Democracy

Will Trump succeed in his identity politics?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think by the time Trump’s second term is over, he will have successfully reduced identity politics to include only “Trump supporter” and “anti-American”?”

That’s exactly what his strategy has been to date. It is precisely that divisive strategy employed by conservatives everywhere he has leveraged into his position of power. This has been the consistent strategy of conservatives who claim the entire world is ugly, evil, and broken beyond repair while claiming they’re the only ones capable of fixing the messes they have made.

It’s a tiresome strategy that has worked wonders for them as they’ve instituted privatization programs throughout every democratic nation. They intentionally sabotage functioning institutes by defunding them to create problems that otherwise would not exist and then claim those institutes would be better served by the private sector.

People have been lapping this lie up since Ronald Reagan betrayed democracy by claiming the government was the problem. By demonizing the government, he created an entity the public would turn against as an enemy and scapegoat for all their problems. He successfully detached the notion of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people and converted it into an imaginary boogeyman that the people would willingly fight against rather than rise to their responsibility to change it in ways that more effectively represent their needs.

Disparagements like “nanny state” have often been used to characterize government as a paternalistic entity while attaching the opposing sentiments of historically destructive autocracies living within the cultural imaginations of people who have always fought for their right to self-determination. At the same time, the ownership class has endlessly justified their need for the government nipple to support the people by themselves as a proxy of wealth custodians with a paternalistic responsibility to care for the people by creating jobs for them.

In the minds of the people, blurring the distinction between a democracy and autocracy made it easy to turn the people against the only entity capable of protecting the integrity of a government of the people against the people. By turning the people against their only protection, he successfully made every citizen in every democracy around the world vulnerable to the only enemies of humanity that humanity has ever had — parasites who steal our value and hoard it in service to their egos.

DonOld Trump’s rhetoric, along with every CONservative political leader, makes a point of feigning solidarity with the working class while besmirching them in private. A recording of this dynamic was Romney’s downfall as he publicly pretended to have a working-class sensibility in the most awkward ways, making him give off uncanny valley vibes that made it difficult for people to buy his ruse.

George Bush Jr., however, was elected based on people’s perceptions that they could enjoy a casual conversation with him over a beer. Neither of these people understood or cared about the lives of everyday citizens. We have all been little more than disposable pawns in their games of power all along. The ownership class breeds this dehumanizing class distinction within every generation while disparaging anyone who does not share their misanthropic regard for humanity.

Trump hasn’t done anything different or unique from that playbook. He has merely capitalized on the inculcated belief that billionaires are job creators. Trump has leveraged the lie that his wealth is a product of pure effort and individual initiative. Trump has benefitted from the lie that anyone could have his wealth if they worked hard enough and were smart enough about how they spent their money.

He has taken the strategy of bamboozling the public over decades to its logical conclusion. He has benefitted from the illusion that an avocado toast diet has been responsible for irresponsible people suffering in poverty. It has been a strategy of mollifying the working class to such a degree that many have shown an eager willingness to wage war against their fellow citizens to defend the ownership class.

The ownership class has been so successful in cultivating the image of a blurred distinction between classes and making themselves appear as one of the little people that they’ve begun dropping any pretense of their disguise being a lie. They made themselves abundantly clear with the threat issued by the president of the Heritage Foundation when he declared Project 2025 would be a restructuring of the nation that would be bloodless only if the left capitulated.

The arrogance of the tech bros perpetuates a horror show of arrogance over the little people through a disgusting betrayal they have coined as a “dark enlightenment,” which hearkens back to biblical references and the devil’s temptations.

The most consistent characteristic of hubris, however, is its finite and fleeting moment of ascendancy because, like Icarus, the most arrogant humans who deign to fly too close to the sun fail to understand how their wax wings inevitably melt under the light of truth.

They will always fall to their doom.

This is the broad lesson of the history of social evolution.

