The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-05-2020, 05:52 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: America was never great, and therefore won't be made great again; it may never be great, but only by defeating you guys thoroughly and completely forever does it stand any chance to be great or even good or long-enduring past today.

Hey, the US did pretty good under tax and spend liberalism. I wouldn't complain. The conservatives had to change policies, though.

[Bob Butler 54]

I just picked up a Shield and Brooks piece. They quoted a psychological study saying the more you prove somebody has the facts wrong, the more tightly they will cling to their ideas. They also reminisced about the good old days when you assumed the other side had good intentions. They might be mistaken and misinformed, but you didn’t assume they were evil. Assuming evil is more the norm these days.

It just reflects what tends to happen here. The more you report on what is going on on Earth 1, the deeper the clinging to the Earth 2 fantasies get.

[Eric the Green]

(12-05-2020, 07:50 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I just picked up a Shield and Brooks piece.  They quoted a psychological study saying the more you prove somebody has the facts wrong, the more tightly they will cling to their ideas.  They also reminisced about the good old days when you assumed the other side had good intentions.  They might be mistaken and misinformed, but you didn’t assume they were evil.  Assuming evil is more the norm these days.

It just reflects what tends to happen here.  The more you report on what is going on on Earth 1, the deeper the clinging to the Earth 2 fantasies get.

Yes, I watched it live. Fact-checking doesn't change emotions.

[Eric the Green]

(12-05-2020, 06:38 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 05:52 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: America was never great, and therefore won't be made great again; it may never be great, but only by defeating you guys thoroughly and completely forever does it stand any chance to be great or even good or long-enduring past today.

Hey, the US did pretty good under tax and spend liberalism.  I wouldn't complain.  The conservatives had to change policies, though.

We young boomers found plenty to complain about at the time. Little did we know how much worse things might get.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-05-2020, 08:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 07:50 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I just picked up a Shield and Brooks piece.  They quoted a psychological study saying the more you prove somebody has the facts wrong, the more tightly they will cling to their ideas.  They also reminisced about the good old days when you assumed the other side had good intentions.  They might be mistaken and misinformed, but you didn’t assume they were evil.  Assuming evil is more the norm these days.

It just reflects what tends to happen here.  The more you report on what is going on on Earth 1, the deeper the clinging to the Earth 2 fantasies get.

Yes, I watched it live. Fact-checking doesn't change emotions.

Neither has massive death. But it worked with Atlanta and Hiroshima? Does it not count if they are doing it to themselves?

[Bob Butler 54]

A recent CNN article's headline had Trump removing experts in the Pentagon and replacing them with partisan party loyalists.  It brings back memories of an old time.  Reds versus experts anyone?  Mao would be proud to be vindicated, I think.  Trump's Great Leap Forward?  At least out of the White House?   

[pbrower2a]

(12-05-2020, 04:06 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Biden won't be President for long and you already know what's going to happen when Harris becomes President. So, it's waiting game at this point.  As I've told you, we'll watch as Rome burns.

Just a reminder. Donald Trump has been defeated. American voters, most of whom have no use for his cult, voted against him in places other than the super-safe D states. 51.28% of American voters voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and 46.83% voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. After four years of Donald Trump, enough people got tired of his antics. That appears as a 306-232 split in electoral votes, barring faithless electors. The amazing thing is that Donald Trump got elected the first time. 

You aren't the first person to feel this way about an American election. Four years ago many of us liberals thought that if things got bad enough we would get to stockpile some Valium and get some vodka if things got bad enough and we could not flee. Or we thought of whether we had a chance of starting over elsewhere where people cherished the decencies of liberal democracy because they would never vote for some angry populist who claimed to have a secret solution for everything -- you know, make those who don't go completely with him irrelevant. Maybe I would take a trip to Canada and send postcards back saying "Greetings from Free Toronto!"

