(06-21-2017, 02:48 AM)Galen Wrote:(06-20-2017, 10:36 PM)Eric the not-so-Obtuse Wrote: The loss in GA is yet another stunning demo of American ignorance. I am tending toward the David Kaiser view today. America is deciding in favor of gilded age, banana republic status. I don't know where this goes, but it can't be easy any way it goes. Buckle up folks; we're going downhill. Dismemberment of America at this point would be an optimistic scenario.
The Dims spent twenty-three million dollars versus three and a half million from the opposing team and managed to lose the election. A prime example of what Heinlein called the authoritarian fallacy. I truly am enjoying watching the libtards go crazy because they can't even contemplate the possibility that people will reject them.
Call us liberals what you wish -- but we are not stupid or immoral. To the contrary. Most of us think ourselves wiser and more decent than the President, or even the fanatics and empty-suit pols that the Master Class has foisted upon the not-so-wise and not-so-decent among us. Your fanatics and empty-suit pols are extremely successful at creating wealth and indulgence for a few and misery for almost everyone else.
It is better that liberals be your opposition. If your Dark Side should render us irrelevant, then think of the sorts of political figures who could oppose your side. Lenin. Mao. Castro. People even more ruthless, sadistic, and brutal. People who know how to stoke anger at exploiters and abusers who happen to be owners and managers.
Sure, life is great for economic elites just before the Revolution. But once the Revolution comes, your assets are forfeit, and when the angry mobs that a Marxist demagogue has stirred up wants to take revenge, the people that you have allowed to live with a little privilege as brutal enforcers of your interests will sell out to the revolutionaries who know that the only loyalty of such people is to whoever cuts the paycheck or distributes the coins of 'real value'. The fiat currency of the old regime will be worthless except to be exchanged for 'revolutionary' currency (including vouchers for obvious needs) as the revolutionaries deem fit. Currency with one set of idol images is replaced with the idols of the Revolution.
We liberals have our virtues. We dislike violence, and tolerate it only in self-defense, as in our Jihad against Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini. We were the pioneers of freeing Humanity from the strictures of authoritarian believe-it-or-burn religion . We started the idea of responsible government. We initiated the movement to abolish slavery. We came early to recognize the right of working people to contest the bureaucratic power of tycoons. We got children out of the mines and factories and into schools. We acceded before others to equal rights of political participation for women. We opposed Jim Crow and Apartheid. We have a track record. Your advocates of all power to owners and managers? Your side may have created wealth, but it has no idea of how to transform it into happiness.
Quote:No doubt Alphabet will claim the Russians did it like a character out of Dr. Strangelove.
This special election? No. The 2018 elections will be big, and the 2020 election will be really-big.
Donald Trump is still at least as bad a political leader as he was as a businessman, and the Republican majority in both Houses of Congress and Republican majorities have nothing to offer people other than themselves except pain and shame. No pseudo-intellectual legerdemain can refute that.
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.