Dynasties and monarchies are anachronisms because people invariably tire of the lies, the abuses, and of being played as fools while watching their dreams shattered one by one and the ownership class flying to the stars in their mechanical penises.

It is an embarrassment that Bezos remained so utterly oblivious to the profundity of that flight that he had to drag along a human symbol capable of interpreting an experience he could not appreciate. He struggled to acknowledge that that was only possible for him by the sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of people who contributed to his hoard.

The ownership class has been successfully whispering in the ears of their hordes of Stockholm Syndrome victims that their power is an inevitability, that it belongs to them by a divine right of kings as old as humanity. They ignore how their power rests on the shoulders of those who support them, and they do not have infinite patience for egotistical abuses.

Our stories are written by those who have historically stood against their power and have consistently transformed human society into something more approximating the justice history inexorably bends toward.

Trump will only have succeeded in pushing the stale ruse past its due date and causing it to smell so much like rancid fish that even the MAGAt army supporting him today will turn on him like rabid animals when they can no longer believe his lies.

By the end of his term, many of his MAGAt followers will have hit rock bottom. They will be ripe for vengeance against him and all the arrogant members of the ownership class who have been steadily waging a war against the little people for centuries. If all goes well, this will finally be the last of this primarily silent war because the little people will have learned that power should never be unlimited within anyone’s hands. Power must always be restrained. That’s the only way we can survive and meet our future.

By the end of Trump’s term, he will either be dead because his body will have finally given out, locked in prison (and primarily for his protection) or be in hiding from an enraged electorate that has finally figured out the truth about his betrayal against them and the nation he fraudulently claimed to be a patriot of.

The hordes of the people who outnumber the ownership class by orders of magnitude will either destroy the edifices of power while seeking retribution for their betrayal, or they will be satiated by an awakening among the ownership class that they either share their power or lose it altogether.

How do Canadians and Americans feel about each other?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “How do Canadians and Americans really feel about each other?”

This Canadian thinks of Americans in ways not too dissimilar from how I think of fellow Canadians. Most are decent human beings at heart. Many are misguided and gravely misunderstand the nature of today’s dysfunctionality in society. A few — or more than just a few, but a minority nonetheless, are toxically stupid to the point of being beyond redemption.

All but the third group are reasonable and amenable to working together to identify the best solutions which meet the broadest range of needs of the citizenry. Our cultures are similar but unique, while, as a whole, Canadians appear to have more insight and respect for the values declared by Americans as being core to their identity.

Much of the discord in America, for example, in the value of freedom, lies in the difference between Canadians being more community-oriented. Americans tend to breed an isolationist degree of individualism. The resulting perception of freedom between the two nations is that Canadians regard freedom as derived from our community, and Americans appear to interpret freedom as the ability for an individual to do whatever they please whenever they please.

If we were to track this difference through Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, we can see a distinction in the degree of moral evolution this represents.

Caveat: Like all models, this is not a universal prescription defining all people in any culture, and so this may generally describe some fundamental cultural differences, the overlap between cultures exists in the developmental differences between individuals.

Canada has no shortage of people who fail to grow beyond the pre-conventional stage. We do have our flavour of Maple MAGAts — the toxic form of extremist conservativism plaguing the planet. It is certainly more prevalent in the U.S., but that’s entirely due to economics.

The U.S. has always had a much larger budget that has always been more attractive to society’s predators. IOW. The economic success of the U.S. has been its most fundamental weakness.

It is in the best interests of those seeking power to ensure the populace is developmentally stunted. Keeping people on the level of pre-conventional development makes them more malleable and amenable to influence from authorities. Teaching them to fear punishment keeps them in line and converts them into sycophants addicted to chasing their self-interests.

This works for most of the population, which functions as workhorses to keep the machinery of society operational. Still, the next level of conventional morality is also necessary to function as an administrative body to keep the rabble in line.

