08-13-2020, 09:36 AM
(08-13-2020, 06:34 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-13-2020, 12:24 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(08-12-2020, 10:53 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(08-12-2020, 08:39 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: I keep saying that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) thugs are paranoid and desperate, and highly emotional, and highly delusional, and this article is a good example.
I would feel better if that description couldn't be applied to Trump as well. Such an attack would be fairly absurd, but Trump will be getting desperate. Preparing for such an attack is not totally absurd.
Plagues are bad times for initiating wars. They add new danger to war, already dangerous to soldiers.
I am not saying it would be wise or safe. I am saying Trump might be desperate to shake things up at that time. It would also make for a pretty good distraction to surface the possibility. I still suspect a lot of the CPP's apparent irrationality is an attempt to focus attention away from their role on COVUS early.
Dictators and wannabe dictators do bad things to people, and they ensure that when something goes wrong because they cut corners, other pay the price and get punished when they affix fault to the Great and Infallible Leader. Xi is undeniably a dictator that the system of CCP dominance ensures. Trump faces no such certainty and is more likely to get a term in prison or have to go into exile than to win a second term as President.
Xi had a more rational response to COVID-19 than did Donald Trump. Vile as the political system is in China is, ours over the last forty years seems largely to follow something close to what the late, reactionary oil billionaire said: "He who owns the gold makes the rules". The politician who goes along with that principle, basically a mirror-image Marxist who loves what Marx and his successors have all found abominable about capitalism and holds that above all human values has a far easier time getting elected than someone who would compromise such a principle.
That principle did lead to Donald Trump, but before that it led to political figures as pure in their support of a political order in which the untrammeled greed of 2% or so of Americans is the objective of us all no matter what the human consequences. 3% of Americans would fare quite well under any system, 5% know that they are doing sort-of-OK but are still being exploited badly, and the other 90% are nothing more than conduits of money between plutocrats who must work for the privilege.
We do not have a conflict between Marxism and mirror-image Marxism. Were it that simple, America's plutocratic elites would offer plenty of well-paid opportunities to brutalize honest-to-dialectic-materialism Commies and their sympathizers through official enforcers (government) and unofficial enforcers (like the KKK or neo-Nazis, if necessary) to do unofficial brutality that conveniently disposes of regime critics. It is now a struggle between Enlightenment values that existed before industrial capitalism and the fallen angels that well serve people who see no rightful constraints upon their gain and indulgence. For about forty years we have had typically five steps toward and one step away from a New Feudalism or a superficially American fascism (think of Classic X'er on some other threads) in which what is ostensibly American is acquiescence in something that most of us consider inexcusably vile. (As with fascists in other countries and times, the definition of what people are 'their' country narrows greatly until huge masses are pariahs get the privilege of living miserably if the fascist clique has yet to decide to exterminate them). I would suppose that a superficially-American fascism praises the tycoon, executive, and landlord and sees them as expressions of parts of America that no longer exist.
The system toward which we have been drifting requires that unless one is part of the elite, then the secret of happiness is stupidity, which well fits a slave. Life for people not rich is as a tool for people who consider the common man expendable. The elites treat the common man badly, inculcating fear at every turn and making sure that such bliss as anyone can enjoy is swift, ephemeral, expensive, and destructive. There are people whom I have seen go out for their breaks, step outside while in a company uniform, and take a drag on a coffin nail. Such is the sort of work that the elites would foist upon me.
I know the secret of happiness, and that is to accept that instead of a drug high, a drag on a cancerette, ten minutes of hard-core pornography, an episode of drunkenness, sex with a prostitute, the short-lived good feeling from impulse shopping, or the thrill of the prospect of one's dollar having a chance to pay back as some gigantic reward through gambling that one accept instead a delight that takes more time, knowledge, sophistication, and well-developed aesthetic values to enjoy... a book that cannot be read in a single setting, a trip to a first-rate museum or art gallery, a communion with Nature at its most wonderful, a drama that takes two hours to unfold on stage or screen and needs it, or (instead of the latest Top 40 hit nearly as expendable as toilet paper) an extended work of music that one admires for its cleverness.
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.