So how can people vote for that horrible man? How can people throw away a heritage of 240 years of freedom for vague promises that mean one thing to the victor but not to everyone else because he can shade the meaning of the first-person plural pronouns? There's a huge difference in meaning between "my associates and I, but not you yokels" and "you and I". The English language does not define that, so people must be cautious when listening to political rhetoric for that reason alone. But we realize that there are all those people wearing MAGA-themed items, and there's more to them than their support for Donald Trump. If you want to hold a job or not alienate near-neighbors, old friends, and relatives, then you learn to drink a rich, warm cup of "shut the f--- up". After you run out of tears you realize that there is more to politics. People who find Trump's rhetoric offensive to their intellectual sensitivities can then turn to literature, art, and music. If you loved the daring chords and rich counterpoint of J S Bach, then his music is still there. In a system so dehumanizing as the Third Reich, there were still the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic to remind one that there was still aesthetic truth even if political life was nothing other than the brutal enforcement of absurdity. See also how people saw the Czech Philharmonic and the Leningrad Philharmonic in Commie states. Life did get depressing -- and at times scary. But there was plenty of humor, often grim humor that such people as Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling offered as eccentric-but-somehow-true realizations of someone else's reality. What difference was there from when those two were making movies or TV? The absurd world of Hitchcock or Serling was the world in which we now were in. Acceptance comes with the realization that the best way to survive in a totalitarian dictatorship is to be as insignificant as possible. People have survived such killers as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Trujillo, Duvalier, Castro, Amin, Pinochet, the Argentine military clique, Satan Hussein, etc. Maybe you find ways to smile through a nasty situation, like finding something completely irrelevant to the bad news for you. So you finally got the Weierstrass substitution in integral calculus. So you started painting some primitive landscapes and they are starting to look good. So for the first time you got through The Brothers Karamazov. You may seem to be compliant, if for a reason other than being satisfied that the Great and Infallible Leader is doing great things for you. In your logical mind, you recognize that support for Donald Trump is foolishness. You still hope for a free election that will allow people to repudiate the most despotic leader in American history. As for you, Classic X'er, I see little evidence that you have much of a life of the mind. That's unfortunate, as it can bring meaning into an absurd world.              

Quote:America ain't going away and America understands the difference between racism and the need for more border security and the job of enforcing  immigration laws. It also knows the difference between fascism and American defense and American law enforcement.

Donald Trump, beyond any denial, is a racist and a religious bigot. Maybe you who still support Donald Trump need a political equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.  You need to escape a cult. That cult creates a net of lies that you cannot easily escape. You got there somehow. I remember one college chum who eventually became a Moonie. He was sort of a misfit at an ultra-liberal university and his beliefs well fit the Moonie agenda. Moon's cult is far less dangerous than Trump's cult. Moon stayed clear of violence that could get him into serious legal trouble.  

Quote:The political circus that you and others are directly associated with will end in disaster.

No. In some places we have a heritage of democratically-elected. responsible government that goes back nearly 400 years to the founding of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Virginia House of Burgesses established a democracy among planters that has since become a democracy for all. 

Admit it: Donald Trump is a disaster. The death toll from the plague that will be the most memorable event of his Administration has passed 284,000 deaths alone, which is just larger than the population of Newark, New Jersey. Don't tell me that Newark is a dump. We all know this. Just imagine a city of that size nuked with all its inhabitants killed. Think of how angry Americans were on 9/11, and how delighted many of us when Seal Team Six dispatched the murderous cult leader Osama bin Laden. The death toll from COVID-19 in America alone is basically one hundred "9/11's". How can you be so numb to that?  

Quote:America stepping away is what your going to see as a bunch of self serving, self loathing, self absorbed tycoons and political whores learn a lesson or two about real life. America doesn't care about you or your issues or Obama or Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney or Tesla or Ford Motors or Citibank more than it cares about it's country and you'll all will find that out the hard way.

Well, you have something right there, if for the wrong reasons. Reality in a capitalist system means that if you really want economic freedom, then you must earn it by evading the stultifying effects of giant enterprises that can buy the political system. That means starting a small business instead of seeking a job in some bloated bureaucracy and hoping for the best. Big Business needs Big Government, including a huge welfare system to cover its ethical failures. When small business was the norm in America, small business accommodated the customer instead of making the customer fit the structure of the business. Sure, you did not get Wal*Mart's "everyday low prices", but at least you were more likely to like what you got. Big Business as bankers can decide that your credit-dependent business can fail if it wants you to fail, which explains part of the cause of the decline of the family farmer while corporate farms snap up what used to be family farms and establish what are for all practical purposes twenty-first-century equivalents of plantations. Giant, landed estates rely upon ultra-cheap farm labor stripped of political rights... and dominate the political life in rural areas. The proprietors of those landed estates are reliably the most reactionary interests in any country, and if they see any threat to their class privilege they turn to fascism to suppress any dissent. Just look at the once-civilized politics of the Dakotas and perhaps Iowa. When the ruling elite can demand that the common man suffer for the power, gain, and indulgence of rapacious elites... then someone like our friend "Einzige" is right. When someone like "Einzige" is right, then capitalism is an inhuman monstrosity in need of revolutionary change. I differ from Einzige in my belief that centralized power, whether that of reactionary aristocrats or of revolutionaries who eventually turn reactionary as they take over the landed estates and brutally-run industries is the problem, and the solution is decentralization of economic power.    

