01-20-2021, 07:44 PM
(01-20-2021, 06:41 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-20-2021, 04:05 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(01-20-2021, 03:09 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(01-20-2021, 01:08 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: We shall see. Do you even know what a moral compass is? Agreement with you is not a moral compass.I have a moral compass that I've learned to trust over the years. You don't have one. Your moral compass died years ago. Whether you agree with me/it or not doesn't matter to me because I understand that its a matter of choice at this point.
From the angle of the moral psychologist Haidt and his The Righteous Mind book, everyone has a moral compass. It is instinctive, firm, fast, and doesn't change unless one sees a total failure of values. Once you absorb the family teaching and perhaps a youthful search, that is it, locked. All the rational part of the mind can do is try to justify one's instincts. A few weeks ago, it looked like the COVID deaths, the failed economy resulting from the COVID inaction, the bad cops practicing racial injustice, and the capitol insurrection don't add up for a lot of people as a total failure.
Today? The hope is from the mourning of the COVID dead, the lack of further insurgency, MLK day, and the poor turnout as Trump flew off into the sunset. There might have been an enthusiastic crowd waving flags at the airport, much as happened on January 6. Instead you saw a small, dejected, defeated guy. It seems a lot of people are finally seeing a total failure. Too soon to tell for sure, but some of the signs are there. The collapse of conservative values I have long predicted may be starting.
Classic? I don't know that he will see it.
You keep talking about the collapse of conservative values that I refer to as traditional American values that are directly related to you and much of the Democratic population that exists today. The Democratic party has now been placed in charge of its own fate and the fate of a portion of the country ( the people directly related to it and the people reliant on it and those who have greatly benefited from being related) that it currently controls.
If you talk about conservative values relating to economics, then support of a free market, the development of skill, thrift as a virtue, enterprise as a solution to distress, and integrity in business dealings are pragmatism. A non-market economy, a social order that consigns people to poverty by denying opportunity, an attitude of living only in and for the moment, excessive trust in bureaucratized monopolies, and chicanery in ordinary business dealings practically ensure poverty. Those values well suit the middle class, the more skilled part of the working class, and the rich well. They well serve the Model Minorities who have fared better than average.
Grinding poverty serves nobody well. The ideal is to get people out of poverty, and the consumer economy is usually a good-enough spur. Hunger and homelessness may sting harder, but they also make people less able to compete.
We have been stuck with a plutocratic ethos that began with Reagan and a flawed dream and has culminated in the catastrophic failure that is Donald Trump. Donald Trump is in essence a juvenile delinquent who has never grown up and has instead gotten away with what he has gotten away with only because someone has covered for him or he has had the means of buying his way out of any problem.
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.