08-12-2018, 01:59 PM
(08-12-2018, 11:14 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote:(08-11-2018, 08:33 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > I can't see what you find so marvelous about Donald Trump. Is it
> that he seems charmed, able to get away with things that others
> wouldn't dream of getting away with? Mobster John Gotti was like
> that for some years.
(08-12-2018, 05:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: > I have frequently compared Trump to Chavez for demagoguery and for
> contempt for nearly half the American population for holding ideas
> contrary to his. Both the late Hugo Chavez and the very-much-alive
> Donald Trump have been treating opposition as scapegoats.
It's not just Trump you that you hate. You also feel the same way
about the 60 million people who voted for Trump. For you, all 60
million people are in Hillary Clinton's "basket of deplorables --
racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it."
So your claim that your attitude is about Trump is, as far as I'm
concerned, a lie. What does it say about you that you feel morally
superior to 60 million people, when you obviously aren't?
Yes, I loathe President Trump. The 60 million who voted for him? Everybody is capable of serious misjudgments. Trump exploited some blind spots in people's minds. There's plenty about which Americans can be uncomfortable, like seeing what looks like their greater competence and effort -- including more hours at work if they must take second jobs to get by -- and figuring that if that is all so, they need a huge change.
So what is it? Food is not getting more expensive unless people insist upon 'organic' food. Electronic stuff has become less expensive in the sense of more bang for the buck; heck, if one were to bring a small Android ® device by time machine back to NASA in the 1960s, NASA would have been delighted. Motor fuels have basically kept up with inflation, as has all but one thing not-high-tech. Property rent? There it is!
I look at the map, and I notice that Donald Trump -- who above all else is a landlord -- is highly unpopular in those urban areas (including in such cities as Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Miami, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta, New Orleans, Cleveland, Columbus, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio) in states that voted for Trump where the rents are insanely high or the housing stock is awful -- or both. If you own your own home, Donald Trump is just another capitalist. If you are a renter, your favorite capitalists (if you aren't a full-blown Commie) are not landlords. You probably see your landlord fleecing cash cows -- like you. That makes a huge difference.
People can admire capitalists and executives who provide innovative products or find ways to make things available less expensively. Maybe they can admire Bill Gates, Lee iacocca, Elon Musk, T. Boone Pickens, or (in the past) Sam Walton, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Milton Hershey, the Kellogg brothers, etc. Donald Trump is not an innovator; he is simply a gouger. They do not admire easy money, especially when it is associated with something that rhymes with "mass coal".
Donald Trump has said that he loves the slightly-educated because they vote for him. That says much about his appeal. He has won the gullible voter, the fellow to whom he seems like a normal person because of his vulgarity, the sort of vulgarity that one rarely sees in people who have college degrees. His style is that of the prole who won the Super-Duper Megabucks lottery, something that anyone who did well enough to get into a first-rate college or university does not buy into. The problem with Donald Trump is that he is a ruthless, cruel, rapacious, and selfish character -- and that his type invariably gives the shaft to the Common Man when he gets a chance. He is doing exactly that.
Quote:This has been going on for years. Several times in the last ten years
I quoted main Obama union supporter James Hoffa as calling for war
against the Tea Party and other political opponents of Labor
organizations, saying: "We are ready to march. Let’s take these sons
of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong."
Regrettable, over-the-top language. But this said, Donald Trump really is harmful to children and other living things.
Quote:The mainstream media frequently and openly referred to Tea Partiers as
"teabaggers," which is just as vile and racist as the n-word.
They are now largely Trump supporters if they haven't come to the conclusion (too late for November 2016) that Donald Trump is a horrible person and that his economic policies are going to do great harm even to people who usually vote Republican out of a primary concern for taxes. I'm thinking of farmers and ranchers who ordinarily see themselves as cash cows for taxing authorities, whether federal, state, or local. When the trade war cuts their income, all the tax cuts in the world won't be worth the loss of income and raised costs of vehicle repairs to their electronic devices. The word "teabagger"? We don't need it anymore. The silly hats and the appropriateion of the Gadsden flag? No longer relevant.
.
Quote:So you should look to yourself before you blame others. You're just
as bad as the KKK, and in fact you use many of the same words. They
target the blacks, and you target the 60 million Tea Partiers and
Trump supporters. Other than that, you and your people are no
different than the KKK. The same hate speech. The same violence and
incitement to violence. The same delusional world views. The same
sense of moral superiority to people many of whom are obviously
morally superior to you. You and the KKK are almost identical.