All nations leverage this developmental dynamic through intrinsic and extrinsic punishment and reward systems. Canada and the U.S. are no different in this regard because this is a dynamic cultivated by power structures.

The causes of the distinctions between nations begin at the third and uppermost level of development, in the post-conventional stage. This is where philosophies and ideologies live that define the visions guiding all citizens in their perceptions of themselves and as members of a community.

This is where the distinction between “melting pot” and “multicultural mosaic” lives and flows throughout society to form a cultural identity.

It appears ironic that a nation that values individuality is adamant about conformity, but that’s explained in the differences between these two perceptions of national identity. One cannot truly value individuality when their culture homogenizes its citizens through a melting pot. (Many) Americans consider Canada a “socialist” country, but we value individuality, and freedom, by extension, more than Americans because we embrace and celebrate diversity as core to our cultural heritage.

I am proud to have Quebec as a part of Canada precisely because their contrast has kept Canada from falling into the same self-serving traps of insular arrogance that Americans have. They’ve been regarded as pains for many westerners, but so have westerners been regarded in similarly disparaging ways by our French-speaking members of our family. However, the dynamic between divergent cultures characterizing Canada makes us strong and coherent as a nation, which values its people above those who would rule us.

Americans would do well to learn from our dynamic and begin to treat their Spanish-speaking population with the same respect. It would help you grow as a nation with something more nuanced as a culture beyond the bombast of commercial ostentatiousness and avoid being viewed as the meth lab we live above.

Will the next President be able to reverse the current destruction of the government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “”https://donewiththebullshit.quora.com/Will-the-next-President-be-able-to-reverse-the-current-destruction-of-the-government-3“

No.

The next president can mitigate the impact of the damage, reverse all the executive orders, and pull the nation out of free fall, but the destruction will be permanent.

The damage to the nation’s international reputation is permanent.

The damage to the people who Trump’s reckless behaviour has victimized is permanent. The families he destroyed in his first term have still not recovered.

The divide he has wedged open will take the rest of this century to repair.

The nation will not and cannot return to the state before Trump took office. It was already being held together by duct tape and a skilled, lifetime politician who performed feats of magic to repair the damage done by Trump’s first term.

Too few people failed to acknowledge the significance of Biden’s leadership, and that was a consequence of a nation that was far too broken on too many levels to appreciate for most.

The nation has been falling to pieces for decades, and since Ronald Reagan betrayed the middle class. This destruction became inevitable when Reagan reversed the nation’s trajectory to favour the wealthy class.

This damage isn’t based on politics but on class.

The wealthy class have brought this tragedy to the world.

The numbers don’t lie.

The moment the people bought into the lie that the wealthy class are gods among the population and from whom we are blessed with their favour in economic growth and prosperity is when we gave up on ourselves and started turning against each other.

No president can repair this damage alone… not even if he were the second coming that far too many people pin their hopes and dreams on.

We must do the repair work, and we have to begin by repairing ourselves first.

We must focus first on the welfare of the people because, without the people’s health and welfare, there is no nation, economy, or prosperity. No wealthy class of billionaires can exist without the economy’s engine of 350 million consumers pumping value through a system designed to benefit everyone. They are more dependent upon a healthy middle class than the people who are dependent upon them to finance their pet projects.

We must weed out the greed of humanity if we are to have any hope of stability.

Reversing the destruction will require doing many things differently, but they’re not insurmountable problems. On the upside, more people are aware today of the threat of excess power in too few hands. More people understand today that medical bankruptcies occur only because a handful of greedy billionaires prioritize the bloated luxuries they have acquired by victimizing millions of people.

More people understand today that their economic struggles are due entirely to the economic disparity that led to a world war less than one century ago.

The economic destruction can be repaired, but it must begin by restoring economic justice.

The psychological destruction of today, however, can forever change the nation on a fundamental level — but sadly, the destruction is nowhere near complete enough to force enough people to wake up to the horror of what they have become.