Quote:There is now a clear separation/distinction between the American people and all the shit associated with it government today.

Your idea of what constitutes the American people differs from mine. If I adopted a different religious heritage, let us say Judaism, from what I was brought up in I would still be an American. If I assimilated into a different ethnicity than I was brought up in -- let us say Mexican-Americans -- I would still be an American. As a liberal I am just as American as you are. At this point I see myself having much more in common with Japanese-Americans in California than with Americans of Scots-Irish ancestry in Appalachia or the Ozarks. 

There are far more ways to be American than you recognize. It may be very different from my heritage, but I recognize the Nation of Islam as fully American because it arose here among Americans and has no other home. I'm not saying that I would confront its values, some of which I consider cranky. Then again I would not go to a community of polygamist cultists in a part of the country that has weak and ineffective law enforcement. 

Classic X'er, the test of being an American is not in being like you or believing what you believe. The test of being an American is recognizing that people unlike you in many key ways are still as American as you or me.
  

Quote:The media are a bunch of (expletive deleted) idiots in my opinion but whatever, the damage they created is already done and your fucked in my opinion. You don't know this but we already have you by the balls so to speak. Trump will formally concede during a national address, do a Douglas MacArthur "I shall return promise" and  more or less leave the keys to the White House hanging on the door.

Donald Trump has good cause to hop onto a transport jet, quite possibly something with this flag attached as a decal:



A hint: it has a border with two of the most pleasant countries in the world in which to live (with the possible exception of climate) and one with one of the worst political systems in the world. It does have a sea border with the United States. We know where President Trump's loyalties are -- the Russian Mafiya.

Quote:As I said, there's a lot of you (a Democratic system that's reliant upon America staying together and quasi socialists with alternative motives or oil and water constituency) and a lot of us (hard core Americans). Biden represents the interests of Washington DC and Wall Street and the interests associated a bunch of ***** up cities and state governments and a group of global tycoons and the interests of a political cult/ social justice warriors who seem hell bent on destroying everything that's good (the fabric) that made America Great. You eliminate what's good (the fabric), what's left? .... Once again, nature always wins.

People have every right to believe all sorts of religious, cultural, and political values here in the good old US of A.  Only when you accept that are you a part of the true American way of life. Economic results aren't quite even, which may reflect faults in the system... but on the whole, liberals have been the ones to do the most successful mitigation of life for people getting the bad breaks in life (think of being an Italian-American or a Polish-American before the Second World War). We have gotten out of the way of free markets except to give breaks to people who need them. What you call the "social justice warriors" are far more diverse than what you consider "hard core Americans".

As for the fabric of America as a political entity... that remains the Constitution, the ethical basis of the political structure.

I have a different idea of what made America great than you have. It certainly isn't leaders like Trump, pathological narcissists on the borderline of sociopathy. It is normal people who went beyond expectations because they had a chance because there wasn't some bloated bureaucracy, governmental or corporate, getting in the way. I contrast the Roman Empire in its final stages of rot to the pioneering days of the Roman Republic. In the best times, common people like Cincinnatus (the model for George Washington) did extraordinary things because they could and because a system in need would recognize the need for them to achieve great things that save the system. In the rotten Roman Empire (and the Roman Empire was a rotten order from its inception) it took great people to achieve minor things. Yes I see rot as bureaucracy (the allegedly-civilized way to do thoroughly barbarous things to people) starts to crush individuality.

[David Horn]

(12-06-2020, 09:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: A recent CNN article's headline had Trump removing experts in the Pentagon and replacing them with partisan party loyalists.  It brings back memories of an old time.  Reds versus experts anyone?  Mao would be proud to be vindicated, I think.  Trump's Great Leap Forward?  At least out of the White House?   

Sad is it not?  How did we ever get this far down the rabbit hole?  Are we still the people capable of getting ourselves back out?  To be honest, I'm skeptical ... too many are still tunneling down looking for their own personal Shangri-La.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-06-2020, 11:39 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Classic X'er, the test of being an American is not in being like you or believing what you believe. The test of being an American is recognizing that people unlike you in many key ways are still as American as you or me.

