As everyone except the Fox News/QAnon crowd knows, Antifa is not an organization; it’s a philosophy. It has no leaders, headquarters, or funding/budget.
Now, is this (at left) what I voted for?
Well, I vote for honesty, logic, compassion and truth. I vote against lies and stupidity. So, the answer is No.
Irrelevant.
Unless some miracle takes place that turns around what appears be an irreversible trend, JD Vance will have an appeal to Americans that is equivalent to leprosy. We’d rather elect a projectile vomiter.
We’ve all heard people make the claim 20th Century French historian Michael Foucault makes at left.
Twisted, I believe.
Socrates believed that “the only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance”. I’m going with Socrates on this one.
Until fairly recently, it appeared that civil rights in the United States were making solid progress.
But now, there is an entrenched population of white nationalism, all led by the president of the United States. All this hatred and ignorance extends far beyond racial bigotry itself; in fact, it spreads into dozens of arenas that are collectively called “anti-science,” e.g., climate denial, anti-vax, etc.
The cryptic title to this post comes from an encounter I had with a guy earlier today in which he said, “Trump is institutionalizing hate.” I replied that most of us use the verb “normalize,” but I like “institutionalize” just as well.
As suggested at left, Rush Limbaugh made a fortune by sewing hatred into American lives, and he was incredibly good at it. He convinced tens of millions of U.S. citizens that anything that would not make rich white males richer was communism.
Following in his footsteps certainly does appear to be an essential guarantee of wealth.
Charlie Kirk, as an example, was a college dropout who was on a conveyor belt to selling used cars until it dawned on him that selling hate was one hell of a lot easier that hiding defects from car-buyers.
My main problem with it is that it’s a direct violation of the United States Constitution, a document that, until recently, was a pretty big deal here in America.
A minor problem that further kills the deal for me is that I don’t want squads of lawless goons in my quiet little town.
The words at left come from late-20th Century philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna.
His observation here echoes those of many other intellectuals who have pondered how it’s possible that an extremely intelligent species can make such poor decisions when it comes to governance.
The problem, I believe, is that intelligence isn’t the only characteristic–or even the main one–that drives the way we elect our leaders and get along with others. Our tribalism and greed are far more important to how human beings behave in groups.
This could be what takes Trump (and countless others) down.
Government officials all around the world have access to the unredacted Epstein files, and the top people in, say, France couldn’t care less about protecting the criminal sociopath in the White House.
In fact, they know that by exposing him, they’ll be doing the world a huge favor.
Most of us can’t.
We’re too old. We have children and grandchildren here, we have a medical team that knows us and keeps use healthy, we’re embedded in careers, etc.
So many of us would love to move away from this budding fascist empire, but we simply cannot.
In response to the question at left:
Of course; it’s their lives. But I’d be saddened.
I told my kids when they were young that they would have far more rewarding lives if they were able to fashion their careers out of working with their minds than their hands.
