— X — wrote:

You left out some details.

Is the 99%er on Island one the only guy working? What if he created the island like one of those fake islands China makes in the South China Sea? Say he made the island, built machines to cultivate the land and dig wells, set up an aqueduct, built infrastructure to get from one side of the island to the other, built luxury huts with premium thatch, and provided clothing & necessities for decades upon decades.

And then 9 people showed up illegally from a nearby shitty island and demanded all his stuff.

Are the 10 people on island 2 all pulling their weight equally? What if they’re all lazy and contribute nothing to the island except for one hard working guy? Say only one of the 10 gets out there and works. He goes out and harvests the coconuts, digs the wells, does all the fishing, manufactures clothing (grass skirts & palm frond vests, I would imagine), and stockpiles it to ensure his longevity.

The other 9 do nothing but steal his shit because they’re too lazy to do it themselves.

Well, I can’t speak for WV, but to me, the problem with your question is — at least I’m reading it this way — assuming that just one person, the “capitalist,” did all of those things her/himself. And that’s never, ever, not ever, how things work under capitalism. Huge numbers of people work for the capitalist and do all those things. They do the actual lifting of the bails, and toting of the barges. They actually “build” it, not the capitalist.

The capitalist basically plays golf or goes to the country club, and delegates work to others, but then gets to claim EVERYTHING made by everyone else in that workforce for themselves. They get to, legally, appropriate — which is a fancy way of saying “steal” — everything generated by that workforce, and they get to decide the value of their workers’ time. Just that one capitalist gets to do that, which I find profoundly immoral.

I think capitalism is evil, radically immoral, and is always already an act of theft. IMO, no sane society should accept it as its form of economics. It creates blatantly unequal power arrangements, automatically creates arbitrary, forced, neck-breaking hierarchies, and disproportionately rewards the few for the work of the many.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the “island” metaphor.

One area of David Barton critique might be more to your liking than the others. Because it comes from conservative Christians themselves. There are plenty of atheist, secular humanist angles in this debate, but it’s interesting that several conservative Christian scholars have come out to debunk Barton and his mythology.

Getting Jefferson Right: Fact Checking Claims about Our Third President Kindle Edition by Warren Throckmorton (Author), Michael Coulter (Author)

The author’s site:

https://gettingjeffersonright.com/

And an overview of the debate:

By Paul Harvey June 4, 2012 The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton

An excerpt from the last of these links:

Lies, Damned Lies, and Damned Misleading Lies

As the poster child for tendentiousness, Barton makes easy pickings for dispassionate truth-seekers like Throckmorton and Coulter. One by one, they consider, historicize, and debunk Barton’s claims: that Jefferson used federal funds to promote missions to the Indians, that he sought a theological professorship at the University of Virginia, that in only a very few of his letters did he attack basic Christian theological beliefs, that he believed not in a “wall of separation” of church and state but in a Republic that would actively promote Christianity, that his sexual morality was unimpeachable, that he didn’t really edit out the miraculous stories of the New Testament, that he founded the Virginia Bible Society, and on and on.

They find without fail that the claims fall into one of the following categories: 1) complete falsehoods (there are plenty of those); 2) misleading falsehoods (such as the story about wanting Christian imagery on the national seal—true, but on the other side of the seal, had Jefferson gotten his wish, would have been a pagan story); 3) true, but entirely irrelevant and ultimately misleading statements (such as signing documents with “the Year of our Lord,” which he did because pre-packaged treaty forms had that language, and had about as much meaning as signing “Dear” in our salutations in letters to complete strangers); 4) statements with a “kernel” of truth but blown so far out of proportion as to end up being false (such as Jefferson wanting federal funding for Indian missions, when in fact the titles of the bills simply took on the name of already existing religious societies); 5) baffling assertions that are so far out of the realm of reality as to be neither “true” nor “false,” but simply bizarre (such as Barton’s defense of Jefferson’s views on race, which were disturbingly ugly even by the standards of his era).

