Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

(05-02-2019, 04:35 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: Since you somehow managed to break the tags PBR...

Quote:...and we end up with a political system that dies much as the Soviet Union did -- as a country with a brain drain that becomes technologically backward, in which crony capitalism makes the formation of small business nearly impossible. That sort of order has a proclivity for starting wars that it loses, as is so of most fascist regimes.

Except that isn't how the USSR was socially organized at all.  Moscow and Leningrad got everything they wanted, the rest of the country got nothing.  Furthermore crony capitalism arises not under laissez-faire but under strict regulation.  The rural population rather than the urban is more reluctant to let government bureaucrats regulate everything.  Finally the warrior class comes overwhelmingly from red and rural states  most of the people there prefer our traditional isolationism.

One difference is between state ownership in which bureaucratic elites took on aristocratic ways, and competition with economic behemoths was outlawed as 'capitalism', and crony capitalism changes the tax laws and regulatory environment to favor giant enterprises with monopoly or cartel power over any small businesses that would exploit the interstices of failure in crony capitalism. Another difference is that the Soviet military system itself became a bureaucratized order in which the senior military got to live extremely well while conscripted soldiers even faced food insecurity, which is how things were in the tsarist era.

As for the soldiers, many come from minority groups whose proletariat has no stake in crony capitalism. If you want to find the communities that most look like America as a whole in ethnic mixture, then look at towns near military bases -- and not such places as college towns. White soldiers come heavily from depressed areas with few opportunities (like farm labor, roadside services, maybe industrial sweatshops) The military has its attractions -- opportunity to get away from communities that one easily identifies as economic wrecks, continuing education and vocational training, the opportunity to see more of the world, and the discipline that a chaotic world does not offer. Add to this, the military is not a good place for those who seek to assert ethnic superiority (such is contrary to military discipline) or for people to do any political proselytizing.

Quote:Given you have gotten everything backwards I have to question if you actually thought about this or are just spouting some canned response someone gave you.  Given your propensity for the latter, it probably is the latter.

if it does not come from a book, it is my own thought.  If what I express sounds like some pundit to the Left of "Daddy" on economics and to his Right on foreign policy, then such is coincidence.

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Quote:Such will happen after I am dead.

Nope such would happen immediately after the Electoral College is abolished or effectively abolished.  We have been having a cold civil war for a number of years now, like the Cold War itself it can go hot at a moment's notice and for little provocation.

Major changes in the political system through Constitutional amendments are rare, happening either as subtle refinements or in the wake of catastrophe. Think of how long the abolition of slavery took and the circumstances under which slavery disappeared. Think of how long the time was between the first women started seeking the vote and women getting the vote. If we are ever to see a fundamental change in the political system, including the way in which we elect the President, then such will happen only in the wake of a catastrophe. Just because a parliamentary system seems to work better today in Canada than ours does now does not mean that we will go parliamentary. In a parliamentary system, members of the majority or the leading coalition in parliament select a Prime Minister and have every cause to select well. A parliamentary system has the vote of no confidence, which is easier and more effective than impeachment. The prospect of losing a parliamentary election is a good reason to vote out an incompetent or corrupt Prime Minister.

So why do we not have a parliamentary system? Because the one parliamentary system that our Founding Fathers knew well was grossly inadequate because it was unrepresentative (full of the King's flunkies) due to what passed as an electoral process. We have a census to establish representative districts that honor state boundaries and generally fit proportions of the population. (OK, it is not perfect due to gerrymandering which reflects political hacks in the states, and on the margin between two states of similar population, one state [Montana] may have one representative and another [Rhode Island] may have two. Montana is likely to end up with two Congressional Representatives and Rhode Island with one after the 2020 Census, but that is a side story).

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Quote:Trump's approval ratings are remarkably stable. Styx is saying things that are technically possible, but unlikely.

Styx's track record is far far better than yours or for that matter Nate Silver's.  But then again he's not a paid shill for anyone.  He's a rather smart citizen merely speaking his mind--or as the left calls them these days a "conspiracy theorist".

Anyone who believed that Donald Trump would be elected President was betting on a long-shot. Long-shots occasionally win horse races, which makes horse racing attractive to people who attend it so that they can wager on which Equus caballus and jockey riding it will win. Add to this, Trump broke many of the unwritten rules of normal politics and got away with things that no prior elected President got away with. In 2020 people will vote on whether they like the results -- and the personality -- of a reckless demagogue who has used the Presidency to force a political culture upon people who still think his style and agenda alien.

So you bet $50 on a 200-1 long-shot and your horse won. Congratulations! You now have $10K net of the income taxes and any costly celebrating that you did. Unless you know something about the horse that the handicappers don't.. well, some people apparently make a precarious living betting on 'bargains' -- long-shots that have 40-1 chances instead of 200-1 chances.

I didn't see it coming -- but Trump won by debasing American politics into something objectionable and loathsome. People accustomed to better often decided not to vote or somehow forgot to vote. America ended up with the worst federal leadership that it had had in a long time. The people still committed to vote included the people who liked Trump's style and agenda, and the people intent on establishing a pure plutocracy got to prevent losses in the House and Senate.

