MistyTiger wrote:If Trump does not start a new business like his own media company, he might be financially crippled.
Trump will be able to hold $1000 a plate dinners to hear him speak and meet people and get pictures with them. All past presidents have plenty of ways of making money, and I doubt Trump will be any different. They all get a presidential library and they all pretty much write a book or two.
Igor Antunov wrote:Trump was great for the world, he adopted an isolationist policy and tried to disengage from conflicts abroad. He of course failed because we all know the office is largely ceremonial and others are running the country. Still that alone makes him the greatest US president ever-by merely attempting to derail the establishment he positively distinguished himself from every US president post-ww2.
Interesting take. I have an uncle who's 87 years old, and he also thinks Trump was the greatest president of his lifetime, which kind of surprised me since he was born in 1933, the year FDR assumed the presidency. So he's seen a lot of them come and go. I think his greatest accomplishment is exposing the deep state, because it becomes very clear that they operate without the consent of the governed for all practical purposes.
Tainari88 wrote:He truly believes in his idea of technology and science as being the core of human existence. I am an anthropologist who has dug in excavations with ancient evidence and artifacts of how humans have survived on planet Earth for all this time. I also know humans are not solely purveyors of technology and science and humans make decisions rarely on pure reason and pure logic. If they did? You would not have angry mobs or angry rioting on both the left and the right creating anxiety right now. Humans are not purely logic driven species. I wish they were. If they were we would not have racist policies or bad educational policies or spineless, bootlicking politicians.
It's not the core of human existence, but it is the core of modern societies. Before the 19th Century, life could be pretty brutal for the average person. Today, it's pretty comfortable for the average person comparatively. As I said in Wellsy's thread citing Dinesh D'Souza, we live in a country where the poor people are fat. A big part of my criticism of socialism and welfare-state politics is that humans are not merely material entities needing material inputs. We can even see this behavior in other mammals like mice. If you give them all the food and drink they need and don't have to struggle for anything, they become self-destructive. People need a purpose in life. They need goals. Even mice do.
Logic and reason aren't normative goods in their own right. Why intellectuals were horrified by Nazi Germany is precisely because such an abomination came out of a society devoted to logic and reason, science and technology--progress. I would say probably my most fundamental disagreement with someone like Drlee is that people with whom he disagrees are merely stupid. Very intelligent people disagree all the time. James Watson was more or less deplatformed by our cancel culture, because in his life experience he felt that Africans were less intelligent than Europeans. Watson was a co-discoverer of DNA and the double helix. He's obviously a very brilliant man and made an enormous contribution to science; yet, his personal views are characterized as racist and he gets deplatformed to that end.
Tainari88 wrote:That is a big issue I have with Blackjack. His solutions are about pulling back, not dealing with expansiveness of knowledge, in the sense that he wants hiarchies. {sic} He wants to really impose some type of system in which everyone lives in neat categories based on 'productive' values and IQ tests and some deterministic, clean and logical world, and it all justifies Asian or European superiority, and it all makes for an orderly society in which everyone is basically without any real circumstance that is flowy and fluxing all the time. He doesn't get it.
These are your assertions of what I think. You are not coming to this conclusion from what I'm saying, because I am not saying that at all. Hierarchies are useful for some things, and not others. If you knew my mind as well as you purport to, you would know that I'm far more given to
directed acyclic graphs than hierarchies. Since you likely aren't familiar with graph theory, you are frequently incapable of comprehending what I say. That's why I don't support race-based hierarchies at all. I simply mention Charles Murray and The Bell Curve, and since you have heard leftist criticism of it but have not read it yourself, you think you know what it says and you don't. Bell curves are about distributions, not hierarchies. Then, you ascribe your interpretation of works like that to what I think as a whole, and why you end up with such a distorted theory of what I think that you can fit into your own ideological constraints.
It is precisely because this society is unable to deal with the actual data on complex issues like race that we are unable to deal with persistent social problems like race relations. We can all champion Brown v. The Board of Education as some moral victory, but the result was mixed. Segregation led to black schools that had inferior infrastructure and insufficient funding. Desegregation changed that. However, the grades of black students on average started going down. Why? Is it because they were put into schools with white teachers who were racist and downgrading them? Is it because people reject information from people who don't look like them? We don't know the answer at this point, but we do know that a well-intentioned policy didn't lead to universally better results.
We do have some answers, like children with two biological parents in an intact and functional family regardless of their economic status tend to do better than children from broken homes regardless of their economic status. Yet, social libertines do not want to confront this type of data, because it doesn't support the outcomes they would like to see. Many socialist manifestos hate nuclear and extended family systems, for example.
