Joined: 10 May 2005 Age: 40 Gender: Female Posts: 7,245
29 Jul 2019, 9:26 pm
He represents an America characterized by a fixation on Socratic methods of self-control, and narcissism and lack of empathy:
This kind of dark America has been around a while, and is even mentioned in the Boy Scouts' official handbook for boys:
Quote:
If left alone, the short-sighted, selfish, and cruel members of the American nation would quickly exterminate all our valuable forms of wild life, and our valuable timber and forests.
_________________ "You have a responsibility to consider all sides of a problem and a responsibility to make a judgment and a responsibility to care for all involved." --Ian Danskin
Joined: 6 Feb 2005 Age: 45 Gender: Male Posts: 24,522 Location: 28th Path of Tzaddi
30 Jul 2019, 6:48 am
I'm really seeing just about everything from the origin of the earth that brings us grief as the psychopathology of evolution. Everything from rapacious carnivores to rapacious industrialism, it seems like it's all variations on the same pattern - a species gets most of its propulsion from a deeply nested 'survival of the fittest' read of existence, some maintain their place in the food chain others break out of it and start deeply impacting the food chain. While it does looks like David Sloan Wilson may be doing work that could at least give some softening to Dawkin's Selfish Gene theory and put altruism back into nature somewhat it still seems to be the case that altruism even in his own telling only seems to prevail when the conditions are right and that it's always contending with a sociopathic/psychopathic undercurrent. We as human beings seem to represent nature accelerated in all of the best and worst ways.
In my own estimation of Trump I'm really forced to consider that he visually stands for or symbolizes things that scare the heck out of us, where we're lucky is that for the most part he just 'looks' it in that he's more a textbook time-locked boomer than an actual despot, his bellicose social style seems to be from a very specific subset of society and business dealings in New York City where BS'ing is an understood part of how one socializes and does business, and so in an odd way for all of the problems he does have when it comes to what he actually does are relatively stock and trade center center-right but it's his crassness, his way of using social media, lying even when there's no point in lying, that pushes everyone's buttons.
Trump seems to be more part of the bread, circuses, and entertainment. I mean crap - really think about what we've come to, the institutions and media have failed badly enough that half of the US elected a game show host, many in an effort to troll the people who they felt had hijacked the system for their own ends. What we've got is massive wealth transfer upward, automation accelerating, stagnation and decline of real wages, and from the look of the problems that we have no desire to solve the opioid crisis is likely to keep getting worse.
A couple conversations germane to the problems at hand:
_________________ The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
29 Jul 2019, 9:26 pm