  
What a perfectly WEIRD thought.  Unfortunately, Classic is a tribal thinker.  He will cling to his group and hate those outside it. Any who are not of his way of thinking are threatened with violence.

[Eric the Green]

(12-05-2020, 08:49 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 08:31 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 07:50 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I just picked up a Shield and Brooks piece.  They quoted a psychological study saying the more you prove somebody has the facts wrong, the more tightly they will cling to their ideas.  They also reminisced about the good old days when you assumed the other side had good intentions.  They might be mistaken and misinformed, but you didn’t assume they were evil.  Assuming evil is more the norm these days.

It just reflects what tends to happen here.  The more you report on what is going on on Earth 1, the deeper the clinging to the Earth 2 fantasies get.

Yes, I watched it live. Fact-checking doesn't change emotions.

Neither has massive death.  But it worked with Atlanta and Hiroshima?  Does it not count if they are doing it to themselves?

It may be harder to learn from massive self-inflicted death, than death from an external enemy (as the Japanese and Germans did). As for Atlanta, much remained unlearned by the confederates, and much still remains unlearned. That is whom we still face today. And the massive death comes not only from covid, but from the massive floods and fires of today's climate change, which are sure to magnify in the coming years. They still refuse to learn from it all.

I often speak like a member of the blue tribe, and feel ever-more cut off from the red tribe. I note that the blues are always, as a rule, more willing to compromise and understand the red side, than vice versa. I even give some credit to the ideologies they hold to so fanatically and dogmatically. I can go a long way with their beliefs about Jesus and God, just not so far or in the same way as they insist that we all do. I don't want confiscatory taxes and infinite debt, and considering my own career, I have to say like Elizabeth Warren that, along with being a quasi-socialist, I am also a capitalist to my bones. I was raised with a mixture of self-reliance and silver spoons. 

It's just that the red tribe has gone so far off the deep end, and now so endanger the country and the world, that I realize the first priority is to defeat them politically. They can't be reasoned with or compromised with any longer, unless they begin to learn the error of their ways. I can see them as my fellow Americans, and concede that they have some personal virtues in their lives, but I would not object if they split from the rest of us. 

Now they insist that Trump's defeat is a fraud, even though Trump's own puppet AG has found no evidence for it, and even though 40 judges, even many appointed by Trump himself or other Republicans, and Republican legislators, reject his case. So it becomes hard to identify with them as my fellows, when in fact I feel much more aligned with Europeans and some East Asians and Anglosphere members than with these latter-day Confederates. And I attribute our problems more to these people than to the politicians and elites who do their bidding.

[pbrower2a]

(12-06-2020, 12:03 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 09:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: A recent CNN article's headline had Trump removing experts in the Pentagon and replacing them with partisan party loyalists.  It brings back memories of an old time.  Reds versus experts anyone?  Mao would be proud to be vindicated, I think.  Trump's Great Leap Forward?  At least out of the White House?   

Sad is it not?  How did we ever get this far down the rabbit hole?  Are we still the people capable of getting ourselves back out?  To be honest, I'm skeptical ... too many are still tunneling down looking for their own personal Shangri-La.

I trust that the experts will be back when Biden is President.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-06-2020, 07:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 12:03 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 09:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: A recent CNN article's headline had Trump removing experts in the Pentagon and replacing them with partisan party loyalists.  It brings back memories of an old time.  Reds versus experts anyone?  Mao would be proud to be vindicated, I think.  Trump's Great Leap Forward?  At least out of the White House?   

Sad is it not?  How did we ever get this far down the rabbit hole?  Are we still the people capable of getting ourselves back out?  To be honest, I'm skeptical ... too many are still tunneling down looking for their own personal Shangri-La.

I trust that the experts will be back when Biden is President.

The experts will be back in government, but that doesn't mean Trump and the Republican base will listen to them.  To a great degree, they can continue to live in their fact free alternate reality some call Earth 2.  That is why I am so interested in the upcoming battle for the remnants of the Republican Party.

[Bob Butler 54]

It seems Giuliani has gone into the hospital with COVID.  He may have exposed a lot of people with his no mask macho recent behavior.

Not to worry.  He lives on Earth 2.  The disease is just a hoax there.