Tainari88 wrote:He won't get the reality that humanity is emotional and logical, both at the same time, and instinctual and technical. It is a dichotomy.
Who else have you debated on this board that will get right down to brain structure, genes, neurotransmitters, etc.? See, when I actually talk about that stuff, you clam up. For example, if I say about 5.5% of African-Americans have a 2-repeat allele of the monoamine oxidase A MAOA gene, and it's associated with anti-social behavior, you are simply unable to cope with the discussion. You then make gross generalities that I assert all African-Americans are criminals, when I'm saying something very specific and discrete that you could very easily infer the exact opposite using logic and reason alone. I get that people are both emotional and logical. You are triggered right into an emotional state when it comes to talking about race, for example. So much so, that you attribute things to me that I have never said and don't believe. For example, I have never said that we should build our political system on a race-based hierarchy--something, I would consider hopelessly unjust, static and inflexible. It would not work well. It's the stasis of socialism that I abhor as well. Yet, I frequently have to point out to you what I actually think compared and contrasted to the strawman you construct of me in your own mind. There aren't simply two worldview--capitalism and socialism. There are more. I am simply not an unthinking subscriber to worldviews anymore. That ship sailed for me quite some time ago.
Tainari88 wrote:It is not writing code at all.
Law is code. In fact it's called code. It's why we have the United States Code, the Code of Federal Regulations, the California Code, etc. You can say political debates aren't all rational and logical, but law is. In California, a school bus is a motor vehicle; a bus is a vehicle, but in spite of having a motor, a bus is not a motor vehicle; and, a vehicle is a device. Therefore, a school bus is not a bus, it's a motor vehicle; and, a bus is not a motor vehicle in spite of having a motor. Keep in mind, I have worked on legal compliance expert systems and worked with countless lawyers, read the laws of 50 states and countless court rulings. That does not make me a lawyer by a long shot, but I do know quite a bit about some aspects of the legal system and how laws can be distilled into bits and bytes and render binding opinions with an expert system.
Tainari88 wrote:I despair he will ever understand what that means on a large scale. If you don't give a damn about other people and don't act in moral and ethical ways, politically, socially or physically, and implement your political policies with principles that are consistent, moral and ethical and also with logical and reasoned bases of thought and action? And you refuse to be some sellout piece of valueless immorality wrapped in warped sociopathy? And are not about shilling and selfish gain? You will wind up over many generations driving all of humanity into extinction.
We spoke about this when speaking about Sapiens, and humans naturally not scaling groups beyond a few hundred without organization. Humans are unique in that respect, unlike any other species, and yet still have a lot of the same wetware as other species--emotions for example. Humans can only recognize about 4000 faces. There is a physical limit to a capacity for compassion. I just recognize it and accept it, and you don't. The human brain is believed to be able to store about 4 Petabytes of data. In storage terms, that used to be a staggering amount. I've worked on clusters of 100 petabytes. It will not be long before machine learning and mass storage start having a big influence on things.
Tainari88 wrote:Not giving a shit or relying on technology only is not going to get us to survival on a mass scale.
Those are two very different assertions. Relying on technology has done wonders. As I said, more lives have been saved with clean drinking water and sewage systems than all the socialized medicine you can dream of.
Tainari88 wrote:The USA government is acting dysfunctionally but also Grover Norquist wanted the Republican Party to be the party that drowned government in a bathtub. To make it no new taxes, no gains for anyone but private corporate power. To strip government of any authority.
Grover Norquist is ideologically capitalist. He doesn't believe in the welfare state. He thinks it does more harm than good. Sometimes, in some contexts, he's right.
Tainari88 wrote:The USA has a very radical and community based system of representative democracy. But if its only intention was to support white men with property and profit as the directors of all wealth and all decisions in that society for all time? It will never grow. It will implode.
It was never it's only intention to support white men with property. It was started by white men with property and a historical legacy of English common law and culture. The founders of this country held slaves, but they also strictly abolished both monarchy and titles of nobility. Capitalism was fledgling at that time. Adam Smith had just written The Wealth of Nations around that time.
Tainari88 wrote:He basically states that there are only two roads out of this mess. Fascism or social democratic traditions.
It's a false choice. There are other choices. We could become an Islamic Republic like Iran for example, or an Islamic monarchy like Saudi Arabia. There are other options, it's just that your guys want to constrict your choice to two--one of which you find unpalatable, and then leave you with the other one that you want.
Tainari88 wrote:But the socialist column has been smeared to the point of people not understanding it, or trusting it.
