11-04-2021, 03:42 AM
(11-03-2021, 10:05 AM)David Horn Wrote:(11-02-2021, 12:21 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(11-02-2021, 10:26 AM)David Horn Wrote:(11-02-2021, 04:17 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Wow, only 72% of USA Americans have even received one dose. And people wonder why the pandemic continues?
This fits with a prior comment I made on another thread. Dems need to quit wimping out and put vaccine mandates in place that have real teeth, then enforce them to the letter. There will be howls until they actually work, then the howlers will either shut-up or move on to another whine. Being weak is a guarantee of failiure, and the Dems have had failure imprinted on their DNA for decades. Time to grow a spine!
Yes indeed. DeBlazio is showing spine on this, although not so much on some other things.
It may be that Dems are simply incapable of being authoritarian enough when needed to prevent disasters, allowing the Reps to run the board. It's a large part of my contention that the 4T won't be successful, making the next 2T into a barnburner. It's not my preference, but it seems to be how the game is going.
We are timed for a Crisis Era, but we as a nation have yet to unite for any great purpose. We aren't even handling COVID-19 well, So it's not a one-time bolt from the blue like the Pearl Harbor attack or 9/11? It has taken its sour time in which to kill about 750,000 people in America (at least what comes from an official count). As is my want I try to contrast such a statistic of mass death to something to which we can all relate. Let's start with cities: the death toll is higher than the population of America's 18th-largest city, Seattle. Yikes! It is a larger total than the third-smallest state in population (Alaska) and not far short of the population of the fourth-smallest (North Dakota). It is larger than the total of all counts of US military deaths of all US wars combined except for the Civil War. It's hard to know whether any particular occupational group has been ravaged to a greater degree than others, but that could explain some of the problems with the supply chain (especially if the people dying of COVID-19 should heavily be truck drivers or warehouse workers). As for comparisons to Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed the death totals from those Dates of Infamy several days.
We all know that America is severely polarized in political life. America splits almost evenly between two sides that have little in common in politics. One side expects the other to either give in and give up every point of disagreement and move in lockstep or become irrelevant. We have had one of the most shameful events in American political history, and half of the public sees nothing shameful or ominous about it.
A near-majority of Americans voted in someone so awful as Donald Trump in 2016, and even more people voted for him in 2020. I occasionally see banners that read F-- BIDEN. I can't see how people on the Other Side can fail to recognize that Donald Trump was a moral travesty, that his pussy-footing with dictators could only go badly, and that his handling of COVID-19 is anything other than a disgrace. I can understand people differing with me on taxes, welfare, guns, regulations, abortion rights, LGBT rights, labor-management relations, and educational content because I am accustomed to seeing that. I can't understand the Other Side wanting America to fail so that Americans give up their civil and political rights so that we can have some greater prosperity and stumble along in an effort to recreate a 'lost' America.
OK.... rational thought is useful. It solves more problems than it creates. Freedom is a good idea, and that includes the freedom to be outside the political mainstream. People in China and Iran are perfectly free to align themselves with the political mainstream that the regimes define as permissible. Anything else is not permissible, and that alone explains how neither China nor Iran is a democracy. It would be better if we had a stronger civil society, which means that we would rely more heavily upon civic life -- religious services, lodges, and service clubs -- instead of numbing ourselves by watching sporting events in (name of restaurant chain excised) while drinking heavily, playing video games, or binge-watching series television. We would be better off if we rediscovered as owners as shoppers the merits of single-location stores even if we end up having to pay higher prices. (If it is compensation, we will buy less stuff and have less clutter, in part because if things have real cost we become more selective about our purchases).
Maybe structural changes in our social order have torn at some of the most critical assumptions. Our Constitution is intact with 27 amendments, ten of them the Bill of Rights and seventeen other amendments. Two of those offset (Prohibition and Repeal), and most of them on the whole expand human rights and the right to vote. The electorate is not only white, Christian, property-owning males over age 21 and any reversion to that would make a Trump-like nominee have a sure win in 2024. We have checks and balances still intact unless we have a despotic leader with a servile Congress. The most important of all checks and balances is a wise electorate that can vote out corrupt, incompetent, or unresponsive politicians. If we go unwise, then we too lose our freedom.
Donald Trump put our freedom at risk for nothing other than wish-fulfillment of about half the people. Most of the people who voted for him still believe in him and will support the politician most like him for president in both the Republican primary and the general election.
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.