We're WEIRD. Get over it.

[Bob Butler 54]

(09-25-2020, 11:36 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-22-2020, 12:37 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(09-22-2020, 12:02 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Bob, you seem to be saying that W.E.I.R.D. = blue zone. So what happens if the red zone takes over in 2021? Is that the end of the West?

As usual, things will get worse until it is decided to do something about it.  Trump being reelected is pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.  As Churchill allegedly said, America will eventually do the right thing, once they have tried everything else.  He did not mention doing a wrong thing twice.

I don't think a population to try to keep an unravelling going, to keep operating on the values of selfishness once the problems have surfaced.  I suspect the Democrats will triumph.  You are correct to worry, though.

The Hard Right has no intellectual appeal, whether it is the neo-Nazis or KKK types who drip with genocidal talk or Donald Trump's anti-intellectual followers. Marxism-Leninism still had some claim (however specious) to have an innovative program for restructuring the social order of all capitalist countries. That is over. Marxism-Leninism ossified quickly into an excuse for a bureaucratic elite, the nomenklatura, as oppressive and rapacious as aristocratic landowners People are coming to realize that concentration of power is itself inimical to democracy and  that the concentration of power is itself a source of inequality for its own sake. It may be that a nation of shopkeepers and yeoman farmers can better achieve and protect freedom than what we have now. 

 
The problem is this time around there were enough racists that white superiority was considered more important than workers getting their share of the pie.  This is not quite the same as the last crisis, where dictators attempted by military force to sieze a larger piece of the pie, with genocide or mass migrations as acceptable tools.

I am not disagreeing that institutional racism is a problem either way, but we deserved the bad government that resulted.  At the time it was the will of the people.  Trump is just an extreme example of that sort of thinking.  It takes an extremely bad abuse to trigger a crisis response.

(09-25-2020, 11:36 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The Corporate Right has its idea of freedom -- freedom to monopolize, to drive small-scale business out of business through buy-outs or ruin, to buy into the political process (government effectively obliged to serve wealth and bureaucratic power instead of the People), and to slough off responsibilities while imposing quasi-feudal duties upon the common man. Such at its worst is high-tech feudalism most closely imitated in Nazi Germany. Even without the genocide and aggressive warfare, Nazi Germany was a worker's Hell.

Agreed.