America is a sick society

[Bill the Piper]

(10-05-2018, 06:01 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Zero population growth worldwide!

Space colonization will make room for many billions of people in the solar system. Of course, population growth must slow down somewhat, as the number of people cannot grow faster than new habitats are built.

[pbrower2a]

(10-04-2018, 11:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Author Robert Kaplan answers questions from readers

My thoughts: The parochial, provincial, insular character of red America was revealed to Robert Kaplan on his tour of America, as reported in a PBS Newshour interview. It makes clear to me again how the red-state Trump voters have created their own suffering. It's the very anti-globalist, narrow-minded, pro-free market, anti-socialist, anti-diversity policies they have voted for for decades that keep them in decline, while the coasts and the university towns that are connected to the world thrive. And yet they keep voting to keep themselves in pain and in decline. In voting for Trump, the towns in the heartland have voted to make themselves even MORE cut off from the world, through erecting immigration and tariff barriers and empowering an American administration that encourages the rejection of knowledge and the understanding of other peoples. It is just the opposite course Kaplan says they need to take in order to recover. Can they wake up? Or must they be dragged into a better future through political victory OVER them?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/earnin...-questions

(includes video)

(transcript starting half way through)

Caroline Walker:

You write about the growing divide between city states and rural areas and cities that have not adjusted to the global economy.

Do you have any thoughts about how to bridge this growing divide?

Robert Kaplan:

It was stunning, what I saw.

Outside of the two coasts, outside of the university towns and college towns, and outside of a few, a smattering of state capitals, which are doing very well, much of America are towns of 20,000, 30,000 people with shelled-out storefronts, nobody on the Main Street, people having lost all hope.

This book was written and researched before the last election, before the campaign even began for the last election. And I saw a heartland which was economically and socially devastated.

Jeffrey Brown:

And how does that play into what then followed in the election?

Robert Kaplan:

And then all I could think about is, how to bridge the divide is, we can't go backward, we can only go forward, because the only future is global.

You have to get more of these places hooked into the global economy. Like, I'm traveling along the Ohio River, and I see one devastated town after another. But then I get to Marietta, Ohio, which is a tiny college, but it has students from dozens of countries. It's very highly rated. And it's part of the global world.

Suddenly, I'm there, and then I leave it again.

Jeffrey Brown:

OK, let's go to one more question.

Brandon Irwin:

Mr. Kaplan, you say in the book, "Americans, I find more and more each day as I travel, do not want to know the details about foreign policy."

Is this disconnect with foreign policy replicated around the world?

Jeffrey Brown:

You do — we should say you travel all over. You have written about many other parts of the world.

Robert Kaplan:

Yes, I do. Yes, I have got reported from 100 countries.

And in most, but it's — you only see it replicated in large, massive countries, continental-size, like the United States, where there's so much going on internally, that the outside world seems almost to disappear in a way.

But in many — Europe is mainly small countries, and even the biggest countries is small by our standards. But, in Europe, in Africa and the Middle East, people are much more connected to world events, I find, than in the United States.

It's almost as if you know intellectually that every place in the U.S. — the Oklahoma Panhandle has agricultural ties with cities in China and everywhere. You know all this intellectually, but when you actually see it, and drive across it, the continent is so big and variegated, that the rest of the world seems abstract almost.

We are not going to solve this problem until we

(1) recognize that we have a problem where we do not so recognize it yet

(2) seek rational solutions instead of scapegoats

(3) recognize that the rest of the world matters to us

[Classic-Xer]

(10-05-2018, 01:20 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(10-04-2018, 11:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Author Robert Kaplan answers questions from readers

My thoughts: The parochial, provincial, insular character of red America was revealed to Robert Kaplan on his tour of America, as reported in a PBS Newshour interview. It makes clear to me again how the red-state Trump voters have created their own suffering. It's the very anti-globalist, narrow-minded, pro-free market, anti-socialist, anti-diversity policies they have voted for for decades that keep them in decline, while the coasts and the university towns that are connected to the world thrive. And yet they keep voting to keep themselves in pain and in decline. In voting for Trump, the towns in the heartland have voted to make themselves even MORE cut off from the world, through erecting immigration and tariff barriers and empowering an American administration that encourages the rejection of knowledge and the understanding of other peoples. It is just the opposite course Kaplan says they need to take in order to recover. Can they wake up? Or must they be dragged into a better future through political victory OVER them?




g divide?

Robert Kaplan:

It was stunning, what I saw.

Outside of the two coasts, outside of the university towns and college towns, and outside of a few, a smattering of state capitals, which are doing very well, much of America are towns of 20,000, 30,000 people with shelled-out storefronts, nobody on the Main Street, people having lost all hope.

This book was written and researched before the last election, before the campaign even began for the last election. And I saw a heartland which was economically and socially devastated.

