@Region Philbis,
I'm fine with that formulation.
@blatham,
Those fuckers at Fox are all heart and compassion.
@snood,
Not to mention honesty and integrity.
@georgeob1,
You are correct.
There are many good people in the U.S. who prevented evil from prevailing in 2016. I trust that these good people will prevail again in 2020.
Otherwise, this country is in trouble.
@georgeob1,
georgeob1 wrote:
I haven’t been on this site for a long time – several months now –
(snip)
I won’t hang around to see the responses this post may ignite. It has all been posted here many times already.
Despite this I wish all here well. Perhaps I’ll wander back in a few months.
Holy ****, George!
Good to "see" ya. Hope you and the family are all well.
We could not disagree more about Trump, but it was wonderful reading your words anyway.
Hope you do come back to check the responses...and give another wave to the crowd.
@NealNealNeal,
The country has been in trouble since 20136 since the electoral college overrode the will of the people which always turns out badly
@MontereyJack,
Our founding fathers wisely made it a part of the Constitution. It is needed because the wisest people in our country do not live on the east and west coasts.
@NealNealNeal,
actually thats partly BULLSHIT. You should learn some more "detail" about our Constitutions content and whats NOT in it.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
Edited by Bandy X. Lee. M.D., M.DIV.
Epilogue
It is pretty clear what is responsible for the rise of the support for Trump, and there is general agreement about it. If you take a simple look at economic statistics, much of the support for Trump is coming from mostly white, working class people who have been cast by the wayside during the neoliberal period. They have lived through a generation of stagnation or decline - – real male wages are about where they were in the 1960s. There has also been a decline in a functioning democracy, overwhelming evidence of their own elected officials barely reflect their interests and concerns. Contempt for institutions, especially Congress, has just skyrocketed. Meanwhile, there has, of course, been wealth created. It has gone into very few hands: mostly into a fraction of the top 1%, so there is enormous opulence.
There are two huge dangers that human species face. We are in a situation where we need to decide whether the species survives in any decent form. One is the rising danger of nuclear war, which is quite serious, and the other is environmental catastrophe. Trump wants to virtually eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Richard Nixon's Legacy, to cut back regulations, and race toward the precipice as quickly as possible. On militarism, he wants to raise the military budget, already over half of discretionary spending, leading right now to confrontations which could be extremely hazardous.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists regularly brings together a group of scientists, political analysts, other serious people, to try to give some kind of estimate of what the situation of the world is. The question is: how close are we to termination of the species? And they have a clock, the Doomsday Clock. When it hits midnight we are finished. End of the human species and much else. And the question every year is: how far is the minute hand from midnight?
In 2014, the analyst took into account for the first time something that had been ignored: the fact that the nuclear age - - the beginning of the nuclear age - - coincided with the beginning of a new geological epoch, the so-called Anthropocene. There has been some debate about the epoch in which human activity is drastically affecting the general environment; there has been debate about its inception. But the World Geological organization is settling on the conclusion that it is about the same time as the beginning of the nuclear age. So, we are in these two eras in which the human survival is a very much at stake, and, with us, everything else, too, of course all living - - most living things, which are already under very serious severe threat. Well, a couple of years ago, the Bulletin began to take that into account and moved the minute hand up to 3 minutes to to midnight, where it remained last year.
About a week into Trump's term, the clock was moved again, to 2 and 1/2 minutes to midnight. That is the closest it has been since 1953. And that means extermination of the species is very much an open question. I do not want to say it is solely the impact of the Republican Party - - obviously, that is false but they certainly are in the lead in openly advocating and working for the destruction of the human species. I agree that this is a very outrageous statement, but extreme dynamics are behind it, and we are all responsible.
Sooner or later the white working-class constituency will recognize, and in fact, much of the rural population will come to recognize, that the promises are built on sand. There is nothing there.
And then what happens become significant. In order to maintain his popularity, the Trump administration will have to try to find some means of rally in the support and changing the discourse from the policies that they are carrying out, are basically a wrecking ball, to something else. Maybe scapegoating, saying, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it." And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, "terrorists," Muslims, and elitists, whoever maybe. And that can turn out to be very ugly.
I think that we should not put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist attack, which can can change the country instantly.
In the United States, power is overwhelmingly and increasingly in the hands of a very narrow sector of corporate wealth, private wealth, and power––and they have counterparts elsewhere, who agree with them and interact with them partly. There is another dimension of "who rules the world." The public can have, sometimes it does have, enormous power. We can go back to David Hume's first major modern work on political philosophy: On the First Principles of Government. He pointed out that force is on the side of the governed. Those who are governed have the force if they are willing to and eager to recognize the possibility to exercise it. Sometimes they do.
Perhaps the movements we have been witnessing, starting with the Women's March on the day after the inauguration, represent the force within humankind that resists annihilation and groprs toward health and survival. Like Doctor Chomsky, who has worked tirelessly to inform and engage the public, we as mental health professionals and healers should welcome and assist any action in this direction regardless of political attribution.
Bandy Lee
@coldjoint,
Quote: Why don't you tell him?
If sommeone makes a dumb elocution within a public discussion , why is it my obligation to "Larn him"
@NealNealNeal,
The Electoral College was implemented, for the most part, to oblige the smaller states, and especially the slave states and weight their votes in consideration of the large slave populations there that were barred from voting.
It's merely your opinion that the wisest people in our country do not live on the east and west coasts.