[pbrower2a]

(12-06-2020, 08:11 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 07:56 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 12:03 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 09:24 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: A recent CNN article's headline had Trump removing experts in the Pentagon and replacing them with partisan party loyalists.  It brings back memories of an old time.  Reds versus experts anyone?  Mao would be proud to be vindicated, I think.  Trump's Great Leap Forward?  At least out of the White House?   

Sad is it not?  How did we ever get this far down the rabbit hole?  Are we still the people capable of getting ourselves back out?  To be honest, I'm skeptical ... too many are still tunneling down looking for their own personal Shangri-La.

I trust that the experts will be back when Biden is President.

The experts will be back in government, but that doesn't mean Trump and the Republican base will listen to them.  To a great degree, they can continue to live in their fact free alternate reality some call Earth 2.  That is why I am so interested in the upcoming battle for the remnants of the Republican Party.

They GOP base need not listen to and heed expert advice. Earth 2 is fine with them. Earth 2 may have come into existence 2000 or so years ago in seven literal days, may have had a Great Flood in which Noah circumnavigated in forty days (maybe the Earth has grown much since then, because forty days is roughly the time it took for Columbus to cross the Atlantic in 1492 and the Pilgrims took to get to Massachusetts Bay from England... ) and maybe the Detroit Lions did once win the Super Bowl.   

I still lack the imagination to understand how listening to bad ideas in the exclusion of all else can get good results.

[Bob Butler 54]

I find it hard to believe that the Lions could have won a Super Bowl, even on Earth 2.   

[Classic-Xer]

(12-06-2020, 12:04 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-06-2020, 11:39 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Classic X'er, the test of being an American is not in being like you or believing what you believe. The test of being an American is recognizing that people unlike you in many key ways are still as American as you or me.

  
What a perfectly WEIRD thought.  Unfortunately, Classic is a tribal thinker.  He will cling to his group and hate those outside it.  Any who are not of his way of thinking are threatened with violence.

Right now, I'm more or less inside your group so to speak. This is you's guys hang out right and I'm more or less a visitor right.

[Classic-Xer]

(12-06-2020, 11:39 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(12-05-2020, 04:06 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Biden won't be President for long and you already know what's going to happen when Harris becomes President. So, it's waiting game at this point.  As I've told you, we'll watch as Rome burns.

Just a reminder. Donald Trump has been defeated. American voters, most of whom have no use for his cult, voted against him in places other than the super-safe D states. 51.28% of American voters voted for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and 46.83% voted for Donald Trump and Mike Pence. After four years of Donald Trump, enough people got tired of his antics. That appears as a 306-232 split in electoral votes, barring faithless electors. The amazing thing is that Donald Trump got elected the first time. 

You aren't the first person to feel this way about an American election. Four years ago many of us liberals thought that if things got bad enough we would get to stockpile some Valium and get some vodka if things got bad enough and we could not flee. Or we thought of whether we had a chance of starting over elsewhere where people cherished the decencies of liberal democracy because they would never vote for some angry populist who claimed to have a secret solution for everything -- you know, make those who don't go completely with him irrelevant. Maybe I would take a trip to Canada and send postcards back saying "Greetings from Free Toronto!"

So how can people vote for that horrible man? How can people throw away a heritage of 240 years of freedom for vague promises that mean one thing to the victor but not to everyone else because he can shade the meaning of the first-person plural pronouns? There's a huge difference in meaning between "my associates and I, but not you yokels" and "you and I". The English language does not define that, so people must be cautious when listening to political rhetoric for that reason alone. But we realize that there are all those people wearing MAGA-themed items, and there's more to them than their support for Donald Trump. If you want to hold a job or not alienate near-neighbors, old friends, and relatives, then you learn to drink a rich, warm cup of "shut the f--- up". After you run out of tears you realize that there is more to politics. People who find Trump's rhetoric offensive to their intellectual sensitivities can then turn to literature, art, and music. If you loved the daring chords and rich counterpoint of J S Bach, then his music is still there. In a system so dehumanizing as the Third Reich, there were still the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic to remind one that there was still aesthetic truth even if political life was nothing other than the brutal enforcement of absurdity. See also how people saw the Czech Philharmonic and the Leningrad Philharmonic in Commie states. Life did get depressing -- and at times scary. But there was plenty of humor, often grim humor that such people as Alfred Hitchcock and Rod Serling offered as eccentric-but-somehow-true realizations of someone else's reality. What difference was there from when those two were making movies or TV? The absurd world of Hitchcock or Serling was the world in which we now were in. Acceptance comes with the realization that the best way to survive in a totalitarian dictatorship is to be as insignificant as possible. People have survived such killers as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Trujillo, Duvalier, Castro, Amin, Pinochet, the Argentine military clique, Satan Hussein, etc. Maybe you find ways to smile through a nasty situation, like finding something completely irrelevant to the bad news for you. So you finally got the Weierstrass substitution in integral calculus. So you started painting some primitive landscapes and they are starting to look good. So for the first time you got through The Brothers Karamazov. You may seem to be compliant, if for a reason other than being satisfied that the Great and Infallible Leader is doing great things for you. In your logical mind, you recognize that support for Donald Trump is foolishness. You still hope for a free election that will allow people to repudiate the most despotic leader in American history. As for you, Classic X'er, I see little evidence that you have much of a life of the mind. That's unfortunate, as it can bring meaning into an absurd world.              