Jeffrey Brown:

And how does that play into what then followed in the election?

Robert Kaplan:

And then all I could think about is, how to bridge the divide is, we can't go backward, we can only go forward, because the only future is global.

You have to get more of these places hooked into the global economy. Like, I'm traveling along the Ohio River, and I see one devastated town after another. But then I get to Marietta, Ohio, which is a tiny college, but it has students from dozens of countries. It's very highly rated. And it's part of the global world.

Suddenly, I'm there, and then I leave it again.

Jeffrey Brown:

OK, let's go to one more question.

Brandon Irwin:

Mr. Kaplan, you say in the book, "Americans, I find more and more each day as I travel, do not want to know the details about foreign policy."

Is this disconnect with foreign policy replicated around the world?

Jeffrey Brown:

You do — we should say you travel all over. You have written about many other parts of the world.

Robert Kaplan:

Yes, I do. Yes, I have got reported from 100 countries.

And in most, but it's — you only see it replicated in large, massive countries, continental-size, like the United States, where there's so much going on internally, that the outside world seems almost to disappear in a way.

But in many — Europe is mainly small countries, and even the biggest countries is small by our standards. But, in Europe, in Africa and the Middle East, people are much more connected to world events, I find, than in the United States.

It's almost as if you know intellectually that every place in the U.S. — the Oklahoma Panhandle has agricultural ties with cities in China and everywhere. You know all this intellectually, but when you actually see it, and drive across it, the continent is so big and variegated, that the rest of the world seems abstract almost.

OMG, what a case of stupidity.  Yeah, the global economy has one way to go, to destruction.  Let me lay it out.

Let's take the Oklahoma panhandle.  I know the place after all. The Oklahoma panhandle produces wheat and cows. The Oklahoma panhandle is also on top of the Ogalalla aquifer.  Now here's the joke. The global economy is mining that aquifer. Guess what happens when it runs out of water? You can only have a few cows per acre and do dry land farming because, no water, no irrigation.  Hahahahahaha.  The joke of the future is that link like a lot of other globalized shit's gonna come crashing down on fucking idiots like Robert Kaplan.  The moron can't see beyond his cloistered big city living.  Can't  morons see that mining water is a one way trip to oblivion?  I guess not, huh? Oh, and the cow farts in the stinky feedlots are a gas too, heheh.   Just think of all of that methane.

Mideast?  Yeah, I'm sure the folks over there are well connected.  They can't fucking help it after all. All of shitfuck Neocons made that happen. I'm sure they know about every bomb, aircraft, missle, etc. our  MIC has to offer. Well guess what? I bet they also think like like ole Rags does and hates globalization/Neocons.  After all, they experienced the nations getting wrecked, their infrastructure destroyed, family killed and the like. I also perfectly understand why IS lopped the heads off those Americans.  If some country did that to my family, fucking A, I'd like to lop some heads off with an AR-15.  Just shoot enough bullets at the neck and heads will roll, man.

Small towns?  The idiocy here blows my mind.  Globalization is what wrecked the economy there. We exported jobs and imported cheap shit in its place , yes because globalization. 

Immigration/borders.  Guess what? We need fewer people because resources are going to become scarce and we'll have our share of climate change refugees.  Charity begins at home, man.

Besides, local resilance is a better way to go.  Problem is, is wrecks the profit stream of multinational corporations so that's why few know of it. Oh well, we'll get to it later after globalism crashes and burns.

https://www.resalliance.org/

Yeah, reds need to wake up to being screwed over by a facet of globalization being tinkle down economics and no regulations concerning workers, that being neoliberalism.

Blues likewise need to wake up to being duped into supporting cheap labor and the importation of more consumers and screwing over their concerns about mother earth and  poor citizens.

Neoliberalism/Neoconservatism the true axis of evil of our times.

Well, Eric associates himself with those who have been prospering the most from globalization. Eric hasn't seen the devastation caused by globalization. Eric doesn't seem to stray very far from the comforts, the safety, the familiarity and the good feelings associated with home. Hilary saw it and heard about it for years, ignored it or excused it and offered more government welfare and more educational programs and more federal money for support and so forth. I'm not an isolationist but I'm not blind, foolish or a sucker either. My only issue with your views is you keep looking to the government to provide this or that for your sake, legalize this for your sake and tax us more for this and that in order to support this or that and increase the amount for government to spend on this or that for your sake. At what point in your life have you been able to have it both ways, have your cake and eat it too and so forth. The way I see it, I gave you my support in the last election. I didn't have to but I did with my support of Trump. I make really good money working part time.

