09-04-2018, 02:42 PM
(09-04-2018, 01:47 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: Pbrower
You see the blue side as right, the red side is wrong, and everything you write if from that perspective. Part of me wants to join you. I see the progressive side as much closer to the future and what I anticipate we will need. When we finally get sick of the stalemate and start solving problems again, it will likely be the progressives that come out on top. I do lean blue.
Absolutely. Once progressives start solving some of the problems that we have, they will surely create some problems that the Right will seek to exploit or at least rectify. Not long ago the Left attributed criminal behavior largely to economic deprivation and social marginalization while the Right saw criminality as a consequence of bad character. The truth was that many very poor people still remained poor, yet did not become criminal predators despite experiencing much the same economic deprivation and social marginalization. Besides, serial killers like Gary Ridgway and John Gacy were anything but deprived and marginalized. Were the cause of crime deprivation and marginalization, then practically everyone who endured severe hardship would be a criminal. The evidence that the nastiest ghettos have some very good people is a paradoxical case that character is not the result of having good breaks.
Quote:But there are some who lean red, and some who lean extreme red, with equal intensity and sincerity.
I am satisfied that many Nazis and Stalinists believed sincerely what led them to do horrible things. I am also satisfied that plenty of American believed that the only good Indian was a dead Indian, and that slavery was beneficence toward the slaves. Sincere belief in an evil cause is tragic and pitiable, but it is still evil.
Quote:But I do recognize that neither party, culture or way of looking at things fits the whole country. When you look at things from the theoretical point of view, you have to accept that or you end up with projections that don’t fit, with prophecies that don’t come true. I acknowledge your point of view, but I also acknowledge the red and say with conviction that you don’t get it, don’t understand. I think your prophecies are way off, the product of a extremist mind.
Liberty must be the objective over social equity, economic gain, and support for my cultural values. This is a Crisis Era, and all sorts of things can happen, many of them consummately evil. We need only contemplate the last Crisis Era.
It is possible that we will end up with a new feudalism in which the masses have great responsibilities to elites and the common man is expendable if he falters. Maybe we will end up a happy people after society somehow culls out those who do not fit in through flight or death. Such is a possible result of Darwinian selection. Sadists as rulers and masochists as their subjects? That might work for a while, but that is a world in which I would be killed. To put it in the bluntest terms possible, nobody can be more free than the person who believes that death can solve all his problems. Consider those early Christian martyrs who heard the roars of Big Cats or the growls of bears... many believed that those monstrous predators would be their deliverance from a sordid world and a doomed body.
My prophecies are predictions based on what has happened elsewhere. This Crisis does not have the American Revolution as a model, as we are not under the thumb of a despotic king who has decided to micromanage things from his distant throne. This is not the American Civil War redux, as we do not have a debate on slavery. This is not the Great Depression as a replay; even if the Crash of 2008 started much like the Crash of 1929 after a year and a half, the political system backed the banks and started a recovery. World War II? Does anyone see a Hitler or a Tojo? I see Trump having much in common with Mussolini, but that is a Mussolini in the 1920s and not in the 1940s. The United States is not yet totalitarian -- just authoritarian -- and this authoritarian trend can be reversed with the New Birth of Freedom as Lincoln called for.
Spain in the 1920s or Yugoslavia in the 1990s? Either looks more relevant than any Crisis that I know in American history.Until this Crisis is largely decided at the least in style, such looks possible. But so is what Orwell saw as a possibility:
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/george_orwell_159438
Still possible here. Trump must go if America is to have any "new birth of freedom". January 20, 2021 might still be the optimum after his authority is gutted.
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.
