Fascism is on the ballot

[pbrower2a]

(10-25-2020, 04:00 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(10-24-2020, 11:38 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Do you feel guilty about the losses millions of people are taking to protect the lives of people like you these days? Now, I understand how important your lives are to Joe Biden and how important they are to the Democratic party and I also know the difference between the elder blues and reds these days. Do you want America to become unlivable as developing nations with special protections like China, Russia are free to pollute and profit off it as much as they want these days. You know, if blues had some common sense, they'd understand us better. But, since common sense is missing/seriously lacking, we have a major communication gap that's not worth the time or the headaches to overcome.

The important difference is that many reds see their comfort in not wearing a mask and convenience in not social distancing is deemed more important than saving lives.  People are finding it acceptable to ignore the precautions, therefore the bug is continuing to gather steam which means the economy cannot recover.  Trump's failure to address the bug and thus to fix the economy will make it harder to eventually recover the economy.  It is due to the red continuing the selfishness which is the hallmark of the unravelling rather than the crisis willingness to sacrifice for the common good.

It is all incredibly stupid. Survival is a virtue, and avoiding legal problems is essential to a good life. Does the Hard Right have a death wish? 

Quote:We understand that, but can't do much about it.  Oh, tying it to the S&H theory is not understood by many who have not studied the theory, but the lack of willingness to aid the community has been noted by most blues.  If this lack of willingness holds until a vaccine is developed, it may be too late for an at all quick economic recovery.

Some believe in medical miracles without recognizing that such miracles are the consequence of the skill, preparation, and mastery of medicine of physicians, a great corpus of scientific research,  and the infrastructure of the medical system. I have my view of miracles: I want to live in a way that keeps me from needing a miracle for the survival of myself. It does not help that someone distorts values that might have saved difficult-to-count lives by saying "It's just like the flu" and "like a miracle it will disappear". 
 

Quote:There are other differences of course.  The racists want to keep law enforcement killing blacks, enforcing structural racism. The Evangelicals want to use the government to enforce their religious values on those who do not share these values.  Neither party is willing to compromise on weapons, so nothing is being done about the Founding Fathers not foreseeing the need to limit military weapons in the hands of civilians.  I could go on.

The best thing that can happen for us all is that people who stand for crazy, indefensible ideas is that those ideas fail blatantly and become irrelevant. The rejection of sure failure is one condition of  progress, and it can be supremely costly to those who embody the failure. There will be deaths, crippling injuries, and prison terms. Some people will be cast off as people not to be invited to family get-togethers.

Quote:I can regret some autocratic countries put profits ahead of their people's health.  Jobs were shipped abroad where unions, benefits, pay and the environment are not emphasized so the elites could profit from that lack.  I believe we should stop importing from such countries, but neither party has pushed in that direction yet.

With Trump, America has toyed with autocratic (possible other synonyms include "dictatorial" and "despotic") government. Americans of wealth and privilege gave us the promise of cheap stuff that has typically gone into a landfill while Americans lose the manufacturing jobs that are the sole bar to grinding poverty. Although non-manufacturing activity can create great wealth (as with intellectual property), far fewer people can animate films for Pixar than can work on an automobile or television assembly line.

We need remember that the decline of the share of manufacturing in the American economy, beginning in the 1960's (when smart kids were told, "whatever you do, do not work on an assembly line because you will hate it") , when the smart kids did anything else because it was more 'meaningful' or 'modern'. Any activity needs the smart people if it is to innovate.  A year or two of assembly-line work might have inspired some smart kids to dedicate their talents to engineering instead of to 'basket-weaving', and someone who got some book-learning in economics, philosophy, psychology, and accounting might have been the ideal shop steward if he found the golden handcuffs
of union wages that made graduating to a job in a bookstore economically absurd. 

Of course we have other problems that make a return to the halcyon days (for blue-collar workers in industry) of the early 1960's impossible to achieve except in the murky demagoguery of someone so callow as Donald Trump who promised us "Make America Great Again" without telling us what that means. Great for whom? Even greater for people doing extremely well by treating Americans badly? Great for white racists troubled by the rise of Model Minorities? Or was it simply words that, as con artists usually use them, to suggest exactly what people think they want while the swindler bait-and-switches?

Just look at retailing. One of the admonitions about certain college majors is that that major "might get one a job in retailing"... so basically, avoid that major or drop out and avoid college debt (while working perhaps in retail for a near-starvation wage). Unattractive industries attract people who lack the imagination with which to innovate, the energy with which to make things work, and the vision in which to reform the system. Not so long ago, Sears and Radio Shack were deemed two of the worst five companies for which to work. Pay was awful (which is the norm in retailing) and management was incompetent and domineering. People take jobs in such places only as steppingstones to something less awful.  

It is arguable that we were better off when the televisions available for sale were overpriced pieces of furniture with 1980's technology primitive by current standards and cost a month's income instead of the televisions now as cheap as children's toys. We can regret much that we did in the neoliberal era, but that is as easy to undo as the paraplegia that resulted from an incident of bad driving in which one skidded on a road on a trip that was not necessary at the time.