[Classic-Xer]

(10-05-2018, 08:43 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: We are not going to solve this problem until we

(1) recognize that we have a problem where we do not so recognize it yet

(2) seek rational solutions instead of scapegoats

(3) recognize that the rest of the world matters to us

(1) Democratic voters have to stop bouncing back and forth and between working class issues. 

(2) Democratic voters have to stop allowing their politicians to use scapegoats.

(3) Democratic voters have to decide which world (the rest of the world. rest of the countries or the world they live in, the country they live in) matters more to them.

[pbrower2a]

(10-05-2018, 08:50 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Well, Eric associates himself with those who have been prospering the most from globalization. Eric hasn't seen the devastation caused by globalization. Eric doesn't seem to stray very far from the comforts, the safety, the familiarity and the good feelings associated with home. Hilary saw it and heard about it for years, ignored it or excused it and offered more government welfare and more educational programs and more federal money for support and so forth. I'm not an isolationist but I'm not blind, foolish or a sucker either. My only issue with your views is you keep looking to the government to provide this or that for your sake, legalize this for your sake and tax us more for this and that in order to support this or that and increase the amount for government to spend on this or that for your sake. At what point in your life have you been able to have it both ways, have your cake and eat it too and so forth. The way I see it, I gave you my support in the last election. I didn't have to but I did with my support of Trump. I make really good money working part time.

Donald Trump believes in the centralization of federal power when such enhances his and devolution when such can enrich his cronies.

[Eric the Green]

(10-05-2018, 04:05 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: 1.  Small towns don't need to have old jobs return. Since lots of high tech jobs can be done remotely, it doesn't matter where you live. Folks can have the benefits of small towns like no traffic, cheap housing, and fresh food, once agriculture has to scale down. <-  Big AG is doomed by resource depletion like all things big. Oil will get more expensive.  Oil won't run out, but it's gonna cost.   So, the young ones can get on-line and learn the skills of whatever sized companies , chuck cars even, and enjoy a less hectic small town life. Yeah, cars are so over rated. Tesla's a joke. Why mess with cars when one can replace big ugly freeways and airports with train stations for regular and light rail? Meh on corporations. The way I see it, there are no US based corporations. All big corporations are transnationals that owe no allegiance to  anyone but the bottom line and need a smacking by anti trust laws.  

The people in rural red America feel stuck, and have no access or education to those high tech jobs. There may well be bridges to build there as Kaplan said. Mostly young people may be able to bring high tech to rural red America. But not very many young people in urban blue America want to do that. So it will be up to young red rural Americans to move to blue America, and then come back; I suppose.

Rail needs to come back, but cars are helpful. I don't live in an urban core anymore, and like many other suburbanites, our place is built for cars. So Tesla is no joke. But I agree; anti-trust the hell out of corporations. I hope it happens in the 2020s if and when we get our government back. For now, it is lost, and it will take drastic action indeed to get it back. It's a 4T; anything is possible.

Quote:2. I'm not worried about corporate globalism lasting. It's gonna collapse due to climate change, population overshoot, and mass poverty. It's a one way trip to a new dark ages man.

3. I just want my little country to escape as much of the mess as possible. That means fewer people to match the carrying capacity. 

"Our little country?" Which country did you say you're from, again?

What we are forgetting, is that we had a chance to create a new Renaissance when the wall came down. There is more peace and prosperity in the world than ever before. We just don't know a good thing, so we prefer to keep our heads glued to crap and our politics filled with sewage.

Quote:4. Jobs no Americans will do. That's dumb.  If you shut off the cheap labor, companies can either raise wages and improve working conditions so Americans will do the jobs or else they can just shut down.  It's their choice and since they fucked over American workers, tough shit to them.  I'd pick lettuce if I got paid $30.00/hr plus benefits. Lettuce prices go up, but oh well. This is what I keep telling you. There's no need for more people, because resources will become more scarce. I don't want to import elite labor either. If companies want to do business here, they need to support our education system more.  They sure as hell need to have a must do reason to do that.

But the immigrants are not doing those jobs. Residents don't do those jobs, no matter what the wages are, and wages for them are not going to ever go up to $30 an hour. So the immigrants aren't bringing anyone's wages down. The cheap labor is abroad, not coming from abroad to here. The jobs that were lost in the red America that Kaplan saw were not farm jobs; they were industrial jobs, and immigrants did not take them. The companies shipped them and their factories abroad, or consolidated and mechanized their jobs out of existence. Free trade allowed foreign companies to out-compete companies with high-wage American workers. Unions were decimated. Immigrants had little or nothing to do with those lost rust belt jobs; they didn't even go there. But Trump still exploits white resentment, and brainwashes them to vote for his anti-immigration measures. It's easy to create scapegoats; Republicans, not Democrats, are the expert scapegoat creators, unlike what Classic Xer says. "They're not sending their best; they're bringing lots of problems... They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists." -- Donald the Drump. Misdirect blame, and then you can keep doing what you're doing to hurt the people.

