[Tanada]

OK Tanada I surrender. Your superior historical knowledge is of no doubt. And I still enjoy you posts. I didn’t think I was selling our historical leaders short, I was making a POTENTIAL equivelence between two specific folks. So if I muffed the analogy my apologies.

But please don’t let that stop you from schooling me, I may not always agree but I enjoy the discussion.

Back somewhere near topic....I don’t expect any new era to come from the Trump administration. I see it as a temporary disruptor.

I think clearly the D core is holding, it does not seem to giving over to any significant reforms. Trump does not seem to be building a party behind him. Even if he is re-elected it will still be merely an 8 year blip. Then back to where we came from. Few fundamental changes.

Perhaps if Trump does win a second term the D’s will see some significant reform towards democracy. Or, unlikely, a third party will emerge. That would be interesting.

Apologies, History is my first true love and I have often felt that people could do so much better if they would pay attention to its many lessons. The thing is I think you do fairly well paying attention to history, you just triggered my hot button when you seemed to casually dismiss the achievements of Alexander the Great. When I was about 8 years old I got a national Geographic map, taped it up on my wall and colored in his empire because it was as far back as I knew about at the time. I have always loved libraries so the stories about the Library of Alexandria always got my attention.

[Newfie]

I like history also, and Anthropology, but you are far ahead of me.

[jedrider]

Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth

Denialism is more than just another manifestation of the humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a whole new way of seeing the world and – most important – a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth, denialism builds a new and better truth.

Long article, I find it all interesting except for the conclusion. I think this is a phase nutured by the long history of Republican revisionism and exceptionalism that I think will come to an end and a common consensus developed OR outright breakdown of society will occur, which I give equal probability to.

[Plantagenet]

Denialism: what drives people to reject the truth
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/03/denialism-what-drives-people-to-reject-the-truth

Denialism is more than just another manifestation of the humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions. It represents the transformation of the everyday practice of denial into a whole new way of seeing the world and – most important – a collective accomplishment. Denial is furtive and routine; denialism is combative and extraordinary. Denial hides from the truth, denialism builds a new and better truth.

This article pretends that "denialism" is some kind of psychological mechanism that people acting in good faith can fall prey to.

What seems more likely to me is that for political and economic reasons people PRETEND to deny scientific reality (i.e. the truth).

Most deniers of the Holocaust and the Society gulags are fellow travelers---they politically support Russia or Germany or socialism and don't want it tainted by the historical facts.

When South African refused to admit it had an AIDS epidemic, the government there wanted to pretend things were great so it didn't have to take the measures needed to stop the epidemic.

Some people who deny climate change have major economic or social reasons to deny it----who wants to admit the world is ending ----- its bad for business.

[jedrider]

Plantagenet, that's worth discussing, how conscious or subconscious is 'denialism'.

This is not really something new, but worth revisiting:

Facts Don’t Change People’s Minds. Here’s What Does
https://heleo.com/facts-dont-change-peoples-minds-heres/16242/

Saving face is important (more so in other cultures actually).

So, we need to find denialists with a way out, to save face, not "you've been an ignoramus all your life," (usually in a very limited sphere of interest though). That's a tough one. FoxNews did it! Facebook did it!

[Newfie]

Quite correct JD. That’s why I think it is very impossible grant for the President to throw his weight behind the topic, to bring it up, to talk about it in an educational way, to communicate with the public.

Sadly even SOME CC activist I have talked to don’t really get it, they were activist first and foremost, they had merely attached themselves to CC. That doesn’t help.

So far none seem to understand it themselves. If we could only elecct a non-denialist President.

[jedrider]

I'm sorry: Russians didn't do it! Hillary didn't do it. All of you who voted for Trump did it. Own up. Helping someone else save face is, perhaps, not in my playbook

[jedrider]

Liberals who think only Republicans are at fault over climate change. You take a plane for vacation, you know you just fried the planet! That's like putting your dog in the microwave and thinking it will come out alright! Denialism seems part of our DNA certainly.

[Newfie]

Raw meat!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/opin ... trump.html

Consider a few facts: Donald Trump is in the White House, despite winning almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The Senate, the country’s most powerful legislative chamber, grants the same representation to Wyoming’s 579,315 residents as it does to 39,536,653 Californians. Key voting rights are denied to citizens in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and other United States territories. The American government is structured by an 18th-century text that is almost impossible to change.