Most people can point to one or two things they like in a socialist society, and a very long list of things they don't like. The problem with ideological systems is that they want to make the world into a subset of itself, and so by their nature, they tend to be hyper oppressive. You need to have some use of force to maintain order. The liberal model was conceived to have a light touch. Neither the facists nor the socialists like it very much for that reason. Both national socialism and international socialism require higher levels of violence than the liberal model.
Tainari88 wrote:@blackjack21 don't give me some bullshit about how you care about immigrants. For me you either deal with the entire cause of why people are seeking work outside their own native societies or not. If you don't cope with neoliberal crap and smash their hold on many nations' economies? You have no solution to anything about immigration in the USA. They don't care about nationalism and right wing IQ bullshit from Charles Murray BJ. They care solely about anarcho capitalism.
Anarcho-capitalism is one reason why I oppose the neoliberal/neoconservative types. Additionally, like socialists, they are also given to violence. However, the kerfuffle on Jan 6 showed how terribly frightened they are and how much they operate separately from society like what sociologists call a "Total Institution." Their answer is more surveillance. The irony there is that the reason people are angry with them is that they don't listen to the masses and do what the electorate wants, yet they surveil the electorate to an absolutely astonishing degree. If you've ever watched "The Lives of Others" depicting East German Stasi spying on dissidents, the American security state today makes the worst spying of either the Nazis or communists seem trivial by comparison.
Another reason I don't like the neoliberals/neoconservatives anymore is that they are heavy handed, and their actions have so many non-intuitive effects even to them. There would be no ISIS without social media; yet, the neoconservatives/neoliberals pushed social media on the Arab world to organize resistance to totalitarian governments there. They pushed uncensored media as a human right, and now that they have Donald Trump on their hands, they are now pushing for mass censorship in the United States. These are power and influential people, but I've lost respect for them as being anywhere near as smart as they purport to be. I will be helping build their next generation spyware, which will make me a lot of money and will do them no good at all. At least I have the decency to tell them what they're doing is pointless.
While I think there are big problems with neoliberalism, I don't think they are the cause of poverty in Nicaragua for example. Geography, natural resources and political/economic systems have a lot to do with it too.
Tainari88 wrote:I don't believe in some form of thinking that differences in human beings means they are supposed to be judged on inferior to superior.
It's not just thinking. You and I can spend all the time we want learning about basketball. We can even learn to play the game. We will never be able to play it as well as Michael Jordan. Even Michael Jordan at his age cannot do what he used to do--at least not nearly as well. Some people have an aptitude for music, politics, art, science, or technology. Yet, specialization requires trade offs.
Tainari88 wrote:They are supposed to be integrated into the social fabric in a holistic way and in a way that defuses frustration, resentments, anger and hatreds. Not set frustrated people up to scapegoat vulnerable people who are just trying to get a job. For me that is being petty and exclusionary.
What if they white, American, and former steel workers who want to impose tariffs on foreign-made steel? Do they just have to learn to accept Chinese dumping and poor employment prospects? See I'm sort of like an immigrant. I bring up the arguments that the Democrats just don't want to do anymore.
Tainari88 wrote:Because no one who is a human in desperate circumstances is going to accept doing nothing and accepting exclusion and accepting isolation without a fight.
Tell that to the cancel culture types who want to deplatform anyone who voted for Trump, or the governors locking people down and calling some people "non-essential."
Tainari88 wrote:It doesn't end well. It never does. Learn from that for once BJ!!
Yeah. That's why the neoliberals got Donald Trump, and why they had to fake a presidential election to get rid of him, all while freaking out why his support grew in 2020. The neoliberals don't listen. They surveil. They call this "intelligence," and it is anything but...
Tainari88 wrote:He is not a moron. He is a genius in digging away at anger and frustration with the establishment politicos in the pocket of corporate donors.
Well done! You have just demonstrated logic and reason over emotion.
Tainari88 wrote:Yet somehow the rich don't want to give up their enormous profits for the public good. Why?
It's about value for money. I do not support much of what the state does with my income tax receipts. I do support them paving the roads--an easy task, which they seem incapable of doing as they are too busy calling people racist, sexist, homophobic and other things for reasons that have nothing to do with racism, sexism, or anti-homosexual views. What do I get in value for my money when I pay $20k-$40k a year to the State of California?
Tainari88 wrote:ANGRY MOBS of VIOLENT folks who feel stiffed by the system. It favors huge corporations, not small businesses, it favors very powerful tiny groups, not the majority of social and economic classes.
Indeed. That's why I'm not a big fan of the Republicans either. The Bush types are against small businesses on a policy basis.
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