(07-01-2017, 09:37 PM)Galen Wrote:(06-30-2017, 10:20 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-30-2017, 08:01 AM)Odin Wrote: A chilling National Rifle Association ad gaining traction online appears to be 'an open call to violence'
They do stop short of being 'an open call to violence'... by about a millimeter and a half. An interesting point is that most of the accusations against the blue are pretty much true. The one about schools teaching children that Trump is Hitler is a new one to me. What school districts are doing that?
Pretty much my take on it. As for the schools, it depends on where you live. In my experience teachers have pretty much tended toward the left even though there are exceptions. Hell, at PSU we had outright communists there so that accusation is not far from the truth and definitely true at the university level.
Teaching, that is, graduates of 'education' departments tend to fill with people who distrust corporate bureaucracies. K-12 teaching may not be one of the most lucrative of careers, but it does not compel one to believe the agenda of the economic elites that has generally shown itself narcissists believing in an unqualified Social Darwinism. Teaching is one of the least bureaucratic of activities, as shown by the high ratio of supervised people to supervisors.
Teachers do not need to be promoters of the mindless materialism that much of Corporate America treats as the ideal way of thought of the masses. For someone in distress (and I have been in deep distress due to a hopeless situation involving parents for which I took responsibility), turning to this
(Schubert's Octet for winds and strings)
makes more sense than does going on a shopping binge that puts several hundred dollars on a charge card, especially when the situation in which I was in precluded my participation in the money-grubbing world that is America. I had lost my life savings in the situation, and from this I may never recover. This music reminded me that there is more to life than a very bad moment of economic ruin and personal despair. This could do more good for me than could buying some bling; buying some bling would simply give me the ephemeral high that one gets from impulse shopping and leave me very quickly as a person in emotional distress with a little more bling and much more debt.
But that says nothing about the vile economic order that we have suggests that it is just as noble to profiteer off human suffering than it is to make the world a happier place. In our system, profit is the sole measure of virtue irrespective of the human cost. But this has a corollary in the disparity in value between human lives, something inconsistent with the values of three of four parts of the American heritage at the time of the American Revolution. The fourth was slave-owning planters whose devaluation of the lives of slaves has now been completely discredited.
The Hard Right that you believe in, no matter what cultural difference you may have from a President who already resembles one of the unholy trinity of the most despised of Roman Emperors (Nero, Caligula, and Commodus), has no problem with mass suffering so long as it enriches and indulges the Right People. Yes, the three most despised Roman Emperors are so despised because they bled the treasury to entertain people, and it is the elites or Rome (the Senatorial class) who used that unsavory trio as examples of misrule including an odd combination of cultural populism, character assassination of dissidents that culminated in literal murder, sexual misconduct, and abuse of power for the satiation of the ego of the bad Emperors.
Donald Trump is not that bad -- yet. But if he showed signs of getting that bad I would expect the military to take him down as did the Roman military take down Nero, Caligula, and Commodus. But even he is a symptom, and not a cause, of the sickness of America as a social order. Aside from technology and the level of development, a big difference between the United States and Imperial Rome (or for late-Republican Rome which may be a better analogy) is that we have a heritage of elections in which most people can participate. It is my hope that we can simply outlast a President who has contempt for a majority of the People (as shown in polls that already show disapproval of the President ranging from the middle fifties to as much as 60%) and for the people that our political system (the free press, understood now to mean the news media) deputed to monitor the achievements and failures of our political leaders.
I can already think of what the Armed Forces, law enforcement, and the intelligence services would do if the President gave them orders to do something so outrageous as murder the opponents of this horrid President. They would turn on him, and they would insist upon a successor who agrees to do nothing outrageous. At that, a conservative version of Barack Obama would be the solution for the time.
...It is a good thing that America does not exist solely to enrich and indulge elites, and that there are valid roles for many people who find capitalism at its rawest objectionable yet have the talent to do something good without being ideological flunkies. Were I to give career advice to most intelligent, decent people I would tell them to steer clear of Corporate America with its rigid and low glass ceilings. I would have been better off as a policeman than as a glorified clerk in some for-profit entity. Busting a meth lab is far nobler than is hustling people into signing up for cable service. A poorly-paid Protestant pastor can at least pray with someone in economic distress instead of preying on people in economic distress as does some payday-loan place.
Medicine, law, engineering, academia, K-12 teaching, the military, law enforcement, scientific research, religious life, creative activities, and owning and operating a small business all look like better routes to even a modest measure of success than does joining some corporate bureaucracy. You, Galen, endorse capitalism at its worst, which is almost as objectionable as Bolshevism -- because capitalism at its worst gives the world fascism.
This is a 4T, and all other 4Ts have forced Americans to re-examine the fundamental beliefs that underpin American life. In the last Crisis American leadership reached to the heritage of righteousness that rejected a tyrannical king and his flunkies in the American Revolution and that found that claims that America stood for freedom was inconsistent with chattel slavery. When it came necessary to defeat the despotic empires of enslavement and mass-murder in Germany and Japan, America chose to use a legacy of righteousness to smite despotism and free slaves. Maybe in this Crisis we Americans struggle with the demons in our nature and in our institutions. In this we must succeed on our own. I would not want India, Indonesia, or Japan -- let alone China! -- be arbiters of what the next era of American history be like. We solve our problems ourselves -- lest others solve those problems for us on their terms.
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.