In each of these categories, as Throckmorton and Coulter gently put it, “we find the reality is often much different than the claim.” That’s their way of saying that the claims are, mostly, “pants on fire,” to use the language of Politifact, the Tampa Bay Times’ fact-checking project. Others rate a “false” or “mostly false” label, while there isn’t a single one (other than minor statements of fact, such as date of birth or dates of his presidency) that rates “true,” or even “mostly true.”

Getting Jefferson Right is an excellent example of the art of historical contextualization, of trying to tell the whole story, not just part of it. For those reasons, the work should become a standard reference.

Excellent post, PA. Well said.

— X — wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

I think this entire dust-up is absurd. If ANYONE wants to say no to artificial social rituals, it should be a given in a supposedly “free society” that this is okay.

That’s not what they’re doing though. They’re protesting America. These Athletes are doing this BECAUSE it (the flag, the anthem) represents America. Kaepernick said as much. They’re not protesting the idea that they HAVE to stand for the anthem because it’s an artificial social construct. They’re doing it because they want to illustrate to people that America is bad. Again, Kaepernick said as much and many have followed suit. That’s what people have a problem with. *I’m* not taking a position on it. *I’m* not saying it’s good or bad. Personally, I wrote to the NFL and suggested they eliminate the rule that players need to be on the field for the Anthem (did you know that?) and play the Anthem before the teams take the field (for the fans), and THEN let the teams take the field. That way, if a player wants to protest playing an America-themed game, they can stay in the locker room and get docked. Subsequently, there will be no public protests, and players will have to reevaluate how much they care about (insert social cause here) against how much they love their money.

X,

We disagree about this, especially the part I bolded. No. They’re not trying to say “America” is bad. Whatever “America” is at any given time. And, no, Kap and other players have never said that. Not even remotely. They’re protesting against specific injustices that happen IN America, not the entire nation itself.

Which brings me to this: I’ve noticed a pattern on the right, in the public figure and political realm, pretty much since I became politically aware. And the cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy of all of this just knocks me out. Right-wing public figures and politicians can go all hair’s on fire in outrage about all kinds of things that happen IN America, but their supporters never seem to see this as “anti-American” or “bashing America” or, as you term it, “protesting America.” But when their political opponents are critical of certain things that happen IN America, or aspects of our history, it’s almost always and automatically condemned as “anti-American” or “protesting America.” As in, there’s an instant resort to condemning critiques coming from left of center in that way.

I have no doubt that many a right-wing political and public “leader” does this in a cynical, exploitative way, but it’s all too often accepted as righteous by right-wing rank and file. It shouldn’t be. Average right-wing Joes and Janes need to step back, take a deep breath, and see how they’re being manipulated by this bogus, divisive rhetoric into turning against their fellow Americans. And they are being manipulated.

Again, think about the double standards and hypocrisy here. When the Dixie Chicks said they were embarrassed to be from the same state as Bush, they received a mass of death threats, were black-balled from the music industry, and their records were literally set on fire. They were pilloried as “anti-American” for having the nerve to rebuke Bush in a very, very mild manner.

Contrast that to the things said about Obama or any previous Democratic president, or various others like gay people, feminists, “liberals,” whom boatloads of right-wing religious leaders have directly blamed for causing weather catastrophes like Katrina, etc. etc. The list goes on and on regarding the most hysterical hatred being lodged at people left of center (and various minorities) by those right of center, without this being called “anti-American,” etc. etc.

Why is nearly EVERY criticism about things that happen IN America considered “anti-American,” if it comes from minorities and people left of center, but not considered that if the people doing the criticism are right of center?

— X — wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

Aren’t you talking about two distinctly different things here? The perception by some that some people are “disrespecting the flag,” and actually doing that? There’s a huge difference. What you’re talking about is “emotions” and “feelings” about symbols, not an actually, concretely “disrespectful” act. And if you want to play a numbers game here, I’d bet you that most Americans couldn’t care less about this topic, and that few Americans are actually all that bothered by someone taking a knee. Do any of us stop what we’re doing, put down the popcorn and the beer, when we’re sitting at home during the anthem?