There is still much pain ahead, affecting the entire world.

If Americans truly want to believe their anthem and be the land of the free and the home of the brave, the entire world is pleading with you all to step up to the plate and rid this world of the oligarchy scourge.

Why did Colin Powell defect from his old political party?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Colin-Powell-defect-from-his-old-political-party/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

This question represents a severe disability in one’s comprehension of a democracy.

It’s an attitude very much like what Elon Musk displayed when he thought suing advertisers for abandoning his increasingly Nazified platform was justifiable.

It would be like walking past a McDonald’s restaurant and getting fined for not stopping in for a burger and fries or not agreeing to make an additional purchase after being prompted by their upselling suggestions.

Imagine being charged double on your meal because you didn’t want to pay extra for a hot steaming pile of sugar called a “pie.” This cartoon scenario represents the same level and quality of entitled thinking in this question.

No one is obligated to go along with their party in a democracy. Being a political party member is not indentured servitude unless you have no self-respect or ability to think for yourself. You are admitting to your willingness to accept life as a baby bird whose mouth yawns open to await the trickle-down meal of mental stimulation to determine how and what you should think.

How is that a democracy in your mind?

It’s not.

How is that not a grotesque degree of abdication of your free exercise of will?

It’s a betrayal of everything we have had the luxury of enjoying because our forefathers sacrificed their lives fighting for and dying for the right to dissent from their party.

Anyone who steps away from a party is sending the most potent message possible that that party no longer represents their best interests.

The last thing anyone owes a political party is their loyalty.

Genuinely considering oneself a patriot who loves and is dedicated to freedom means protecting one’s integrity and family, friends, and community by walking away from a corrupt party. That’s not a defection but a courageous act of patriotism.

As terrible a VP as Mike Pence can be considered, he at least redeemed himself by showing the courage of a true patriot with a love of country.

Colin Powell may have royally screwed up while serving in the Bush administration, but he is not a defector. Colin Powell represents one of the most loyal patriots the Republican party has had in decades.

If your party cannot put the needs of the many above the desires of the few, then your loyalty to your country demands you to walk away from them.

Yes… that line was a direct ripoff of a very familiar source of inspiration for what defines us as humans. Even you must be able to recognize a universal truth in whatever form you encounter it. You cannot be a human who cares about creating the best world for all of us without acknowledging universal truths.

If your party no longer works to represent your best interests, then the only way you can be a freedom-loving patriot is to turn your back on that party.

If you think that people who walk away from their party are being disloyal, then that makes you disloyal to everything you claim to believe in and value.

If you can’t support a party member’s right to walk away, then that makes you a fascist.

If a party expects loyalty to whatever platform it concocts, then they are not a party that values democracy or freedom.

It is the party that must conform to the demands of their people. It is the party that must permanently relinquish power to serve the needs of its people properly. It is up to the party to adjust its platform to acknowledge what the people want and need. It is up to the party to represent their people, not vice versa.

The thinking embodied within this question is the core of the rot that makes an American style of democracy so vulnerable to enemies foreign and domestic.

If you genuinely want to fight for and protect your democracy as a patriot, then you must fight against a two-party hegemony.

You should demand complete electoral reform to eliminate the kind of corrupt thinking this question represents. It’s abhorrent that people have reduced a public dialogue into a mindless cheerleading competition.

The only people who win that game are the nation’s enemies who seek to usurp its power.

You should consider people like Colin Powell and Liz Cheney among the bravest members of your party because they are not afraid of the consequences of sacrificing their political influence and benefits for ideals that transcend petty politics.

The kind of thinking which embodies this question is what created concentration camps and gas chambers less than one hundred years ago.

This kind of thinking has been responsible for repeating that ugly history, and it’s already at the stage of recreating concentration camps.

How much further must we venture into this nightmare before people realize the horror they invite as a stain on their person and the burden of profound regret they will carry to their graves?

