I saw a photo of a message scrawled on the side of a barn which was "Make America White Again" and there was also a swastika there. So I'm pretty sure since PET sucks up to the ALT RIGHT WHITE Nationalists (racists/supremacists) that is exactly what that means. It's code used to mean get rid of anyone who ain't white. Sad. Thank you for your reply hartfire! :)
Your sense of moving forward is delusional. There is nothing new in the world. Your ideas are not new. Everything that can be done has been done before.
We're not talking about technology. That's irrelevant. We're talking about political philosophy. Technology has made life more comfortable though its effect on human liberty has been completely double edged.
Pseudo intellectual mockery existed since time began. No points for originality there. (You could at least have chosen a different meme...)
History just goes in cycles. It's not a linear story of progress. History books tends to record dramatic bits of violence and forget boring periods of enlightenment and peace. It gives you the delusion that we are so civilized and people in the past were so savage. Human nature is a constant. Societies around the world have found some measure of enlightenment, lost it, found it again, lost it again, over and over and over. It takes centuries even millennia for cycles to play out.
@TrumpianDunningKruger -- This isn't "psuedo-intellectual mockery". This is mockery of your ignorance (and Dunning-Kruger ignorance of your ignorance) plain and simple.
You have essentially ZERO evidence for your assertion of the strongly cyclical history you assert. The ONLY way you can begin to make an argument for it is to cherry-pick superfiscial aspects of particular local histories (both temporally and geographically). "Hey, the ancient Greeks had democracy. We have democracy. It's all the same!"
But, of course, because you have Dunning-Kruger Disease, you lack the intellectual capacity to realize you're spouting ideologically-motivated cherry-picked bulls**t.
I never said specific systems were identical. I'm saying philosophical principles are adopted, abandoned, and readopted. Everything we debate in politics was debated at other points in history.
You clearly have no interest in reasoned debate. You just insult and build straw men. You are blind to your own ideological need to believe in enduring progress. May you live long enough to see your precious lefty progress crash and burn. For a preview take a trip to Venezuela.
Oh! Does that mean that modern medicine, transport, industry, mapping the human genome - truncated here to save writing a list the length of an essay - are all delusional? It's true that very few of us ever have an original idea, but I strongly disagree that everything that can be done has been done.
Apropos Rosie's question about moving forward via the Democrats, there are many examples of legislation in other countries which have helped to create better lifestyles for the majority of citizens. People who visit America comment on how local the news broadcasts are, and how insular and inward looking the country is as a whole. There seems to be very little interest in what happens elsewhere in the world and consequently a tremendous ignorance about how other people really live.
If a country wants to be "great" - that's a relative term. Great compared to what? Great in what way? Does the word refer to size of population, economy, power, health, happiness, egalitarian rights, morality (and who's morals?)... which of these is most important?
As I said to Old School, I'm not referring to technology. I'm talking about political ideas.
The definition of greatness is a matter of opinion. I don't believe that any utopia can be built. We are limited by human nature. Greatness comes from knowing ourselves and designing society in accordance with what we are, rather than pretending we are something else.
"there are many examples of legislation in other countries which have helped to create better lifestyles"
I think you're being short sighted here. A better lifestyle is not necessarily promoting greatness. Sometimes things of superficial benefit sow the seeds of deep problems that manifest decades of even centuries into the future.
All western democracies are heavily in debt and on course for collapse. The growth you think you see is an illusion.
This post was edited by Zeitgeist at November 28, 2016 2:43 PM MST
Re: All western democracies are heavily in debt and on course for collapse.
And, thus, TrumpianDunning Kruger's true motivations are revealed. Like all Authoritarians, he hears the siren call of "THE BAD PEOPLE MUST BE PUNISHED!", and all of his intellectual firepower is devoted to the defense/rationalization of that impulse.
Benedict Arnold 