Every country that is not 'socialist' has some clique that believes that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as that clique gets what it wants (gain, indulgence, and power) -- and that clique got the sort of legislature of its dreams while Donald Trump would govern as befits his class interests. The problem isn't that I use a Marxist model to fit Trump; the problem is that a Marxist model fits him as well as the uniquely-American practice of government by corporate lobbyist. Remember: a nominally free-market system is preferable to Marxism-Leninism to the extent that the social and economic order does not fit a Marxist stereotype. Farm laborers on the brink of starvation in an area of rich harvests have no stake in preserving the aristocratic agrarian elite, and toilers in sweatshops whose owners and managers resemble Henry Clay Frick have little stake in the authoritarian, inequitable capitalism that they know. Capitalism saved itself from proletarian revolutions by giving workers a stake in the system, at least where the capitalists acted upon such wisdom.

A good system either makes a clique of economic sadists irrelevant -- or a bad one puts itself at risk of a proletarian revolution. I see Marxism-Leninism as a special case relevant under circumstances best avoided through democracy and humanism.

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Quote:The three emperors that I showed were Nero, Caligula, and Commodus, prime examples of what is potentially dangerous about an Emperor who pays too much attention to his claims to divinity.

The left can't and doesn't meme.  Boomers that are leftists--like you are--are particularly poor at meme-ing or understanding memes.  And given the Memetic nature of the internet, which is the main form of communication these days they will continue to lose until they start learning how to produce and distribute good memes.  But that is unlikely...the left likes central planning too much and memes are by their nature free market because forced memes never ever go viral.

That is probably why the left is calling for political correctness and censorship most strongly on the largest current social media platforms.  Ultimately this will destroy those platforms and they will be replaced.  Minds is already bigger than Twitter and Gab will replace Facebook.

Did I say that I trust memes? OK, maybe I lack the imagination with which to create them, or perhaps I create them without knowing that I do so (or do so independently of someone else). Memes are intended to be accepted without being understood, which makes them suspect.

Central planning? Did I say that I think it a good idea? It is a failure because it substitutes bureaucracy for a market. A market ensures that people do not raise pigs to be fed to other pigs so that people can get pork. A market can make sense of such basic reality as the second law of thermodynamics as a bureaucracy might not.

I fault you for failure to criticize stock phrases such as the ludicrous "Make America Great Again". Maybe life was easier at some time, especially when the population was smaller and a workingman might be able to afford a single-family house even in San Francisco. But the ease of a world of short commutes and cheap real estate is no more. We are not going back to that.

You identify as black and gay. Some people think that America was better when Southern blacks were consigned to farm labor and domestic service on behalf of an elite that had the ethos of European aristocrats. Surely you don't miss that. As a gay man you probably remember when homosexuality was criminal conduct, and people outed as gay such as Alan Turing and Peter Tchaikovsky committed suicide or quasi-suicide  when they were exposed. Heck, as a straight male I remember being threatened with a beating for being a f****t for not exuding exaggerated masculinity (an aside -- in those days, I thought that exaggerated masculinity looked like one possible expression of homosexuality). That's when I started supporting gay rights; given a choice between law and order and homophobia I chose law and order. That's right -- I used a conservative attitude to defend a major change in American political and family culture. Nobody chooses homosexuality, but people can choose to not beat others up.

Make America Great Again? Now that is one of the most specious memes that I can imagine. I remember seeing film clips of fascist Italy in which banners read "Restore the glory of the Roman Empire"... sure. Gladiatorial games and feeding Christians to the lions? Mussolini might not have brought back the obscene spectacles that the ancient Romans actually saw as examples of civic virtue (don't ask!) but he did churn out legions of cannon fodder for aggressive warfare that culminated in the most impressive conquests of Rome ever:






The Sawdust Caesar loses his capital to troops under the nominal leadership of a cripple. So much for restoring the glory of the Roman Empire.

Memes are great for conveying simple ideas, as in advertising slogans. You know those -- "Like a good neighbor, (insurance company) is there!", "You deserve a break today!", "It's the real thing (soft drink)", "Fly the friendly skies of (airline)"... "Packard -- ask the man who owns one", or "Rheingold is my beer, the dry beer!" Or maybe public service, as in "Only you can prevent forest fires", "Don't be a litterbug!" or "Just say NO to drugs!"  They are great also for pushing bad political causes, as in "Sieg heil!", "White Power!", "Put THEM in their place!", "God hates f@gs", "Let a hundred flowers bloom!", or "Smash the running dogs of capitalist imperialism!"

The commercial slogans are benign because they involve consumer choices in a confusing world of brand competition, and anyone who lets one of those slogans pick one over the other is going to get fleeced one way or another. Buying something or avoiding trouble by avoiding a menace is usually not a bad choice. The realities of political life rarely reduce to a three-word stock phrase without debasing politics.

Good politics requires complex thought.

We hold these words to be self-evident... that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

is much wordier than the usual stock phrase of the would-be tyrant. It is also more complete -- and honest. Far better the complete thought than a meme.