Supporting our education more, yes. The companies do need more people to do educated jobs already. Arousing hatred and resentment of poor immigrants? Not needed. Educated jobs are not threatened by them. No doubt wages and working conditions need to be raised. Maybe forcing farmers to raise wages much higher is a solution to immigrants taking cheaper-wage farm jobs, but the immigrant bashers are not interested in that solution; it hurts their bottom line.

Mistreatment and injustice hurts everyone. We can have a fair immigration system that allows people to come here legally in reasonable numbers, and screens out terrorists and criminals, without separating families and without calling everybody who crosses the border seeking asylum a criminal and a rapist. It's not true. The USA was built by immigrants. Borders are imaginary lines only. Fair immigration policies were proposed already and shelved by Republicans. Trump's policies are racist and un-American and won't work.

More people per se does not threaten the economy or jobs. It creates jobs, and young people whom parents brought here (the dreamers) who graduated school and have aspirations will create jobs and be good customers. Better economies and freer societies abroad will reduce immigrants and refugees. The USA can help and thereby reduce illegal immigration. Building a wall and deporting people for no reason will not stop it.

Quote:5. There will be no need to connect to a world that's like a petri dish full of bacteria.  Humans ain't no different. We'll keep breeding until our population crashes in our own waste. Trump's a bit off wrt shithole.  The whole world's becoming a shithole full of microplastics, fertilizer fueled red tides , and just plain trash.  Trump is off wrt shit holes. The whole world is becoming a shit hole. The US is a literal shit hole due to homeless problems, Mr. Trump. The flood tide of human shit means the whole world is a shit hole. Now that's one thing that's global, human shit, all over the place , regardless of race, it's something whether we like it or not we'll have to embrace, face to face.

Right; we'll need some global solutions and well as national ones to fix that. It can be done, and if millennials learn to vote as well as complain, then the job will be easier.

[pbrower2a]

(10-06-2018, 03:07 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:

(10-05-2018, 04:05 AM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote: 1.  Small towns don't need to have old jobs return. Since lots of high tech jobs can be done remotely, it doesn't matter where you live. Folks can have the benefits of small towns like no traffic, cheap housing, and fresh food, once agriculture has to scale down. <-  Big AG is doomed by resource depletion like all things big. Oil will get more expensive.  Oil won't run out, but it's gonna cost.   So, the young ones can get on-line and learn the skills of whatever sized companies , chuck cars even, and enjoy a less hectic small town life. Yeah, cars are so over rated. Tesla's a joke. Why mess with cars when one can replace big ugly freeways and airports with train stations for regular and light rail? Meh on corporations. The way I see it, there are no US based corporations. All big corporations are transnationals that owe no allegiance to  anyone but the bottom line and need a smacking by anti trust laws.  

The people in rural red America feel stuck, and have no access or education to those high tech jobs. There may well be bridges to build there as Kaplan said. Mostly young people may be able to bring high tech to rural red America. But not very many young people in urban blue America want to do that. So it will be up to young red rural Americans to move to blue America, and then come back; I suppose.

If they get the education necessary for high-tech jobs, they must leave the rural areas for the cities where such jobs exist. This is also true in small cities of failure such as Lima, Ohio, where people are well prepared for an economy that no longer exists and probably never will exist again.

Aside from people whose families have substantial holdings in agribusiness, the only professionals that small towns can attract are medical personnel... cheap golf? cottage by the lake? Those used to be available to the working class, but they are unqualified luxuries now. Entertainment is largely cable TV programming available anywhere, recorded video, or what books or music one gets from somewhere else. That leaves hobbies, church, civic groups, fraternal lodges, and families -- and to really fit into a rural area, one must be there from childhood except for a stint in the Armed Forces.  The human relationships can be rich, but one does not form them after childhood. Rural communities are clannish in the extreme, and even more exclusive than the havens of extreme wealth and privilege.

Quote:Rail needs to come back, but cars are helpful. I don't live in an urban core anymore, and like many other suburbanites, our place is built for cars. So Tesla is no joke. But I agree; anti-trust the hell out of corporations. I hope it happens in the 2020s if and when we get our government back. For now, it is lost, and it will take drastic action indeed to get it back. It's a 4T; anything is possible.

Rural areas are even more dependent upon cars. The medical specialist might be fifty miles away. Where I live, the nearest K-Mart or Kohl's is 25 miles away; the nearest Barnes and Noble, Best Buy, Sears, and Target are each about 40 miles away; the nearest JC Penney and Macy's are about fifty miles away. Small towns used to have vibrant commerce, but that is vanishing. The kids whose parents owned profitable stores didn't want to stay in retail. The business sector is getting sleazier with rent-to-own emporia, 

Quote:

Quote:2. I'm not worried about corporate globalism lasting. It's gonna collapse due to climate change, population overshoot, and mass poverty. It's a one way trip to a new dark ages man.