These ills didn’t come about by accident; the subversion of democracy was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers. For James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 10, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” incompatible with the rights of property owners. The byzantine Constitution he helped create serves as the foundation for a system of government that rules over people, rather than an evolving tool for popular self-government.

[Pops]

I think I've quoted that before, plagiarizing Times!

Even so the electoral college and representative government made sense back in the day when folks lived out on edge of the frontier. Maybe not so much when we mostly live at the end of a cell signal.

[Newfie]

And a more thoughtful article.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/09/soc ... te-speech/

Of course sites like Facebook, Apple, and YouTube are free to ban conspiracy mongers like Alex Jones from their platforms. They have a right to dictate the contours of permissible speech on their sites, and to enforce those standards either dutifully or hypocritically or ideologically or using any method they see fit. No one seriously disputes this.

Then again, Twitter also has a right, as a private entity, to take a stand, and, as the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey explains it, dispassionately allow free exchanges of ideas—even the ugly ones Infowars offers—as long as users don’t break the company’s rules. Yet, here we are, watching a number of journalists—supposed sentinels of free expression—demanding that

[Cog]

Nothing worse than being ruled by a mob. Which is why, very wisely, the founders chose a constitutional republic form of governance. Our Constitution prevents the mob from voting our rights away simply because the have achieved a majority.

[dissident]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwvfh6ZS-7U

The implications of current events are very troubling. It looks like a "leftist" regime change operation. The same bogus demonstrations composed of morons hyped up with blood libel and baying for blood. The US mass media is a total failure. It is the agency by which the current strife is activated and propagated. And the Democratic Party is succeeding in pressuring social media companies into engaging in partisan censorship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8nTzfT ... e&t=31m22s

CNN and Democrats in Congress and the Senate should not get to decide who has a voice.

[Newfie]

Do you have any non-video links?

[Newfie]

The Electorial College.

A good discussion on the value of the Electorial College.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/ ... s-us-from/

In a nation as wide and varied as ours, it would be destabilizing to have a president elected over the objections of most of the states. Our American system as a whole — both by design and by experience — demands the patient building of broad, diverse political coalitions over time to effect significant change. The presidency works together with the Senate and House to make that a necessity. The Senate, of course, is also a target of the Electoral College’s critics, but eliminating the equal suffrage of states requires the support of every single state. A president elected without regard to state support is more likely to face a dysfunctional level of opposition in the Senate.

[Cog]

A tyranny of the majority is no better than the tyranny of a dictator.

[Plantagenet]

we need to find denialists with a way out, to save face, not "you've been an ignoramus all your life,"

Its not just the denialists who are the problems. There are gazillions of right thinking liberals who believe in global warming but nonetheless fell for the hoax that the Paris Climate Accords were actually going to do something to stop climate change.

IMHO both are bad. The denialists who deny climate change and the true believers who nonetheless refuse to do anything substantive about it both accomplish zilch in taking steps to mitigate climate change.

Cheers!

[Ibon]

we need to find denialists with a way out, to save face, not "you've been an ignoramus all your life,"

Its not just the denialists who are the problems. There are gazillions of right thinking liberals who believe in global warming but nonetheless fell for the hoax that the Paris Climate Accords were actually going to do something to stop climate change.

IMHO both are bad. The denialists who deny climate change and the true believers who nonetheless refuse to do anything substantive about it both accomplish zilch in taking steps to mitigate climate change.

Cheers!

Since the pathology of both is excessive self entitlement and since consequences will obliterate the indulgences that create the decadence our self entitled culture we can therefore conclude that healing of the division lie within those very consequences. Logical.

[Plantagenet]

Watching an interview on PBS with Howard Schultz just now.

He believes he can heal the partisan divide by running for president as an independent.

Schultz is very impressive. I hope he runs. I know there are a lot of people like me who think both the Ds and the Rs could use a good whop upside da head.

Trump won i 2016 because he ran as an outsider. Schultz really would be an outsider.

Cheers!

[Newfie]

Came across this, might explain a lot.

118B3A28-43FC-4D66-93F0-30D903DEBB82.jpeg

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.market ... 3C5E6F97B5