How is dissent the foundation of democracy?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-is-dissent-the-foundation-of-democracy/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

  1. The opposite of dissent is subordination.
  2. Subordination is the foundation for authoritarian regimes.
  3. Authoritarian regimes are rigidly hierarchical.
  4. Rigid hierarchies are inflexible and abusive toward all people downward in the power hierarchy.
  5. Authoritarian regimes eventually break because humans have limits on the abuses they can tolerate.
  6. Democracies survive because they are fundamentally adaptable to change.
  7. Democracies are fundamentally adaptable to change because they accommodate individuality.
  8. Individuality empowers self-determination to maximize flexibility and adaptability.
  9. Flexibility and adaptability are contingent upon responsiveness to succeed.
  10. Responsiveness demands input and engagement from diverse perspectives to be effective.
  11. Dissent filters out ineffective processes that inhibit adaptability.
  12. Navigating change requires dissent to ensure that adaptation initiatives succeed.
  13. Without dissent, changes are made blindly to make adaptability impossible and guarantee failure.

Hence, dissent is the foundation of a democracy.

Furthermore, embracing dissent improves all of us, particularly in the essential skills area of critical thinking.

The greater our embrace of dissent, the better our thinking skills become.

The better our thinking skills become, the more robust our democracy.

Democracies are being threatened worldwide because we have been failing to equip citizens with the skills they need to build a better world together.

We have been failing to equip our citizens because arrogant assholes with too much of a desire for power wish to reduce citizen efficacy in self-governance systems because they deem themselves superior humans entitled to their power and to lord over the little people.

It’s past time they begin to relearn their lessons in humility.

Is there a way for those who have lost their jobs to declare war on AI?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Imagine that millions lose their jobs due to AI. Is there a way for those who have lost their jobs to effectively declare war on AI?”

Well, that’s pointless.

People will not lose their jobs because of AI but because corporations save money on labour costs.

AI is a tool, and the argument that ammosexuals love to barf up applies here: “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”

AI doesn’t kill jobs. Capitalists kill jobs because they can and are incentivized by it within a system that worships personal wealth above all.

We, as citizens, kill jobs through our apathy and through our empowerment of those who prioritize their material benefits at the expense of the many they can exploit.

We bring this upon ourselves by not having a coherent social development roadmap. We allow our societies to grow by chaos rather than responsible systems management strategies.

We empower our leaders through a reactionary process of social development rather than a strategically reasoned and proactive process.

Sadly, authoritarian regimes are far more successful along this vector than democracies because their decision-making is limited to small, centralized powers.

This is part of the reason that the public has been increasingly questioning the value of democracy while looking toward authoritarian models to solve our problems for us.

Sadly, the solution for democracies to be far more effective in mobilizing social development in a coherent and unified direction is entirely contingent upon the quality of the education the public receives.

For instance, the transition to a fully automated society is an inevitability. There is no point in resisting it. We would all be much better off by leaning into it and demanding we adapt our systems to manage the transition better so that we can mitigate collateral damage.

Instead, we are experiencing a chaotic transition led by random powers following personal visions motivated by personal benefit rather than social good.

If our education systems provided a more comprehensive insight into social development, much of the public would be engaged in the political process in strategic rather than reactionary ways.

We would be more unified as a people in identifying trends and developing coherent strategies for successfully managing the challenges we face.

Instead, we are burdened by a dearth of education that reduces a population into cheerleading camps driven by emotionality that can be characterized as juvenile reactions against authorities. Considering how democracy means each person is a governing authority member, this is beyond an asinine apprehension of how one’s government works or how it can be made effective.

Democracy demands engagement, yet our apprehension of engagement is limited to how many likes one gets on one’s post. That’s not even remotely resembling engagement.

That’s like claiming every celebrity walking a red carpet and waving at the throngs is socializing with friends.

