly sharp person would realize that all humans have the same rights and deserve the same basic needs met. That is something that any sharp person would care about, because rights denied anywhere is rights denied everywhere, and rights denied to anyone is rights denied to you and me too.
Well said. This is actually a defining issue of our times. Of all people, David Brooks, conservative columnist for the NY Times, made that case in detail, and fretted about the 60 years we have spent dividing everyone into separate camps or, worse, into single units. We're all human and have the need for the same things, including the understanding and support of our fellow humans. There's no future in Bowling Alone.
Yup.
America has grown as far apart as it can in part because the people who now dominate the political debate believe that survival is a privilege to be earned by the masses through their suffering for the elites who have unbridled appetites for aristocratic indulgence. People are catching on, and it is only a matter of time before enough people lose all faith in the economic order that they reject that plutocratic ethos.
It is easier to exploit an atomized people, as shown in Pinochet's Chile, where the only people with any right to organize were the well-heeled interests who got a world made for themselves alone. Commie methods of repression and propaganda served to enforce plutocracy. When I was in college I met people from there, and they told me that it was even worse than American media said. It was as awful as Soviet-style Communism, except that the regime
kept impressing upon the common man that he was nothing more than a machine of meat, differing only from livestock in that cannibalism is abhorrent.
Trump's core constituencies are either people who resemble the exploitative elites of the past in other countries -- or dumb-or-numb white people.
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.