Quote:America ain't going away and America understands the difference between racism and the need for more border security and the job of enforcing  immigration laws. It also knows the difference between fascism and American defense and American law enforcement.

Donald Trump, beyond any denial, is a racist and a religious bigot. Maybe you who still support Donald Trump need a political equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous.  You need to escape a cult. That cult creates a net of lies that you cannot easily escape. You got there somehow. I remember one college chum who eventually became a Moonie. He was sort of a misfit at an ultra-liberal university and his beliefs well fit the Moonie agenda. Moon's cult is far less dangerous than Trump's cult. Moon stayed clear of violence that could get him into serious legal trouble.  

Quote:The political circus that you and others are directly associated with will end in disaster.

No. In some places we have a heritage of democratically-elected. responsible government that goes back nearly 400 years to the founding of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Virginia House of Burgesses established a democracy among planters that has since become a democracy for all. 

Admit it: Donald Trump is a disaster. The death toll from the plague that will be the most memorable event of his Administration has passed 284,000 deaths alone, which is just larger than the population of Newark, New Jersey. Don't tell me that Newark is a dump. We all know this. Just imagine a city of that size nuked with all its inhabitants killed. Think of how angry Americans were on 9/11, and how delighted many of us when Seal Team Six dispatched the murderous cult leader Osama bin Laden. The death toll from COVID-19 in America alone is basically one hundred "9/11's". How can you be so numb to that?  

Quote:America stepping away is what your going to see as a bunch of self serving, self loathing, self absorbed tycoons and political whores learn a lesson or two about real life. America doesn't care about you or your issues or Obama or Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney or Tesla or Ford Motors or Citibank more than it cares about it's country and you'll all will find that out the hard way.

Well, you have something right there, if for the wrong reasons. Reality in a capitalist system means that if you really want economic freedom, then you must earn it by evading the stultifying effects of giant enterprises that can buy the political system. That means starting a small business instead of seeking a job in some bloated bureaucracy and hoping for the best. Big Business needs Big Government, including a huge welfare system to cover its ethical failures. When small business was the norm in America, small business accommodated the customer instead of making the customer fit the structure of the business. Sure, you did not get Wal*Mart's "everyday low prices", but at least you were more likely to like what you got. Big Business as bankers can decide that your credit-dependent business can fail if it wants you to fail, which explains part of the cause of the decline of the family farmer while corporate farms snap up what used to be family farms and establish what are for all practical purposes twenty-first-century equivalents of plantations. Giant, landed estates rely upon ultra-cheap farm labor stripped of political rights... and dominate the political life in rural areas. The proprietors of those landed estates are reliably the most reactionary interests in any country, and if they see any threat to their class privilege they turn to fascism to suppress any dissent. Just look at the once-civilized politics of the Dakotas and perhaps Iowa. When the ruling elite can demand that the common man suffer for the power, gain, and indulgence of rapacious elites... then someone like our friend "Einzige" is right. When someone like "Einzige" is right, then capitalism is an inhuman monstrosity in need of revolutionary change. I differ from Einzige in my belief that centralized power, whether that of reactionary aristocrats or of revolutionaries who eventually turn reactionary as they take over the landed estates and brutally-run industries is the problem, and the solution is decentralization of economic power.    

Quote:There is now a clear separation/distinction between the American people and all the shit associated with it government today.

