10-08-2020, 10:52 AM
(10-08-2020, 12:33 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: I listen by reading what you say and directly responding to what you say and so forth. You should be able to figure that out vs accusing me of not listening. You're problem isn't me not listening. Your problem IS me listening and directly responding to you. If you don't take racial xenophobia serious as you say then why are you committed to using it so much these days. I understand that racism still has value on the Democratic side. I'd say it's pretty hard to deny it at this point. But, you can sugar coat it if you want It's not a matter of me not listening.
You are the person of ideological rigidity. I recognize tests of reality other than "I like it" and "I don't like it".
Major change is always uncomfortable at the beginning. The familiar and conventional usually offer some measure of safety, convenience, and ease. What does not change is basic reality, whatever that is. It is up to those who offer or impose change to demonstrate that such is desirable, necessary, or unavoidable. Challenges to old moral standards are valid only when one moral value conflicts with an old construct. For a very long time homosexuality seemed to be a great abomination to the mainstream almost everywhere. In my case I was able to accept homosexuality as tolerable behavior when I realized that suppression of homosexuality and violence against homosexuals (real or imagined) were inconsistent with liberty, equity, and law and order. I didn't need to like homosexuality to recognize such; I came to recognize that harsh treatment of gays, especially violent attacks, were themselves abominable and even dangerous. Any man can be gay-bashed. I need not understand why some men can love only men and why some women can love only women, but I recognize love as a virtue. At this I am hardly alone.
Sometimes what we have is morally objectionable. So it was with slavery and with the subjection of women. So it was with Jim Crow and Apartheid. Some once-revolutionary changes prove more destructive and in human than what the revolution overthrew (I think of Stalinism and its descendants) or the system that the revolution brought forth ossifies into something itself exploitative, repressive, and dehumanizing. One elite supplanting another elite and becoming as hideous (or even worse) as what it replaced? That is one of the most common themes in history. Every exploitative elite that has ever come into existence has inevitably posed as the only people competent enough to determine the law and administer assets and opportunity, then concluding that its exploitation and command-and-control is all that prevents a descent into the abyss.
...Tests of truth exist. The most obvious is objective reality that has nothing to do with personal desires. If one is a quadriplegic, then that one wants to dance has no bearing on whether one can. There are many things that I would like to see and do, yet those are out of reach because I am nearly broke. I can imagine what better things I could have done with my life if I had my youth back and got to do much over... except that such simply isn't possible. Time travel, faster-than-light travel, violations of the laws of thermodynamics, selective gravitation, and people coming back from the dead would make much that we know absurd.
Quote:To you, I cluck like a chicken because that's all you can see and go by in this cozy blue environment. In real life, you'd have all kinds of other stuff pertaining to me, You'd have my personality, my wits, my knowledge, my age, my experience and my style which I'm able to adjust that you'd have to contend with that you don't have to contend with here. To me, you tend to squawk like a Liberal and tend to accuse like a Liberal but you do show that you have more sense and a better understanding of Americans than the others at times.
I can't speak for Bob, but I can speak for myself. I have had some personal loyalties that have nearly wrecked my life. I took care of parents with degenerative ailments -- Parkinsonism and vascular deterioration. I am definitely not in a cozy "blue" environment; I am in a hick town in which about all that is available as outlets are mass culture designed for morons, church, civic organizations, and fraternal lodges. If one lives in the community in which I live and do not escape it, then one lives in a Wal*Mart culture. I am stuck, and I have been in a situation in which I have occasionally thought suicide an option. Small-town life can be rich in its complexity, but that depends upon denying oneself all else. Worst of all is that our elites expect me to believe that their exploitation and degradation of my life is some laudable benevolence.
Maybe it is easy for me to see Donald Trump as an expression of all that is wrong with American life. I am hardly alone. He will be an easy scapegoat. When he is gone we will need to restructure America so that people don't have to go to the Acela Corridor or the high-tech paradises to find acceptable lives in which people who do the work can live comfortably. We will need to break the monopolies and trusts that dominate the economy. We will need to change the tax laws to give more of a break to small business. We will need to extend education by a couple years so that people will be able to make better decisions in life. We will need to reform the police so that they not be so trigger-happy around black and brown people.
More of us will need to create our own prosperity, so that means that we will need to rely more upon small business and less on corporate behemoths with their bureaucratic bloat. The change will be worth it.
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.