3. I just want my little country to escape as much of the mess as possible. That means fewer people to match the carrying capacity. 

"Our little country?" Which country did you say you're from, again?

What we are forgetting, is that we had a chance to create a new Renaissance when the wall came down. There is more peace and prosperity in the world than ever before. We just don't know a good thing, so we prefer to keep our heads glued to crap and our politics filled with sewage.

When the economic foundation of the System collapses, so will its institutions. That includes schools and hospitals. Life could again be nasty, short, and brutish as Thomas Hobbes says the state of primitive anarchy was. I am reminded of what Barbara Tuchman said in The Proud Tower of the age ending with the start of the First World War: that people who lived through the First World War may have recalled that time as one of wonder and glory after the war and the disappointing reality -- but not when that time (earliest thirteen years of the 19th century)  was going on; besides, truly glorious times do not yield the seeds of their destruction.

Should things go similarly bad a century or so later, people might look upon the last twenty years or so as wondrous times for the high-quality entertainment and some glorious achievements in culture and science. But people don't love this time; it has too many insecurities, too much inequity, too much corruption, too much madness, and horrible politics. Our time, due to the aforesaid faults, has planted the seeds of its own destruction.

Musical illustration: La Valse, by Maurice Ravel (1919-1920). Written just a year or two after the end of the "Great War", it recreates the superficial attractiveness of the world of The Proud Tower with a suggestion of its underlying and ultimately self-destructive rottenness.





(My favorite version was a performance in a 70th-anniversary concert of the Israel Philharmonic... I wonder what cultural differences between Israel and the rest of the West might have made that performance more gut-wrenching... irony intended).  

Quote:

Quote:4. Jobs no Americans will do. That's dumb.  If you shut off the cheap labor, companies can either raise wages and improve working conditions so Americans will do the jobs or else they can just shut down.  It's their choice and since they fucked over American workers, tough shit to them.  I'd pick lettuce if I got paid $30.00/hr plus benefits. Lettuce prices go up, but oh well. This is what I keep telling you. There's no need for more people, because resources will become more scarce. I don't want to import elite labor either. If companies want to do business here, they need to support our education system more.  They sure as hell need to have a must do reason to do that.

But the immigrants are not doing those jobs. Residents don't do those jobs, no matter what the wages are, and wages for them are not going to ever go up to $30 an hour. So the immigrants aren't bringing anyone's wages down. The cheap labor is abroad, not coming from abroad to here. The jobs that were lost in the red America that Kaplan saw were not farm jobs; they were industrial jobs, and immigrants did not take them. The companies shipped them and their factories abroad, or consolidated and mechanized their jobs out of existence. Free trade allowed foreign companies to out-compete companies with high-wage American workers. Unions were decimated. Immigrants had little or nothing to do with those lost rust belt jobs; they didn't even go there. But Trump still exploits white resentment, and brainwashes them to vote for his anti-immigration measures. It's easy to create scapegoats; Republicans, not Democrats, are the expert scapegoat creators, unlike what Classic Xer says. "They're not sending their best; they're bringing lots of problems... They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists." -- Donald the Drump. Misdirect blame, and then you can keep doing what you're doing to hurt the people.

I will say this: the Latin-American immigrants impress me far more than similarly-poor white people for

(1) staying clear of crime
(2) not getting hooked on meth and opiates
(3) encouraging their kids to do well in school
(4) rejecting superstition and pseudoscience
(5) taking care of their own

The meek may not inherit the world, but the competent will.

Quote:Supporting our education more, yes. The companies do need more people to do educated jobs already. Arousing hatred and resentment of poor immigrants? Not needed. Educated jobs are not threatened by them. No doubt wages and working conditions need to be raised. Maybe forcing farmers to raise wages much higher is a solution to immigrants taking cheaper-wage farm jobs, but the immigrant bashers are not interested in that solution; it hurts their bottom line.

Unless all of our economic bounty ends up going to rapacious, grafting elites who use it for sybaritic indulgence (including castles and palaces) in a new aristocratic order, we will need more education just to figure out how to use the large number of non-work hours. The End of Scarcity implies that we will need to work fewer hours just to stave off obscene poverty. There's nothing wrong with STEM for work, but even with that we will work less. We had better know how to use the time that appears as leisure. The need to teach people how to be good citizens implies that people will need to learn more about art, literature, music, and cinema to know what to do with more time on their hands. More physical fitness and appreciation of nature so that they can enjoy hiking, boating, camping, and other wholesome activities? Ditto.