Your idea of what constitutes the American people differs from mine. If I adopted a different religious heritage, let us say Judaism, from what I was brought up in I would still be an American. If I assimilated into a different ethnicity than I was brought up in -- let us say Mexican-Americans -- I would still be an American. As a liberal I am just as American as you are. At this point I see myself having much more in common with Japanese-Americans in California than with Americans of Scots-Irish ancestry in Appalachia or the Ozarks. 

There are far more ways to be American than you recognize. It may be very different from my heritage, but I recognize the Nation of Islam as fully American because it arose here among Americans and has no other home. I'm not saying that I would confront its values, some of which I consider cranky. Then again I would not go to a community of polygamist cultists in a part of the country that has weak and ineffective law enforcement. 

Classic X'er, the test of being an American is not in being like you or believing what you believe. The test of being an American is recognizing that people unlike you in many key ways are still as American as you or me.
  

Quote:The media are a bunch of (expletive deleted) idiots in my opinion but whatever, the damage they created is already done and your fucked in my opinion. You don't know this but we already have you by the balls so to speak. Trump will formally concede during a national address, do a Douglas MacArthur "I shall return promise" and  more or less leave the keys to the White House hanging on the door.

Donald Trump has good cause to hop onto a transport jet, quite possibly something with this flag attached as a decal:



A hint: it has a border with two of the most pleasant countries in the world in which to live (with the possible exception of climate) and one with one of the worst political systems in the world. It does have a sea border with the United States. We know where President Trump's loyalties are -- the Russian Mafiya.

Quote:As I said, there's a lot of you (a Democratic system that's reliant upon America staying together and quasi socialists with alternative motives or oil and water constituency) and a lot of us (hard core Americans). Biden represents the interests of Washington DC and Wall Street and the interests associated a bunch of ***** up cities and state governments and a group of global tycoons and the interests of a political cult/ social justice warriors who seem hell bent on destroying everything that's good (the fabric) that made America Great. You eliminate what's good (the fabric), what's left? .... Once again, nature always wins.

People have every right to believe all sorts of religious, cultural, and political values here in the good old US of A.  Only when you accept that are you a part of the true American way of life. Economic results aren't quite even, which may reflect faults in the system... but on the whole, liberals have been the ones to do the most successful mitigation of life for people getting the bad breaks in life (think of being an Italian-American or a Polish-American before the Second World War). We have gotten out of the way of free markets except to give breaks to people who need them. What you call the "social justice warriors" are far more diverse than what you consider "hard core Americans".

As for the fabric of America as a political entity... that remains the Constitution, the ethical basis of the political structure.  

I have a different idea of what made America great than you have. It certainly isn't leaders like Trump, pathological narcissists on the borderline of sociopathy. It is normal people who went beyond expectations because they had a chance because there wasn't some bloated bureaucracy, governmental or corporate, getting in the way. I contrast the Roman Empire in its final stages of rot to the pioneering days of the Roman Republic. In the best times, common people like Cincinnatus (the model for George Washington) did extraordinary things because they could and because a system in need would recognize the need for them to achieve great things that save the system. In the rotten Roman Empire (and the Roman Empire was a rotten order from its inception) it took great people to achieve minor things. Yes I see rot as bureaucracy (the allegedly-civilized way to do thoroughly barbarous things to people) starts to crush individuality.

You don't think we should have a middle class anymore? You've talked a lot about needing a middle class. You so partisan, you missed your opportunity to help them out. You're screwed dude. I assume that climate change and further enriching tycoons and making black people feel better about themselves is more important to you from a political perspective than helping them save their jobs. I haven't figured out whether your mind is warped or your a two faced piece of crap. Either or, your pretty much screwed at this point. Yep, Trump was defeated but Trump ain't going away anytime soon. If Twitter won't let you speak, you create an alternative to Twitter and play the same game as Twitter and Facebook has played with Conservatives and Donald Trump. Like I've said, you's guys are so stupid it's unbelievable. It's no wonder why you guys get blind sided so much these days.

[pbrower2a]

(12-07-2020, 12:56 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You don't think we should have a middle class anymore? You've talked a lot about needing a middle class. You so partisan, you missed your opportunity to help them out. You're screwed dude. I assume that climate change and further enriching tycoons and making black people feel better about themselves is more important to you from a political perspective than helping them save their jobs. I haven't figured out whether your mind is warped or your a two faced piece of crap. Either or, your pretty much screwed at this point. Yep, Trump was defeated but Trump ain't going away anytime soon. If Twitter won't let you speak, you create an alternative to Twitter and play the same game as Twitter and Facebook has played with Conservatives and Donald Trump. Like I've said, you's guys are so stupid it's unbelievable. It's no wonder why you guys get blind sided so much these days.

