09-08-2018, 08:04 AM
(09-08-2018, 05:47 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-07-2018, 04:47 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Uniting principles have to broader than those of the blues/progressives these days. A simpleton red might follow an idea like small government as government continues to grow and become more powerful and less interested in serving of the interests of those who elected them like a blue simpleton might follow an idea like big government and helps it grow and become more powerful and eliminates a few long standing American rights that big government views as no longer being necessary or views as no longer being applicable to certain people or groups.
I tend to use the word 'base' rather than insults and demeaning descriptions like 'simpleton'. I respect the concepts behind both parties bases somewhat.
I do find the gun issue and the Second Amendment reverses certain trends. Generally, you would find progressives on the side of the arrow of progress and The Enlightenment rights. However, the blue base generally goes for gun prohibition, while it is the reds who are going with the old right. As long as the prohibitions are limited to felons and mentally incompetent, let them try prohibition, but prohibitions are notoriously difficult to enforce and enable the criminal element.[/i]
I would leave the sport hunters, target shooters, and the legitimate collectors alone. Someone who 'needs' a gun for protection (unless against bears) has a huge problem that needs a solution other than a gun. Defense against an abusive spouse? The gun could make the abusive spouse even more dangerous.
Quote:It is easy to see how the parties reversed on this issue. Weapons fit better in the rural environment, and police response time is longer as population density decreases. Hunting is more common in rural areas. The need to try something to ease gun violence in cities is distant from the more rural Republican base. This reverses the usual position of the progressives favoring equality and rights. It is also why I fence with Pbower and Eric on this issue. I am laying cause less with the reds than staying consistently progressive. The arrow of progress suggests a strengthening of the Right to own and carry weapons.
But not to lunatics, idiots, and criminals. Does anyone see a problem with a court order that mandates that an abusive spouse divest himself (herself?) of firearms? People would have to prove themselves trustworthy for owning guns. I am willing to accept that a hunting license creates an implicit right to bear arms.
Quote:I generally sympathize with the bases and consider many of their ideas good ones. However, when stereotypes are involved, I get doubtful. The blue include stereotypes of the red as rednecks, hillbillies and gun nuts. David Horn on this site and the book Hillbilly Eulogy both fish modern blue stereotypes. The red might reply with their stereotypes of the welfare mother, and people who exploit government handouts. All might have some truth, but I have met far more people than stereotypes.
"Redneck, hillbilly, peckerwood"... in All the King's Men, Willie Stark uses those words to describe what the elites (then d@mn-yankee Republicans) thought of poor Southern white people to remind such people that they so smear to get those Southern whites to vote for him.
We liberals need to expunge such words from our vocabulary just as we expunged (or our parents told us not to use) ethnic slurs. Cultural identity is even more real than 'race'. Appalachia may have different problems than do the ghettos, barrios, and "the Rez"... but poverty still stings in a culture that celebrates little more than wealth, institutional power, and hedonistic indulgence. If we want to believe that 'our' classical, folk, or jazz is somehow better than country, then let's leave that opinion where it belongs. J S Bach isn't for everyone.
Quote:I have problems when people too much vote their stereotypes. Voting for small government, low taxes and the Second Amendment is fine. Voting for a politician who promises these things but delivers support for the elites and the Swamp is less fine. Voting for a millionaire narcissistic liar?
When politics has identity as its focus, whether on a medieval or modern conception of life (Spain in the 1930s) or religious identity (Yugoslavia in the 1990s), the fabric of society easily unravels, especially if it was shoddy or became threadbare. Spain alternated between extremes until it got a clique that combined medieval attitudes of social organization with modern technology and got the culturally-barren, grossly-inequitable, politically-uniform regime of Francisco Franco for nearly forty years. The downfall of Marxist leader Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia left in its wake an unwholesome world of patronage and the pretension that ethnic and cultural divides did not exist -- only for people as ruthless as Tito to exploit those divides for their own power. We know what happened, and it is something not to be imitated here.
The people of Spain (which has somehow stuck together) and the former Yugoslavia (which did not) seemed to have learned their lessons. We Americans have yet to know what the peoples of both Spain and the former Yugoslavia know through harsh experience, and we can still avoid the monstrosity of a Franco or Tito here. But we already have people who would meld high technology with pre-modern social, religious, and political values. Who needs evolution or to study the fossil record when we have the Bible to explain all in the Genesis account and can explain why aquatic fossils exist at high mountain peaks because the Flood of Noah that lasted forty days and nights in which he circumnavigated the globe (which, by the way, is flat!) in less time than it took for Columbus to get from Spain to the New World.. deposited those fossils even at the summet of Mount Everest? After all, the world divides neatly into those who will enjoy Heavenly bliss and those who will suffer in Hell for having inadequate faith or the wrong faith.
End of snark. Somehow I like the conception that the good in Humanity will end up together and find out what God really wants for them and accept such as the result of their goodness, and that the likes of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Saddam Hussein will be out of sight and out of mind. I'm also tempted to believe that if there is a Hell, then the telescope will have its eyepieces in Hell so that the Nazis will get to see the delights denied them that their innocent victims get to enjoy forever. Misunderstanding God seems no more a sin to me than is failing to 'get' quantum dynamics.
Quote:Now, I don't see you (Classic X'er) as the base. I see you (Classic X'er) as an extremist and an oddity.
(09-07-2018, 04:47 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: As general rule, what's good for Ford Motors is good for the country considering the country is getting the bulk of the benefits as far as taxes and employment are concerned.
Since Reagan's time, profits from automation have been fed to the elites. The division of wealth has skyrocketed. There is a point to strong corporations. Right now though, balancing the division of wealth more could benefit the people.
We're going to have to tax the Hell out of automation if it leads to mass unemployment. Those who profit from capitalism need to pay for the defense of the system that makes them rich, and that means that they need to pay their fair share for both national defense and the defense of their world from the internal rot (poverty) that can bring the system down. We Americans solved the great economic meltdown of 1929-1932 in part by transforming unemployment into leisure. The current orthodoxy of transforming toil into property rents (basically, people get to pay more for the bounties of high technology and miracles of productivity to landlords like Donald Trump) is creating huge income for passive investors and poverty for far more.
OK, maybe I go too far in seeing Donald Trump as a scapegoat, maybe as much as people used to see Herbert Hoover. Flawed as Hoover was he had few of the egregious vices that Trump displays. Hoover got caught with economic assumptions that suddenly became void, and he was as inappropriately austere as Trump is excessively flamboyant.
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.