1
Well said.
The big problem with the Democratic government over the past four years has been that they haven't owned or even properly addressed any of the serious underlying problems they've been facing. Everything has been laid at the door of the previous administration, with the tacit assumption that now that the Republicans were out of power, the problems would be solved by fiat.
How to approach this over the next four years (as a conservative or libertarian) is tricky. Getting liberals to admit that they have a problem and need to find a solution (really, many problems, and many solutions) is essential, but when people are invested in something, it becomes very difficult to get them to admit they made a mistake. They will often back up their mistake with increasingly irrational responses rather than admit that the original decision was wrong.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wed Nov 7 06:38:37 2012 (PiXy!)
2
Bricky, you make some very good points, but you're too optomistic. I and a number of people said the same thing regarding the social conservatives four years ago -- they were poison to our cause. We tried to make a (
third-party) go of it then, but failed due to lack of money, leadership, focus, and everything else needed to succeed. Oh, and the minor matter of a schism -- by the social conservatives. We never recovered, and I can tell you -- the liberals can't tell the them from the Tea Parties, and nobody can tell either from the "false flag" operations mounted by the GOP.
In four years, it won't be "difficult"; it will be impossible. The EU will fall into chaos by then, and I expect Europe to start falling under the sway of fascists in fact if not name, with war to follow. Greece is already heading there. We'll be suffering from a broken economy, China will be in a succession crises and looking for a diversion, and Mexico is a mess.
What to do now? We can't "close the deal" when half the country thinks the "deal" is being taken care of the other half's productivity. The voters will (continue to) flock to whomever promises them food and security.
I'm too old and decrepit to tilt at windmills any more. My plan is to hunker down in a ringside seat with a drink and try to survive watching the fall of Western Civilization. The end is beer.
This assumes I'm not in the equivalent of a re-education camp somewhere for wrongspeak.
Oh wait, been there, done that. It was called "diversity training."
Posted by: ubu at Wed Nov 7 13:29:26 2012 (SlLGE)
3
Ubu: I'm most assuredly not optimistic.
I'm a history buff. The road we are on is well traveled, but only in one direction.
Still, despair is a sin, and we simply must turn this around, because civilization is precious and there is nowhere to run.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Nov 7 15:20:44 2012 (e9h6K)
4
1. The NEA has raised a couple generations of American students to expect the government to give them what they want, and that there is no need to actually go out and earn it themselves. Most of the young voters I have talked to have never been exposed an alternative political argument, and in fact have been conditioned to tune out any opposing viewpoints because they are, by definition, racist/sexist/Fascist/etc.
2. The majority of the members of the supposed Fourth Estate were educated as "journalists", which means they feel their purpose is to advance a social agenda, and not report facts . In other words, they are political propagandists. Even as a growing number of voters turn away from traditional sources such as newspapers, magazines, and TV/radio news programs, most are still being spoon-fed one political viewpoint disguised as "news".
3. The majority of the entertainment industry is also committed to pushing leftist agendas, just so long as they are exempted with special tax breaks, etc.
Right now, I just don't see any prospects to turning things around in my lifetime...
Posted by: Siergen at Wed Nov 7 19:23:21 2012 (Ao4Kw)
5
Eh... not all the glories of Rome were in the era of the Republic.
The one bright ray of sunshine, if you can call it that, is that though we are beset by problems, it's worse almost everywhere else. Things are exceedingly unlikely to go wrong here first, and the worse off it is elsewhere, the more we benefit in terms of relative competitiveness. Already it's one of the prime enablers of our spending spree - the treasury bonds keep coming in because if the US goes under, there's no other safe harbor for the money anyway.
And if things go bad everywhere? Well, not to put it too bluntly, but in a savage world of tooth and claw, nobody has fangs to match ours. In point of fact, nobody is even in the same class, excepting the broad class of "countries who have nuclear weapons", and of those none other have anything even remotely like our ability to project power abroad. You could even go so far to say that the current system of international trade and commerce exists entirely at the whim of the US - were we determined to stop it, not a single tanker would reach port, nor a single pipeline continue to pump gas. It's not good to make too big a deal of it, and obviously it would be PREFERABLE not to have to go down that road, but if the shit hits the fan...
Posted by: Avatar_exADV at Wed Nov 7 22:56:07 2012 (pWQz4)
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