This is very concerning.
You're right. One of the assumptions in all this "23 million americans will lose healthcare" / "more people are dying of opioid abuse than died of AIDS at the height of the epidemic" hand-wringing is that somehow, the victims are gonna lie down, take it, and fade gently into the night. Clearly, Democrats are pissed. What about the working class banking on America being great again? How does that sense of betrayal play out? We're 145 days into this. I got butter older than that.
If society is its own organism, then I think we have a fight between our collective amygdala and prefrontal cortex. For whatever reason, the amygdala is cleaning calling the shots right now. It's not a Republican or Democrat thing; just because GOP is demonstrably stupider (collectively), doesn't mean that we all aren't too emotional. In the past when I've had times that I knew my reptilian brain was calling the shots too forcefully, I've had to make a concerted effort to double down on rational thought. It's not an easy thing to do, but it can be done with extreme discipline; requires something like a mantra and a constant reminder that your head knows better than your gut what consequences are. I wonder if there's a societal equivalent. My suspicion is that there must be, but I don't know what that is. We've dug ourselves into a very untenable situation, but it's still not the only possible result. There's an energy well out of which we need to climb, but eventually we'll get the jolt we need. One would have thought that the jolt was the financial crisis, but it's been almost a decade and things are still degrading. Perhaps the next crisis? I've done very well financially since the last recession, but I still feel like the country is worse off than before. Is that true? Is it just the media? I don't know. I'm well read enough that I think I have a decent grasp on what has been happening recently in the economy (in a descriptive sense, not a causal one), and my sense is that I'm an exception, that people really feel left out, left behind, and hopeless. There's too much money and too much talent in this country for people to be suffering. I hope we have the balls next time there's a crisis to have a reset. It feels like America's only product right now is money. Patient investing is a thing of the past, and with it so is innovation. That's our real trouble. Not China. Not Robots. Greed. Same story as 1920s. Tell me, really, what the difference is between modern day corporate stock buybacks and railroads issuing bonds to pay dividends to investors? Same disease. It isn't the robots who decide that share price management is worth firing 10,000 people. It's maybe a long leap from tax policy to some deranged dudes shooting lawmakers, but I think there's a causation there. To restore sanity to our politics we need to restore dignity to our people. Everyone just wants to feed their family.
Saint Milton himself argued that any corporation that isn't behaving as rapaciously sociopathic towards society as it can is an inefficient corporation worthy of being crushed by the competition because ethics is not the responsibility of the corporation, it's the responsibility of government. And if government is not preventing the corporation from crushing everything in its path, that reflects what our society's true values are. I think it's taken a long time for the social protections of The New Deal and The Great Society to be eroded away... and it's taken even longer for the impact of that erosion to be felt by most Americans. Contrary to popular belief, the frog will jump out of the water before it boils... but it takes a while before it's worth jumping.
Fuck, just saw this: Exactly what I'm talking about. Money is a conduit, not a product. "Stock picking" isn't supposed to be quaint; it's supposed to be looking closely at a company and its products, deciding where it sits in the market, then buying if you think that its growth potential is unrealized. It's supposed to be fucking hard. Let's shoot all the quants.
Boy Scout with archery, shot gun, and riflery merit badges standing by.Let's shoot all the quants.
What I don't get is the fact that people are trying to shift the focus onto anti-Trump rhetoric and how that needs to be "toned down." If it was really that hateful and violent then people wouldn't be be going after Scalise and other senators, they'd go after Trump. I'm expecting to see this used as pushback now next time someone gets too critical of the administration. But I do hope Scalise and his aides recover, and that the gunman is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This kind of stuff could pull the country even further apart than it's already been pulled.
So much of the political use of this event will come down to the personality of the shooter. Edit: he was a 66 yo Bernie campaigner who allegidly asked if the players were Republicans or Democrats before opening fire. He will be used as an example of liberal extremism.
Wha, the article I read said he didn't say anything. Also why would he approach people with a rifle in a targeted shooting if he wasn't sure they were the people he wanted to shoot ? I mean he didn't just happen to stumble across a GOP baseball team, he already knew they were there. Somebody made that up so regular everyday republicans can feel they aren't safe since the guy was shooting republicans. It's just like how the shooter in Ottawa years back was shooting at "anybody" in parliament yet people freak out about how they qualify as "anybody" by being anywhere.
Autoresponse says: "Well and after Steve, good friend, dearest guy, of course, after he got shot on the hip, well then we all knew, Mueller had to go". - Donald Trump, tonight "The Dems have gotten so radical in their witch hunting that they've broken their own gun control values? How desperate are they?? All democrats are this one bad thing that justifies a blanket death penalty" - Guy #2 On it goes.