Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[pbrower2a]

(02-21-2019, 02:16 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(02-20-2019, 03:30 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(02-20-2019, 01:00 AM)Classic-Xer 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.

Having spent my adulthood in the minority political sphere, I know it's hard to accept the fact that your view of things isn't being appreciated.  I'm sad to say that you may be emerging into that world right now.  Since everything runs in multi-decadal cycles, your time in the spotlight is probably over … or nearly so.  How you deal with that is entirely up to you.

And btw, no one is advocating for sloth and pandering.  You can pretend if you wish, but it's not so.

So, I/we should ignore and dismiss or pretend we haven't seen what Ocasio-Cortez officially released as being included in the Green New Deal. You better speak to her about the Green New Deal its going to reward sloth. Now, I don't know how important she is to the higher ups. Oh that's right, she's already been promoted to a higher up which means she must be viewed as important to the high ups. The new liberal system is so strange compared to the old liberal seniority system. I guess a young fresh pretty new face is more important than time and learning through experience these days. If I seem critical that's because I can be just as critical as the liberals. I can be critical and can be more critical and can be even more critical and be more critical than that too. You've seen me at my least critical level and at my more critical level. I've spent my adulthood in the majority political sphere voting on central issues that pertain to me and most people. Yes, my spotlight will eventually fade and go out. Nothing lasts forever.

The problem is that our society seems to already reward being rich and powerful and making all else meaningless. We live in about as pure a plutocracy as is possible. It demands work but pays it less than it used to even though the economy has become more productive.

The paradigm of recent years has become tired and dreary. The new economic order will be about experience and not about filling lives with more consumer schlock -- especially if the consumer schlock comes with a hefty price tag of debt that people cannot pay easily.

You claim to be in the political minority, yet you have been in the effective majority in American politics in the times of both the Contract for America and the Tea Party, both of which did well in entrenching the power of America's elites of ownership and upper management. Those elites have been successful in exploiting resentments about demographic and cultural change on behalf of their own enrichment, power, and indulgence. Those elites want no independent and prosperous middle class, and they want to abandon the consumer economy so hat those elites can live in the sort of splendor that one associates with sultans while most Americans become poor no matter how productive they may be.  You fail to recognize that you could be a victim of the desire of elites to ensure that America neatly divides between wealthy predators and impoverished prey. Those elites want you to be another serf or peon. They want a nation of debt-bonded toilers, a modern equivalent of sharecroppers in the presence of an elite that lives incredibly well. I spend a couple years in Arkansas around 1970, and I saw that -- it was ugly.

I can say of their dream that I will hate life itself. I will take no delight in the ostentatious display of wealth and privilege, much of it offensive and even destructive, by people who make my life miserable. Little could be more meaningless. We are entering a post-industrial world, and its potential had better improve our lives. We are in the latter stages of a 4T, which could include a final, destructive denouement that has yet to begin but could be over in a few short years. After that we will enter another High in which the culture has become omnibus in nature, in which widespread prosperity is the norm, inequality of the lord-and-peon sort is an abomination, and opportunity for people rising in the ranks is an expectation. It will look much like the 1950s, with more homogenization of economic results. The extreme partisanship of recent years will implode as America become less tribal in its politics. Remember: organizations with generous funding from America's economic elites (FreedomWorks!, Club for Growth, Citizens United, and Americans for Prosperity) have fostered such tribal politics in support of divide et impera, and Donald Trump has tried to make that ugly trend mainstream. It is failing -- and flailing.

I remember hearing elderly Polish-Americans and Italian-Americans recalling their childhood poverty before the Second World War but who had made their way into the American middle class without having to deny their origins. They spoke with no longing for the good old days. To paraphrase an ad slogan, I have been around long enough to see a few things -- and then some. I listened to the elderly of the 1960s and 1970s... I know things that many young people do not know. I am one of those elephants with a long memory, and I know where to look when my information runs out for the time.

You need to be critical of people of unrestrained greed and whose economics are sadism. You need pay attention to the critiques of bureaucratic and economic power. Our economic elites are on the same moral plane as medieval lords, slave-owning planters, the economic masters of Germany who bankrolled Antichrist Hitler into power in Germany and supported the militaristic expansion of Japan, and the nomenklatura of Commie states. Of the latter, they could exploit people, contrary to Marxist theory, as badly as any aristocracy despite owning little but the proceeds of their administrative positions. America's elites have played salami tactics upon us Americans long enough in politics -- and we are getting wise.