I’d bet few do. So what is “disrespectful” about it? And, again, it wasn’t an organically derived “tradition.” It was imposed on us, by a few team-sports owners, and by two presidents, Wilson and Hoover.

Choosing the FSK song among millions of others was done via Big Gubmint fiat. We had no voice in the matter. And the anthem was played in scatter shot ways, primarily as a way of indoctrinating Americans to move in lock step during WWI. It’s had an on again, off again history since that time.

Why should ANYONE care that players express their free speech rights by NOT participating in an artificially constructed ritual of indoctrination? IMO, it’s the essence of liberty and freedom to say, “No. I choose not to go along with the crowd on this one.”

And it’s not even about the flag. It’s about the anthem. Which is racist and champions slavery, and was written by a slavery-loving, white supremacist author. Again, I’m actually surprised any black athletes stands for our arbitrarily imposed national anthem.

It’s not really about how it originated to these people. It’s about what it stands for now. Nobody is going to go back and micro analyze its origins now. And they shouldn’t. It’s taken on a specific meaning to people and it’s universally accepted to represent Patriotism and honoring the fallen. So when players take a knee to highlight some sort of manufactured social injustice, people are – rightly so – going to be offended. I don’t know why that would be a foreign concept to anyone. There isn’t anything wrong with being proud of your Country and taking offense to anyone disrespecting the sacrifice given so they CAN take a knee. Which is the richest of ironies, by the way. The anthem and flag only mean injustice. Not a nod is given to the sacrifice that allowed them to protest the thing that represents their ability to protest.

We’re kinda going in circles. You’re saying we have to understand that a lot of people feel this way about our nationalist symbols, and just deal with that. I’m saying a lot of people don’t feel that way about our nationalist symbols. Why do you think just one “side” of the issue is legit and should be respected, and the other “side” should be condemned?

And the parts in bold: There is nothing “manufactured” about their protest. Again, the evidence is overwhelming that the kind of social injustice in question exists and is real. And getting worse. A thousand and one studies prove this, as does just living in the USA.

Also, it’s not “universally accepted” that people see these symbols as you do, or as the people you’re speaking for do. A lot of Americans, including this one, see them as abstractions of an abstraction, and with a host of conflicting “meanings,” too many of them based on myths.

When I actually take the time to think about it, which isn’t often, I see the flag and that racist anthem as “representing” a fiction, an arbitrary, abstract fictional entity called a “nation,” that doesn’t actually exist in reality. I see humans and the earth and no nations. I think the height of enlightenment would be for us to completely jettison the idea of national borders. We’ve done that for capital, why not human beings?

Admittedly, there are some practical advantages for organizational purposes. But, on balance, the concept of nations — and in our case, an empire — have largely been deadly to human health and well-being. I think we’d all be far better off as world citizens, with communal, community-based, egalitarian, fully democratic societies, federated to one another, under a world constitution. A Star Trek kinda thing.

But until we evolve into that, we’re going to have to make the best of living in a nation-state. And that requires tolerance of dissent.

— X — wrote:

Will only address this one of your coupla right now.

Androgyny, from a historical perspective, didn’t mean anything like it does now. So, yeah, I’m talking about choosing your gender at a whim, pansexuals, genderfluid, bigender, trigender, non-binary, Skoliosexual
(someone attracted to non-binary people or those who aren’t cis-gendered), etc. Do I personally care if someone chooses to be one of those? I dunno. Maybe. But what you have to understand is that this Nation was founded on Christian principles and is comprised – now – of millions upon millions of Christians. So this offends them. It also offends them (and me to an extent) that they’re inventing these terms, identifying as such, and then screaming oppression for not being Championed universally.

