09-20-2017, 02:13 PM
(09-20-2017, 11:57 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:(09-19-2017, 09:44 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: I think you've got that backwards. Most people have to encounter new ideas more than once if they are counter to a lifetime of propaganda exposure - especially when the propaganda specifically includes simplistic ways to reject those ideas. In addition, I believe, he has a vested interest in the welfare system. Get him a job that takes him off welfare for a few years, and he might suddenly become open minded.
When Americans of the red-state mentality can stop making welfare into a bugaboo and scapegoat, and thus their basis for voting, and realize it is just part of a workable society, now needed more than ever in this age of computer automation and globalization, then they will have become more mature and more like grown up adults.
I should likely just stand back and let you two prove the point.
I can agree that people who have been subjected to a lifetime of propaganda need more than one exposure to new ideas, but it isn't just the red-state (or blue-state) that features a propaganda system that leaves one values locked. For many, it takes a lot more than a few exposures to get an open mind. (I assume you two have lost count?) To a large degree, you are saying the same thing about each other, and it is greatly true. The problem is real, and nobody has a wide enough vision and large enough group resolve to solve it.
As to the immediate problem, welfare can do only so much when the minimum wage prevents a living wage. I'd like to see welfare as an emergency measure to hold somebody over a troubled time once, but it is being turned into a way of life by a system that promotes more profits for the already wealthy. These are parts of the same problem. Of course, it is easy for the already wealthy to claim it isn't their problem.
And that leads back to a political system where those who can buy the best lawyers, lobbyists, media people and politicians make the rules. That will take a lot of people getting angry to fix. The questions include how many, how soon, and how angry.
We shall now return to our abstract philosophical discussion of maybe True Believers needing to see the key problem as more important than the value of human life.
That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.