The KKK? Hate speech? Ludicrous! I have learned to modulate my language when I see someone with a Trump sticker. I saw someone with an obvious farm vehicle one day and expressed my concern that Donald Trump's trade war would hurt farmers like him. To avoid a repeat of the political disasters of 2010, 2014, and 2016 (and it is my prerogative to see those as disasters) it is up to us liberals to make it as easy as possible for people who voted for "tea bag" pols in 2010 and 2014 and for Trump in 2016 to change their minds. People going to Trump rallies who hold up a middle finger and shout "F--- CNN!" are probably beyond reach. But those rallies are shrinking. Rallies like that were commonplace in Cuba under Fidel Castro, and they kept getting the large crowds. Sure -- the government was trucking school children to those rallies. Our Fidel cannot do that.
By the way -- Obama didn't hold those rallies when he had bigger concerns than having garish shows of his popularity among his base. Trump is the first American President to do this, and if we are fortunate he will be the only one to do so.
Quote:For more information on my views on American xenophobia, see the
article I wrote about in 2010, long before Trump ran for president:
** American xenophobia on the Left and on the Right
** http://www.generationaldynamics.com/pg/x...tm#e101107
Relevant then, but not now. Donald Trump has changed everything in American political life except demographics and the consequences of his policies. I predicted that he would be a catastrophic failure as President because he had done nothing to prepare himself for the unwritten responsibilities of the Presidency. His experience in business had little relevance to the Presidency. A software magnate or an oilman instead might be better for understanding some aspects of American life that someone who can operate with a rigid model of business as does Trump. Trump knew nothing about law, diplomacy, or military life, and he lacked the flexibility to understand them as does a President like Lincoln, FDR, or even Obama who has the intellectual flexibility to understand something outside his experience.
Donald Trump was excellent at riling angry and desperate people. They remain riled, and they can turn on him. He rides a tiger. He cannot escape the consequences of political failure and demographics that disfavor his pet constituency. The only positive that I see for him is that he has gotten the support, at least for a time, of the super-rich tycoons such as the Koch family. Whoops! They now see him as a Frankenstein monster.
Now for the generational aspect -- Donald Trump is a Boomer. Boomer elites are infamous for arrogance, selfishness, and ruthlessness. The worst of them fit the pattern of Southern slaveholders especially of the Transcendental generation, the sorts of people who insisted that they be seen as benefactors to the slaves that they exploited so severely. The worst also seem to resemble those educated people, mostly of the Missionary generation, who fell for the fad of eugenics and claimed that harsh measures would be good for the 'failed' peoples who would be cleansed of their deficiencies through some 1920s-era version of tough love.
So what is the connection between Transcendental, Missionary, and Boom elites? They lack a trait that Idealist non-elites get: humility. Most of the Boomer elite has not come up from poverty or even the middle class. Non-elites have had to develop the "suffer greatly, but always be sure to show that big, theatrical Happy to Serve You! smile" that one sees among restaurant help, convenience-store clerks, and hotel or motel staff who live in dire poverty or who see their work as a stepping stone to something better after they graduate from college and professional schools -- or skilled work or even factory work where one has no obligation to show such. Humility is not a way to fun; it is a survival skill for any subordinate. Boomers who have known any economic hardship cannot get away with being as arrogant as Donald Trump, in part because Boomers have generally not had the chance to rise in the environment of low and rigid glass ceilings that infest Corporate America.
I am sure that you will recognize that the Silent who were good at many things were very poor at starting businesses from scratch. New Silent businesses were typically professional practices with limited potential for institutional growth. The biggest 'job creators' that I notice among the Silent were the late Mike Illich (Little Caesar's Pizza) and the late Dave Thomas (Wendy's). Just what everyone with a college degree wants, right? A job in a fast-food place. Then there are T. Boone Pickens (oil), Ross Perot (government contracting, largely because federal and state governments have antiquated computers), Warren Buffett (buy-and-hold investment), Carl Icahn (insider trading), and John Gotti (organized crime).
The big early investors in the electronic industry when it was largely office equipment were GI or even Lost entrepreneurs. As the GI generation was fading out of economic life, the late wave of Boomers were going in, and the Silent businessmen not operating professional practices were mostly small-scale restaurateurs who were largely foreign-born business owners who got their help from within their families. Boomer elites were able to decide that anyone who ever experienced a hardship would not qualify for membership in the elites. If that wasted talent -- at least it means that one gets good help and ensures that competition is at bay.
When the Crisis Era gets deadly serious, then all those sleazy realities come to an end, whether because wise people make them impossible to continue or because those sleazy realities cause the System to collapse. A man whose initials are D as in Deplorable, J as in Judas, and T as in Tyrant is just the person to make this system fail. Yes, I hate him and his closest associates almost as much as I hate a mobster. The legal system that can take down John Gotti is doing much the same to Donald Trump. We have yet to see the result -- and that could be the focus of this Crisis of 2020.
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.
