07-14-2020, 02:03 PM
(07-13-2020, 11:46 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-12-2020, 08:34 PM)User3451 Wrote:(07-11-2020, 11:59 AM)TnT Wrote:(07-11-2020, 06:48 AM)David Horn Wrote: This is certainly true. Actions will determine the result. To be honest, Trump is a potential GC. Neither of us appreciate the change he wants to create, but he's all change, that's for sure.
If the Trumpists prevail, the 1T "consensus" could indeed be authoritarianism.
Au contraire, I think we'll see authoritarianism from the "left"
Trump is done. The extremists on the other side are taking over
The extremists on the left have never been very effective at doing anything other than gaining attention. Unless your idea of extreme is anything to the left of the pre-Nixon era, which is almost a given. FWIW, I don't see a lot of that as extreme at all. After 40 years of retrenchment, with the last 4 years being truly extreme on the right, real change is needed ... even demanded.
Big, meaningful change is possible without destroying capitalism and free markets. If anything, if one really did smash an elite that had adopted feudal means of command and control, one would need to replace the authoritarian economy with something as close as possible to a free-market order. It would be necessary to unleash small business (which exists in restrained interstices of a monopolistic society) to thrive in the wreckage of defunct behemoths.
Marxism (and especially Marxism-Leninism) is of course an infamous, catastrophic failure both at bringing any real democracy and at giving a jump start to economic development. We don't need a body count except to fend off despots, and we will blame the despots for the body count. We don't need mass killings of 'enemies of the people', 'wreckers', and 'running dogs of the imperialists', either. We need no images of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, etc., to 'inspire' us. Marxism-Leninism failed because it had no use for the checks and balances of legal precedent for administration, free and competitive elections to ensure that the political bosses are responsible, or a market to decide what succeeds and what fails. Central planning looks good on the surface, but in the end it churns out stuff that nobody wants because it is made on the cheap (and thus shoddy) or after it has become hideously obsolete. Marxism-Leninism establishes the dictatorship of the proletariat, itself a contradiction because any prole who becomes a leader or otherwise does something remarkable is no longer a prole... and because an administrative elite that faces no consequences for failure except for inadequate loyalty to the regime can become just as rapacious and demanding as plutocrats and aristocrats. Marxists promised the classless society because nobody owns the means of production -- but ignored the capacity of bureaucrats and political hacks to take whatever they want so long as nobody is able to say "no", let alone "Hell, no!" to them.
Quote:When serious journalists start comparing the current meat and poultry industry to the one depicted by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, you know major fixes need to happen and fast.
As is typical of a society in a 3T (or trying to resume a 3T), we have been doing many things on the cheap -- of course at the expense of workers, renters, environmental protection, and of course climate. When profit is the only virtue that the economic and political elites recognize, all else goes sour.
At one point we had epidemics of COVID-19 in the meat and poultry industry because the packing houses have had crowded workplaces in which workers are obliged to sacrifice their personal hygiene for maximal profit through minimal cost. Early this year, pork was about as cheap as vegetables... that is over.
We are seeing the consequences of profits over all else... one of those is vulnerability to a pandemic.
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.