From Karen:
I would appreciate an answer, if not from you then from the commentariat here. It was a sincere question. It appears not a single Republican voter bothered to read the platform they voted for, solely because Trump lied and said he hadn’t read it. (Of course he hasn’t read it: it was widely reported his intelligence briefings had to be made into picture books to hold his interest and his intellect, and Project 2025 (or as he likes to call it, “Agenda 47”) is 900 plus pages. But he seems to be hiring a lot of the people who wrote the document. And Elon Musk is cheerfully getting ready to “break” the economy. “There will be hardship”, he says. These are people who have never managed anything of note, being asked to manage massive systems they are actively hostile to.
Who votes for hardship? I really would appreciate an answer.
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From [Fiz]:
November 21, 2024
Trump’s latest win is best thought of as a victory of “up” over “down”, rather than left vs right. Whether it lives up to its promise remains to be seen. There are a lot of people, plus huge corporate entities, plus the established government itself, which have a lot of money, power, and control to lose if they can’t keep people DOWN.
Now, when I say “up” versus “down” I am referring to the Nolan Chart 2-axis system for mapping ideologies: http://i2.wp.com/wmbriggs.com/pics/nolan_chart.png?w=750
For hundreds of years now THE PROGRAMMING OF THE HUMAN RACE TO THINK IN TERMS OF A LEFT-RIGHT PARADIGM HAS SERVED GOVERNMENTS WELL AND HUMANS POORLY:
(me quoting someone else: “As for “left” and “right,” I notice that many people, such as you, seem to want to make them correspond to some kind of abstract principles. They’re not abstract principles — they’re tribal affiliations. Look at the people who call themselves one or the other, and draw your own conclusions.”)
Goose-stepping to the cadence left-right, left-right, left-right has kept Authoritarians (Totalitarians) in power and kept the masses distracted and malleable. That is what politics is all about: keeping actual LIBERTY out of the brain and out of the debate. So, left and right, Liberal and Conservative, Democrat and Republican, these are mostly just distractions. Distractions from what? Distractions from Liberty.
Government is the OPPOSITE of Liberty; In engineering terms, a governor is something which reduces degrees of freedom in a system. That is what a social government is as well: a mechanism to reduce freedom of pesky humans.
Left-Right may have little or no anchored meaning, but Liberty does have meaning: LIBERTY MEANS FREE. Government means — literally — reduction or restriction on Freedom. How much restriction on Freedom do you want? Authoritarians — from Marx to Hitler — both “left” and “right,” and everything squished in between, want effectively all freedom throttled under their control. Most Democrats and Republicans only want “SOME” of your Liberty “temporarily”, today . . . . But today becomes tomorrow and then they ask you for MORE of your Liberty. And then more. And more. And more. There is always an excuse or an emergency. War is a preferred way to get people to go along: Russia, Russia, Russia! “Climate Change!” “War on Terror!” “Save Our Democracy!” “Literally Hitler!” “My Body My Choice!” “A dark winter of the unvaccinated!” Propaganda and slogans are great for getting people to go along with what they are told. The real compliance tests include things like Paying taxes, fighting wars, Jabbing themselves and their children with experimental EUA chemicals. Divide and conquer keeps the juices flowing!
Government is, always and everywhere, the opposite of Freedom. Most people don’t even realize that. It certainly isn’t taught in our schools nor reported on in proper fashion in corporate news. Are some restrictions on individual choice necessary for a functioning society? Of course. How many?
Freedom comes at a cost: You have to stop playing the putz and you need to take on — yes — a lot of self-determination. Another word for self-determination is “hardship”. One needs to learn how to take more responsibility for themselves, take on more immediate risk, develop and use willpower, do work one may not “like”, study, work harder, learn how to manifest better. Note that these things are all “hardships”.
So, in a round-about way I come to an answer to "KAREN’s ... question: “Who votes for hardship? I really would appreciate an answer.”
Wise people, and people who value Freedom (self-determination) sufficiently, will choose hardship over the alternative, Eva. Having read a few more history books, and watching less TV, helps in realizing that avoiding hardship at all costs will cost absolutely everything in the longer run.
I think the inability to accept hardship, to accept Freedom, may be a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological_disorder. It is likely even genetically controlled. Seriously. Psychopathy is a brain deformity. And it is obviously conserved in the human genome. Why wouldn’t natural followers (slaves) be conserved as well? Society needs slaves. While that is only my hypothesis at this point, it seems more than reasonable, almost self-evident, and explains a lot.
Why does human society have such difficulty escaping the paired trap of Collectivism-Authoritarianism? Why to we keep allowing self-serving Authoritarians to take over the reigns of government?
I watched a long documentary series on Napoleon, a long time ago. What struck me was how Napoleon seemed, most of the time, to be operating a good citizen who wanted to better his society. After the LEFTIST https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/modern-history/jacobins/ butchery (a prototype, of sorts, for the Democrat “Lawfare” operations), Napoleon seemed to be gradually compelled to step in and clean up the mess. If you don’t understand what I mean, consider the vast amount of practical work Napoleon put into rebuilding Paris, putting in place modern legal mechanisms, etc. The man was. — despite being a dictator — mostly a benevolent dictator.
Which made it especially hard when I first saw this quote from him:
“I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Freedom is a need felt by a small minority, whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. ”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
I suspect you were not born to be free, [Karen]. To flourish under Freedom you need to accept a lot of hardship. And you would never vote for hardship, right?
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