Quote:Mistreatment and injustice hurts everyone. We can have a fair immigration system that allows people to come here legally in reasonable numbers, and screens out terrorists and criminals, without separating families and without calling everybody who crosses the border seeking asylum a criminal and a rapist. It's not true. The USA was built by immigrants. Borders are imaginary lines only. Fair immigration policies were proposed already and shelved by Republicans. Trump's policies are racist and un-American and won't work.

Good people will be fleeing Syria because under either the Assad crime syndicate or the Islamists threatening to take over and establish their own criminal syndicate in the form of a government, good people will be uncomfortable. Criminals from among the defeated will want to come here simply to avoid just retribution. Maybe we can do what India did with Froduald Karamira, who disseminated hate speech against the Tutsi people, including his infamous "It is time to harvest the tall trees", referring to the Tutsi being taller than the Hutu who largely did the killing; India stopped him on entry in Mumbai and deported him for trial (and ultimate execution).

Borders delineate legal authority and usually little else. Within the Schengen Zone, some borders are virtual irrelevancies in people's lives. Some people might order Food in a restaurant in the Netherlands and step barely outside the restaurant and dine outside -- in Belgium. A thin painted line might have "B" on one side and "NL" on the other.

Quote:More people per se does not threaten the economy or jobs. It creates jobs, and young people whom parents brought here (the dreamers) who graduated school and have aspirations will create jobs and be good customers. Better economies and freer societies abroad will reduce immigrants and refugees. The USA can help and thereby reduce illegal immigration. Building a wall and deporting people for no reason will not stop it.

The only bad effect that I can see is that a larger population in any area drives up the cost of rental housing. This applies whether the increase comes from immigration or from births. High rents make life more costly and less satisfying for renters. As for births, owners of urban apartments are among the most reactionary interests in America; look at Donald Trump as an illustration. They have an interest in a population explosion from even an abortion ban and especially a ban on contraception.

Quote:

Quote:5. There will be no need to connect to a world that's like a petri dish full of bacteria.  Humans ain't no different. We'll keep breeding until our population crashes in our own waste. Trump's a bit off wrt shithole.  The whole world's becoming a shithole full of microplastics, fertilizer fueled red tides , and just plain trash.  Trump is off wrt shit holes. The whole world is becoming a shit hole. The US is a literal shit hole due to homeless problems, Mr. Trump. The flood tide of human shit means the whole world is a shit hole. Now that's one thing that's global, human shit, all over the place , regardless of race, it's something whether we like it or not we'll have to embrace, face to face.

Right; we'll need some global solutions and well as national ones to fix that. It can be done, and if millennials learn to vote as well as complain, then the job will be easier.

Zero Population Growth worldwide is a good start. Trump and his political lackeys are making America into a fecal pit.

[Eric the Green]

"But people don't love this time; it has too many insecurities, too much inequity, too much corruption, too much madness, and horrible politics. Our time, due to the aforesaid faults, has planted the seeds of its own destruction."

I'm not sure. It is remarkable how much more peace and prosperity people had up until the 2008 crash, and now there has been a weak recovery thanks to Obama. People around the world have progressed in many places. The politics would have been better in the USA too if not for some close elections in 2000 and 2016, which our system allowed the greedy to virtually steal, and if younger people had lived up to their civic archetype and voted to support Obama in the midterms of 2010 and 2014. I do think it was more about laziness and not being informed about civic responsibility, more than disappointment with Obama, although the latter played a role. Meanwhile the Tea Party and other manifestations of the 1980s regression were active and kept us from progressing as we should have for 40 years and counting.

So, because of this political failure, we are now stuck with a Supreme Court that could well squelch anything which reformers try to do, and lock in the Reagan/Tea Party legacy for another generation. Elections may well go more and more Democratic, but they may not go Democratic enough, IF the Supreme Court manages to lock in continued disappointment and disillusion among voters. Only if the millennials and other liberal and diverse groups are militant enough, and not complacent, will they realize the scale of the problem, and act to pack or reform the Supreme Court so that progress can resume. At the least, this will prolong the 4T as long as I have stated it will be prolonged, and a 1T that will not be as peaceful and secure as many here hope.

It is truly a tragedy that the religious and free-market fundamentalists have locked us into the past, supported by a 240-year old constitution that locks in control by the (former?) slave states and other redneck states, as well as the failure of liberals and millennials to vote in 2010 that has resulted gerrymandered state elections, and which now the Court will likely hold in place. Money is to be held as speech until the Court changes, keeping the oligarchy in power. The possibility of a national divorce and resettlement process can't be discounted. Susan Collins and Sandra Day O'Connor now bear the greatest responsibility for our political failure. People don't realize that Kavanaugh is not only unfit personally, but that a right-wing Court is truly a damper on ALL hopes for a constructive century ahead.