This will seem Cro-Magnon, but I’m of the opinion that men should be men and women should be women. I feel uneasy when I go into a store and there’s some confused teenager or 20something dude with a man-bun, nail polish and a skirt. I don’t know what to make of it and I don’t want to have to deal with it. Maybe I’m intolerant – I dunno – or maybe I’m just old-school. And I certainly don’t want to be chastised for misgendering. That’s stupid to me. Almost as stupid as children being abused by their parents into being taught that they don’t have to fit the model of gender normality. They can be whatever they want and should demand respect. That’s horseshit to me. But again, might be just me. But I doubt it, because there are millions of people out there who got sick of the Progressive agenda and voted differently.

Also, where does the line get drawn? Because it has to.

Can people call themselves goatarsexuals who get off on fucking goats and thereby demand acknowledgement, acceptance and special rights? Extreme example, I know, but where does it stop?

Well, actually, this nation wasn’t founded on “Christian principles” in the slightest. The authors of our founding documents were deists, not Christians, and in their private letters to one another — especially Jefferson and Adams — they mocked Christianity. They also, as students of the Enlightenment, realized how the merger of Church and State in Europe caused centuries and centuries of bloodshed and was always tyrannical. They wanted none of that for the new nation.

The actual foundation for our society came from Pagan Greece, Pagan Rome, the Renaissance, which was a rediscovery of both, and the Enlightenment . . . . which was the first philosophical movement to go after superstition, the supernatural, and the power of organized religion, and to fight against “faith-based” rationales.

And if we look closely at the bible, it’s pretty easy to see that our form of society and governance is the antithesis of iron age, nomadic cultures represented there. There is no “democracy” in the bible. There are no “republics,” other than Pagan Rome. Nothing about the way people behave in the OT or the NT was ever used to form our society. Our society was actually a rebellion against Church doctrine, power and ethos.

To try to shorten this up a bit:

I think this entire dust-up is absurd. If ANYONE wants to say no to artificial social rituals, it should be a given in a supposedly “free society” that this is okay. And if they want to do so to protest societal ills, that makes it all the better in my book. And in the particular case of black athletes protesting police abuse and general oppression toward blacks in America, there are mountains and mountains of evidence to support their protest.

So, for me, it runs the entire gamut: From people who just feel like saying no to going along with nationalist indoctrination rituals, to people who want to protest against societal injustices. Anyone who believes in a “free society” should be good with that, IMO.

America can’t possibly be as “great” or as “exceptional” as some people want to claim if there isn’t plenty of space for this kind of dissent. We’re NOT “great” or “exceptional” when we condemn it.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.

— X — wrote:

So, I won’t. Billeh just wanted me to expand on something I said in the Foozball side of the site, so I’ll just carry over what he quoted and take it from there.

I said:
Similarly, as long as ‘they’ try to force people into accepting progressive myths and ridiculous social advancements, reactions to this are inevitable. And asking people to “accept that politics belong everywhere” makes no sense when those Progressive myths and ridiculous social advancements have no business in politics to begin with. The Government should provide free health care? The Government should enact laws protecting “genderless” people? The Government should redistribute wealth? The Government is responsible for oppression? Yeah. Sure thing.

I guess you want me to expand on the myths and ridiculous social advancements thing, yeah?

Here’s what I feel is being force-fed to me, and other righties.

1. You don’t need a gender, and you’re intolerant if you suggest people do (need it).
2. Government run health-care is a fantastic idea. Except it’s not.
3. There’s such a thing as ‘white privilege’, and I should not only have it, but feel guilty about it.
4. Income inequality. What about it? Is this my fault too?
5. America is more racist than ever, and I’m partially to blame whether I know it or not.
6. Microaggressions. I’ll never understand them, even though I use them constantly (allegedly).

and so on…

I mean, pick one and we can talk about it, but don’t pick them all.

X,

Thanks. And your title is excellent. Meta, ironic, all of that. It’s not too dissimilar to this painting by Magritte:

Anyway . . .

Will only respond to a coupla.

First one is really easy. It’s not really about being “genderless.” Androgyny goes back in time as far as we can look, and has always been with us. I think the issue you’re referring to is choosing a gender not necessarily in accord with the biology one is born with.

