11-21-2019, 02:31 AM
(11-20-2019, 08:09 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-20-2019, 03:12 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:(11-14-2019, 04:54 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-14-2019, 03:45 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: Obama was an oddball - first, he's from Hawaii, the most un-typical US state among the 50, and second, he spent a good part of his childhood in Indonesia. And if you insisst that he's part of the US cycle, his empty talk of Hope and Change™ is very Boomer-like.
Without such talk, we stay mired in cynicism typical of Gen X and go nowhere at all. Where there is no vision, the people perish.
You want a vision? What about survival? Both Global Warming and Islamism/overpopulation of MENA threaten us. Not to mention other big problems. If we don't survive, neither will your religion and spiritualism. Also, no arts and sciences.
Vision's your thing, survival's ours - the Nomads'. So if anyone should be in charge, it's us. People like you have achieved nothing in more than 50 years. You have written many stupid sentences, read many stupid sentences, and esp. tawked many stupid sentences. Go to the garbage heap of history.
Another way to look at this. Survival. Global warming. What is the reason for this problem? What is keeping the solution from happening? What is threatening our survival?
Ideas that people have.
The ideology of free market economics aka neo-liberalism militates against any government or business action on the problem. To prevent this action, the fossil fuel companies and right-wing foundations and pressure groups subsidize a campaign of denial of the scientific facts about global warming. Motivated by desire for lower taxes and less regulation, deniers have convinced 40% of the people that nothing needs to be done about global warming, that it is caused by the Sun, that "climate change has always happened" and that "it's a natural cycle." This convinces some business concerns as well as right-wing voters and their politicians, which are over 40% of them, that global warming does not threaten our survival, and that we can continue using fossil fuels and using our same current agricultural and tree-cutting practices as long as we want, and that changing all this will threaten our economy and raise our taxes, and so on.
Neo-liberal free-market fundamentalism needs to be debunked. It's a question of ideas being in the way of reality. Vision in this case means learning to see straight. That's what it often means, as in the case of the videos about scientism I posted. Same thing. Assumed mythology gets in the way of our seeing straight. Did you watch the videos?
The neo-liberalism that you abhor serves people that many call "mirror-image Marxists", the people who see a Marxist critique of capitalist behavior and endorse such, ignoring that such behavior is monstrous. A social order with no vision higher than profit maximization reduces workers to serfs. In effect the common man exists solely to enrich, pamper, and obey the economic elites who have no responsibilities except to themselves.
Such an ideology plunders resources for quick profit, debases the lives of people not in the elite, and even promotes war for profit. I can easily see such an ideology marking the divide in which capitalists transmute from what Arnold Toynbee calls a creative elite that establishes a prosperity from which all have solid chances at solid lives to a dominant elite that profiteers off mass suffering.
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.