If not for the politics which the likes of Classic Xer and Galen support, we could have had a prosperous century without too much trouble. We could be free of a lot of the problems which held us down in previous centuries. Some other societies may well move ahead while the USA stalls and falls, although the problems like climate change which Reagan/Gingrich/Tea Party/Trump have caused also affect the whole world. It is only the temptations of free-market dogma along with religious regression (i.e. abortion fixation) that are leading us to doom. Only a decisive blue victory and Supreme Court reform and/or packing during THIS 4T will save any chance we still might have. Otherwise the downward spiral cannot be rescued in a future 2T or 4T. Regression and failure will be too locked in, I'm afraid. We must realize in this 4T that Kavanaugh is not acceptable, or we fail forever. What a horrible man he is, and how horrible all like him are who support him.

[Classic-Xer]

(10-05-2018, 09:30 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-05-2018, 08:50 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Well, Eric associates himself with those who have been prospering the most from globalization. Eric hasn't seen the devastation caused by globalization. Eric doesn't seem to stray very far from the comforts, the safety, the familiarity and the good feelings associated with home. Hilary saw it and heard about it for years, ignored it or excused it and offered more government welfare and more educational programs and more federal money for support and so forth. I'm not an isolationist but I'm not blind, foolish or a sucker either. My only issue with your views is you keep looking to the government to provide this or that for your sake, legalize this for your sake and tax us more for this and that in order to support this or that and increase the amount for government to spend on this or that for your sake. At what point in your life have you been able to have it both ways, have your cake and eat it too and so forth. The way I see it, I gave you my support in the last election. I didn't have to but I did with my support of Trump. I make really good money working part time.

Donald Trump believes in the centralization of federal power when such enhances his and devolution when such can enrich his cronies.

You liberal views seem consistent with the views of someone who has been diagnosed with Asperger's disease.

[pbrower2a]

(10-06-2018, 04:49 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(10-05-2018, 09:30 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-05-2018, 08:50 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Well, Eric associates himself with those who have been prospering the most from globalization. Eric hasn't seen the devastation caused by globalization. Eric doesn't seem to stray very far from the comforts, the safety, the familiarity and the good feelings associated with home. Hilary saw it and heard about it for years, ignored it or excused it and offered more government welfare and more educational programs and more federal money for support and so forth. I'm not an isolationist but I'm not blind, foolish or a sucker either. My only issue with your views is you keep looking to the government to provide this or that for your sake, legalize this for your sake and tax us more for this and that in order to support this or that and increase the amount for government to spend on this or that for your sake. At what point in your life have you been able to have it both ways, have your cake and eat it too and so forth. The way I see it, I gave you my support in the last election. I didn't have to but I did with my support of Trump. I make really good money working part time.

Donald Trump believes in the centralization of federal power when such enhances his and devolution when such can enrich his cronies.

You liberal views seem consistent with the views of someone who has been diagnosed with Asperger's disease.

No, my liberal views are consistent with a 'disease' called 'conscience' in a time in which the real rulers are mostly corrupt, cruel, and in contempt for democratic decencies. I dislike being stepped upon, and I trust that most people dislike being stepped upon, too -- and that the vast majority of people have no desire to step on other people. If economic elites select for cruelty, then that elite has a huge problem that might have horrible consequences that lead in the end to the ruin of that elite. Pathological elites tend to be overthrown in revolutions and international wars that they provoke through their evil.

A set of soft rules for the elites and a set of rigid rules for non-elites usually works badly. With rank and power rightly go responsibilities to use those wisely.

The Golden Rule (basically, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you") exists from antiquity and arises in both the Abrhamamic and Dharmic religions, has existed long before anyone had any idea of what Asperger's was. People like me used to be understood to be crazy when in fact we are simply cold, unfeeling rationalists who must pretend to care about others just to have any decency as people.

[Eric the Green]

Words cannot express my contempt for red state Americans who decide to vote Republican because some people protested against appointment of a judge that will destroy democracy, voting rights, and any reform we may want to make. Not only do these red state Americans embrace tyranny in their support for Kavanaugh, but they want us to live in a totalitarian state where the people cannot express their opinions about the tyrant taking away our democracy. Shameful beyond words.

[Galen]

(10-07-2018, 10:44 PM)Eric the Obtuse Wrote: Words cannot express my contempt for red state Americans who decide to vote Republican because some people protested against appointment of a judge that will destroy democracy, voting rights, and any reform we may want to make.

As the left becomes increasingly unhinged this will probably continue to get worse for the Dims.

I believe the following image says it all.

[Eric the Green]

The left can get unhinged, or they can get busy. That will be up to us.

Worth posting yet again:

[Galen]

(10-08-2018, 02:11 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The left can get unhinged, or they can get busy.