To me, no one should care. If someone wants to pick another gender, and live that way, it’s not going to hurt another soul on this earth. Not a one. Life is soooo damn short, and we have soooo many other issues to deal with, getting worked up over that is, to me, beyond absurd. And because this choice almost always results in an enormous amount of harassment and oppression against that person, the last thing we should be doing is adding to it via public policy.

Live and let live, etc.

4. Income inequality. There are a host of reasons why this is a major problem. One of them is its existential nature. Income inequality actually kills people. It literally causes death. And if not death, then sickness, disease, pain, misery and suffering, and there are no valid, rational reasons for its existence.

It is absolutely “unnatural” to have steep hierarchies within any species. They don’t exist in nature. At most, you’ll usually find two or three tiers, and they’re not that far apart. But under the capitalist system, we have thousands of them, and people are separated via wages, benefits, access, wealth, opportunities and power to a degree we’ve never seen in human history. From top to bottom, we’ve never had such neck-breaking hierarchies/inequality, and, again, it’s not rational, or defensible, or anything but arbitrary.

There is simply not that much difference between humans to warrant such massive gaps between the haves and the have nots. The system creates them. They don’t occur for any merit-based reason. And if we deal with just merit, and put aside for a moment the birth lottery, which is a ginormous factor, there is just not enough difference in intelligence, creativity, “hard work,” hours spent, skill levels, etc. etc. to warrant one person making 20K and another 5 billion. It doesn’t exist. The only way to make that work is if we consider the woman or man making the five billion a human, and the bloke making the 20K a crustacean. Within the human species there are simply not enough differences between us to justify that kind gap.

(more later. Will wait for other responses first.)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.

Zooey wrote:

I agree with Billy here (no surprise), and will just repeat this much: having the National Anthem and military displays IS political. There is no getting around that. He’s right: if you don’t want politics mixed with sports…stop using them for the political purpose of creating nationalism in the first place.

And defending the national anthem, and criticizing the protesters, is ALSO taking a political stance…it defends the status quo. It says “Shut up. Do not remind me of the country’s imperfections. I don’t want to hear about it.” That is, of course, completely contradictory to what America allegedly stands for in the first place.

Finally, one other thing. I listen to the criticism of actors and athletes with some incredulity. It is as if the audience for these forms of entertainment believe these humans exist principally for our entertainment, and should not have the full rights of ordinary citizens. That, somehow, we are entitled to all their performances, and of course full access to all the details of their personal lives, but they don’t get to say how they perceive the world politically like ordinary citizens do. WTF is that? Seriously. It is enormously selfish to proclaim that you have a right to this person’s service of your desire for entertainment, and they also have to STFU when it comes to politics.

Sorry. No. Citizens in this country have rights. Full rights. And no right is more important than the freedom to point out that the power structures in this country do not respect the rights of all of its citizens. It’s appalling to me, actually. The “STFU” crowd is demonstrating rank hypocrisy.

That part in bold is key. For years and years, my conversations with conservatives and centrist Dems have been filled with this strange kind of claim. That it’s only “the left” that is being “activist” and “tries to tell everyone else how to live.” Sorry, but everyone who takes a stance in support of the status quo is also doing that. They are trying to tell other people how they should live, how the nation should be, etc. etc.

In this case, they’re pushing for their own kind of “PC,” political and patriotic correctness. Disagree with them, and you’re “disrespecting America” or being “anti-American” blah blah blah. We heard the same nonsense when Bush decided to invade Iraq. Any disagreement regarding its insane, indefensible, profoundly immoral policy idea was considered “traitorous” and worse.

I also find it amazing that the same people who talk about “liberty and freedom” are advocating for forced submission to “tradition” that no one ever asked for. We never had a voice in this matter. But we’re supposed to shut up and clap louder, and blindly follow it, like everyone else, creating what appears to me, when I really think about it, a sea of sheep. It’s especially appalling to me when I think of the way the NFL and our military elites have worked hand and hand to pimp out the message of military might, firepower, war and empire.