A society polarized into a few rich people and a proletariat of destitute toilers is typically one famine or one military calamity away from a Jacobin or Bolshevik revolution. 

Beginning with Nixon, who partially revived his activity as a diplomat-in-all-but-name, ex-Presidents have had some involvement in American life after the President unless they went senile (Reagan) or became near-recluses (Dubya). Trump has much to offer his cult, but little to offer anyone else. He is already a sick, stale joke. Contrast Barack Obama, who is welcome almost everywhere in the world. He did little bad and much good, and he says some wise things that people like to hear. Trump is simply a shock jock, someone more likely to offend than to inspire. Trump's style is distinctly 3T, and any practice or trend from the 3T had better be really good to survive through the 4T.

[Bob Butler 54]

(12-07-2020, 12:37 AM)Classic-Xer’' Wrote: Right now, I'm more or less inside your group so to speak. This is you's guys hang out right and I'm more or less a visitor right.

I can easily think of four regular red or tribal posters. There are more blue folk, but trying to talk sense to the red seems to be what keeps refining my perspective. Every once in a while a blue poster will endorse a book like the one on the WEIRD, but the majority of my posts are in response to the red folk. Without their being around, things could get dull.

(12-07-2020, 12:56 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You don't think we should have a middle class anymore? You've talked a lot about needing a middle class. You so partisan, you missed your opportunity to help them out. You're screwed dude. I assume that climate change and further enriching tycoons and making black people feel better about themselves is more important to you from a political perspective than helping them save their jobs. I haven't figured out whether your mind is warped or your a two faced piece of crap. Either or, your pretty much screwed at this point. Yep, Trump was defeated but Trump ain't going away anytime soon. If Twitter won't let you speak, you create an alternative to Twitter and play the same game as Twitter and Facebook has played with Conservatives and Donald Trump. Like I've said, you's guys are so stupid it's unbelievable. It's no wonder why you guys get blind sided so much these days.

I would say we get hit by Republican obstructionism more than getting blind sided. What is more predictable than the senate blocking anything that helps the middle class? With the Republican philosophy being dominant through the unraveling, we have lost benefits, unions, jobs and equality. Blaming this on the Democrats is far from the truth. It is tribal thinking, xenophobia directed at those who are not in your immediate group. It is clucking like a chicken.

Twitter and Facebook have made a small attempt to correct Trump's habit of lying. Without lies, they wouldn't have to correct them.

[Classic-Xer]

(12-07-2020, 06:37 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(12-07-2020, 12:37 AM)Classic-Xer’' Wrote: Right now, I'm more or less inside your group so to speak. This is you's guys hang out right and I'm more or less a visitor right.

I can easily think of four regular red or tribal posters. There are more blue folk, but trying to talk sense to the red seems to be what keeps refining my perspective. Every once in a while a blue poster will endorse a book like the one on the WEIRD, but the majority of my posts are in response to the red folk. Without their being around, things could get dull.

(12-07-2020, 12:56 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You don't think we should have a middle class anymore? You've talked a lot about needing a middle class. You so partisan, you missed your opportunity to help them out. You're screwed dude. I assume that climate change and further enriching tycoons and making black people feel better about themselves is more important to you from a political perspective than helping them save their jobs. I haven't figured out whether your mind is warped or your a two faced piece of crap. Either or, your pretty much screwed at this point. Yep, Trump was defeated but Trump ain't going away anytime soon. If Twitter won't let you speak, you create an alternative to Twitter and play the same game as Twitter and Facebook has played with Conservatives and Donald Trump. Like I've said, you's guys are so stupid it's unbelievable. It's no wonder why you guys get blind sided so much these days.

I would say we get hit by Republican obstructionism more than getting blind sided. What is more predictable than the senate blocking anything that helps the middle class? With the Republican philosophy being dominant through the unraveling, we have lost benefits, unions, jobs and equality. Blaming this on the Democrats is far from the truth. It is tribal thinking, xenophobia directed at those who are not in your immediate group. It is clucking like a chicken.

Twitter and Facebook have made a small attempt to correct Trump's habit of lying. Without lies, they wouldn't have to correct them.