Considering the track record of the left it seems far more likely they will become even more unhinged.  Under normal circumstances this would be true but Trump really has a gift for pushing Dims over the edge.  There are thing I don't about Trump but his effects on the left are the most entertainment I have had in years.

[pbrower2a]

(10-08-2018, 02:34 AM)Galen Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 02:11 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The left can get unhinged, or they can get busy.

Considering the track record of the left it seems far more likely they will become even more unhinged.  Under normal circumstances this would be true but Trump really has a gift for pushing Dims over the edge.  There are thing I don't about Trump but his effects on the left are the most entertainment I have had in years.

Sadist!

The Right has been abusing power, which suggests that they are even more troublesome than 'sore losers'. They are 'sore winners' who love to remind the Other Side of its defeats while making those defeats sting more intensely every time.

Most people get through 'sore loser' feelings... just think of die-hard Cubs fans all those years. Then winning gets sweet. But as with most baseball fans irrespective of the team they find that after the celebration is over it is no longer time to rub the win in someone else's face. One must pay for cable TV to see the games.

Trump has a 'gift' for piling on the insults. Most people have no use for that or can't get away with that. The late Don Rickles made a career cutting down Hollywood celebrities down to size. He did not do that to handicapped people, people with incurable diseases, or families with missing children; such would be unconscionable.

Donald Trump is the Darth Vader of American politics today, someone that people love to hate. But we all know that Darth Vader and his horrible Empire are somehow doomed.

[Eric the Green]

(10-08-2018, 12:32 AM)Galen Wrote:

(10-07-2018, 10:44 PM)Eric the Obtuse Wrote: Words cannot express my contempt for red state Americans who decide to vote Republican because some people protested against appointment of a judge that will destroy democracy, voting rights, and any reform we may want to make.

As the left becomes increasingly unhinged this will probably continue to get worse for the Dims.

I believe the following image says it all.

Well, it looks like going unhinged worked very well for the Republicans.

[Eric the Green]

(10-08-2018, 02:34 AM)Galen Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 02:11 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The left can get unhinged, or they can get busy.

Considering the track record of the left it seems far more likely they will become even more unhinged.  Under normal circumstances this would be true but Trump really has a gift for pushing Dims over the edge.  There are thing I don't about Trump but his effects on the left are the most entertainment I have had in years.

I get plenty of entertainment out of Trump thanks to Colbert, Meyers, Maher and Oliver.

[Galen]

(10-08-2018, 10:49 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 02:34 AM)Galen Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 02:11 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The left can get unhinged, or they can get busy.

Considering the track record of the left it seems far more likely they will become even more unhinged.  Under normal circumstances this would be true but Trump really has a gift for pushing Dims over the edge.  There are thing I don't about Trump but his effects on the left are the most entertainment I have had in years.

Sadist!

Not really.  Its much easier to win if you can get your opponent to destroy themselves.  Once Trump realized there was no working with the Dims he started doing things that most people wouldn't care about but cause the left to go bananas.  Unlike you I would be willing to bet that Trump has read Sun Tzu.

[pbrower2a]

(10-08-2018, 03:27 PM)Galen Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 10:49 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 02:34 AM)Galen Wrote:

(10-08-2018, 02:11 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: The left can get unhinged, or they can get busy.

Considering the track record of the left it seems far more likely they will become even more unhinged.  Under normal circumstances this would be true but Trump really has a gift for pushing Dims over the edge.  There are thing I don't about Trump but his effects on the left are the most entertainment I have had in years.

Sadist!

Not really.  Its much easier to win if you can get your opponent to destroy themselves.  Once Trump realized there was no working with the Dims he started doing things that most people wouldn't care about but cause the left to go bananas.  Unlike you I would be willing to bet that Trump has read Sun Tzu.

Donald Trump, from most accounts, isn't much of a reader.

Donald Trump has been good at insulting his opponents, offending the sensibilities of anyone not with him, and working contrary to the values of those who were never going to vote for him. Since environmentalists were never going to support him, he could promote ravaging the environment on behalf of special-interest groups.

This polarizes politics even more, and it is better at creating hatred than at creating concord.

We shall see how this works in the 2018 midterm elections. Nobody has ever done this before (except for Lincoln freeing the slaves, which is commendable), so it is either a consummate stratagem or consummate folly. In between? I doubt it.

[David Horn]

(10-05-2018, 07:10 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:

(10-05-2018, 06:01 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Zero population growth worldwide!

Space colonization will make room for many billions of people in the solar system. Of course, population growth must slow down somewhat, as the number of people cannot grow faster than new habitats are built.

I suspect that ZPG will simply happen of its own accord.  When having many children is less desirable than having none at all, the population problem reverses, as it has in many countries already.  Space colonization?  Not soon and not in any substantial number when it starts in earnest.