From where this American sits, I see dissent against that as a concrete demonstration of “love of country,” and assent as, at best, being blind to indoctrination from on high.

If we ever get to the point where people are actually fired for not following in lock step with fiat-ordered traditions, a venn diagram of us and fascist states will have several points in common.

— X — wrote:

Hey, you either agree with Nationalism and/or American Exceptionalism, or you don’t. And as painful as it may be for some, over 60 million people do agree with it. Personally, I think players should leave their political protests off the field. And again, millions of people feel the same way. The NFL used to be the only place you could go to escape this stuff, but apparently that’s no longer a luxury. And the NFL will pay the price. Not just because of the right-leaning population who are (and will) protest the league, but because it’s compounded by the left-leaning population who are sympathetic to Kaepernick’s “plight” right now and are protesting until he gets another starting gig.

Doomed. The NFL is doomed.

They should have nipped this in the bud the SECOND Kaepernick decided to use the NFL to advance his agenda. I’m not saying he’s right or wrong, because it’s irrelevant. Politics has no place in sports. It’s not what they’re paid to do, and it’s not what fans pay to see.

Hey, X,

Thing is, there’s a major contradiction in what you’re asking. Cuz playing the national anthem and demanding that everyone act in lock-step is ALREADY “political.” It’s already a Big Gubmint, authoritarian move to indoctrinate large assemblies, and shouldn’t be injected in sporting events in the first place.

You can’t have it both ways. If you don’t want “politics” in the sports arena, then you’re going to have to remove overtly political acts, symbols and demonstrations like a (racist, white supremacist) national anthem, displays of empire and military power, gigantic flags being rolled across the field, etc. etc. And you’re especially going to have to get rid of the obviously authoritarian demand that everyone adheres to all the above without question.

Trump, with his latest barrage of mindless bullying, wants to go even further and actually fire people who don’t obey. What could be more “political” than that, or more “Big Gubmint”?

To me, as long as we try to force people into group-think, lock-step adherence in accepting nationalist myths and symbols, reactions to this are inevitable. And asking people to “keep politics out of it” makes no sense when those nationalist myths and symbols already politicize the events in question.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Billy_T.

Steve Fraser, in his important The Age of Acquiescence, talks about media coverage of strikers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even such pillars of liberalism such as The Nation often (mis)portrayed strikers, anticapitalist and antiwar movements as violent and an assault on American values, leaving out the fact that private companies pushed governors and even presidents to call out violent strike breakers, etc. I think the center-left has gotten a great deal better on those issues in the last few decades, but centrist media like the NYT and the Washington Post have done their share of false narratives regarding who is really assaulting whom.

The right has been rigid in its contempt for these movements from Day One. But it can be seriously depressing to note that it’s not exclusive to the right and falls into the centrist MSM as well.

America is NOT being well served by our media overall. In general, it presents a wildly false view of reality, oftentimes through omission. In the case of violent clashes, this isn’t always — though it often is — a matter of a purposeful distortion for ideological reasons. In many cases, it’s just the the usual “if it bleeds it leads” mindset. Writing about, photographing, filming peaceful demonstrators and dissenters is just not going to sell or hold the attention to the degree of those violent clashes. So the camera isn’t going to focus on the 99.9% peacefully protesting. It’s going to focus solely on the 0.1% doing the fighting.

If it bleeds it leads.

zn wrote:

ZN,

That’s spot on.

Basically, you have sociopathic predators (nazis, fascists, skinheads, the KKK, white supremacists in general, etc.). And you have people fighting against those sociopathic predators. If the antifa go away, the sociopathic predators are still out there. They still want to create a world wherein only white Christian males rule, and everyone bows or is wiped out.

If the sociopathic predators go away, however, antifa will too. It will actually disband. It has no more reason to gather or be a “group.”

They are light years apart — morally, ethically and in practical terms.

Along the lines of that second item, I thought this article made a lot of sense. I don’t agree with all of it, but enough of it strikes me as just common sense to warrant sharing:

The Left’s Supporting Role in American Hate Theater White supremacists from the KKK to the alt-right hold rallies solely to troll liberals— and they’re succeeding. It’s time for a new resistance strategy. By Bob Moser August 7, 2017

It came out just a few days before the tragedy in C’ville.

wv wrote:

Billy_T wrote:

…As in, capitalism makes us crazy
AND it produces the temporary fixes for that craziness — Netflix, HBO, shopping on Amazon, staring at our cell phones, game consoles, political food fights, etc. etc. All these things serve the interests of billionaires several times over. They make them rich, they keep us distracted, and they keep us relatively docile and confused. Oh so confused.

So when it’s time to vote, we’re too tired, confused and docile to check out third and fourth and fifth parties, and they don’t get any air time anyway. So people just pull the lever, or stay home altogether. And that suits the powers that be just fine. Vote Dem, GOP or stay home. It doesn’t matter to them, except around the edges. Heads they win, tails we lose. Doesn’t matter. . . .

======================

Yes, i think thats quite true.

It certainly made ‘me’ crazy.

Perhaps other systems make people crazy in ‘other’ ways. Maybe feudalism made people ‘feudalism-crazy’ etc, and so forth.

Or maybe humans are just always crazy and the whole idea of ‘sanity’ is….crazy.

I dunno.

Rams won though. Thats certainly crazy.

w
v

I agree with all of that. Not trying to say that “crazy” started with capitalism. It’s a part of the Human Condition. But I do think that the more we add complexity, tiers, steps on the ladder, the more we atomize ourselves, separate ourselves from the earth, community, each other and into our own little cubicles — literal and metaphorical — the crazier we get. And I also believe no economic system prior to capitalism came within light years of doing this as much, with its division of labor and specialization and removing humans from the holistic logic, the Big Picture, of what we do with our time. As in, basically, cogs in the machine. It’s never happened before to this extent or on this scale, and we’ve never had so little connection with the larger picture of why we work, when, how, where, what, etc.

Alienation and all of that. We’ve just never been severed from ourselves to this extent, externalized, reified, made into things who make things to make a few rich people richer. We’ve lost our “ground,” our reason for being.

It’s been commodified and monetized. Capitalism follows us everywhere and there is just no escape from it.

Again, that’s unprecedented in world history for an economic system, and I don’t think humans were built to handle this.

My main point though is that MY own complaint (as opposed to the rightwingers complaints) is that the Universities lean REP/DEM. Just like every other institution in Amerika. That there would be my complaint.

SOMETHING is making amerikans into political-idiots, zn. Something. So, is it the water? What would your answer be to the question: What is making Americans vote for the two-parties that screw them over everyday? If its not the Universities, public schools, government, and the Media — what is it?

w
v

It’s all the above. That, of course, is the easy answer. But it’s true. And it’s also something that rarely gets talked about: Our economic system is literally driving people crazy. It puts waaaaay too much stress on humans, well beyond what our biology was designed to deal with. Humans weren’t supposed to be surrounded by neck-breaking hierarchies, and about the only way we’ve managed this long is the endlessly increasing distractions generated by, ironically, the economic system itself. As in, capitalism makes us crazy, AND it produces the temporary fixes for that craziness — Netflix, HBO, shopping on Amazon, staring at our cell phones, game consoles, political food fights, etc. etc. All these things serve the interests of billionaires several times over. They make them rich, they keep us distracted, and they keep us relatively docile and confused. Oh so confused.

So when it’s time to vote, we’re too tired, confused and docile to check out third and fourth and fifth parties, and they don’t get any air time anyway. So people just pull the lever, or stay home altogether. And that suits the powers that be just fine. Vote Dem, GOP or stay home. It doesn’t matter to them, except around the edges. Heads they win, tails we lose. Doesn’t matter.

Next up . . . the Castle Dilemma, which I’ve just invented, I think . . .

;>)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Billy_T.