Sadly, part of the problem has been deliberately cultivated by the capitalists who want us distracted enough from the sausage-making process to allow them to remake human society into their image.

They have been succeeding remarkably within the U.S. as it has become a dystopian corporatocracy that prioritizes gun sales over the lives of children and billionaire profits over the healthcare needs of citizens.

The public has been so conditioned to prioritize profit at all costs that they will fight to preserve a billionaire’s right to kill people for profit.

We can’t govern ourselves in a democracy if all of our time is focused on survival and profit-churning. Most of us don’t care to be involved in the decision-making process, which would be okay if we could trust our information systems to prioritize informing people over chasing profits.

Instead, we have media that has become a singular, massive entity of public influence predicated upon churning conflict to maintain attention justified by revenue increases.

Instead of informing the public on issues of criticality to the future of the people, we have this kind of incendiary rhetoric from an attention whore indulging in shock stupidity to justify their salary increases by ginning up the rubes to create conflict.

Less than one hundred years ago, this kind of crap would be shut down immediately because it would be considered a precursor to war.

Instead, the attention-seeking mentality justified by the profit (and power-seeking) motive does not care about the casualties created by irresponsible language.

The value of human life has been downgraded, if it ever mattered to society, to a level that’s no greater than the Roman arenas when people were killed for entertainment.

If we don’t start asserting some standards on coherent behaviour that cultivates the best of us as a species, we will continue careening headlong into chaos.

Humans can take only so much abuse before they break. Everyone can break, and people like Watters are playing with fire. There’s no way he will be safe again crossing the border into Canada because of his disgusting language. Some might argue that any aggressive response against him is unjustifiable, and that may be valid, but it doesn’t change how humans behave when aggrieved. I’m confident few Canadians will give him a warm reception for his remarks if he ever crosses the border. At best, at least from my perspective, he’s earned a bloody nose for his garbage.

This kind of bullying rhetoric is toxic to society and is a betrayal of the social contract.

The acceptability of this nonsense and its prevalence is why we have no coherent strategy for managing our transition into a fully automated society. The acceptability of this kind of incendiary distraction from critical information the public needs to make proper decisions to minimize casualties in our transition will create unnecessary casualties. This kind of thinking is what permits bigotry to determine outcomes that dramatically affect lives.

This kind of nonsense is why this question exists in so many forms everywhere and why I’ve already answered this question in several forms by now.

The issues are not complex, but they are made so because we’re not talking about them where we need to be talking about them. We’re allowing jackasses to troll for reactions in “respectable mainstream media” that we would mute and block online if they were individuals and not expensively dressed and cosmetically pampered media personalities.

We are being betrayed by the Fourth Estate each and every day — and to the degree that a majority of the world now believes the U.S. is a tragic case of end times for a nation that has become so corrupt, it can never be trusted for leadership in the world again. However, anyone may parse the 2024 election, and one cannot ignore the role of the media in installing a monster in the top job for the nation.

If you genuinely want to declare war against the loss of jobs, then you need to take it to those who benefit from displacing jobs. You need to start pressuring the billionaires and the corporations they benefit from while ripping off the public through tax avoidance schemes.

Instead of war, you should demand responsible management for an unavoidably dramatic and traumatic societal transition by insisting on the only sane solution to this period in human history, UBI, as a starting point toward sanity in our social development.

The worst thing about where the world is at in this transition is that the next four years are being defined by a parasitic presence seeking to empower further those who are disempowering the working class while replacing workers with automated solutions to toss millions out onto the streets to fend for themselves.

We must stop blaming AI for job losses because it’s just a gun in the hands of mercenaries.

Is the entire world moving further to the right?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Is-the-entire-world-moving-further-to-the-right/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

The entire world is undergoing a massive transformation that has steadily escalated in speed and scope year by year for decades. Although the world has constantly been changing, this degree of change is unprecedented.

I remember Alvin Toffler’s predictions on this in Future Shock from when I was a kid in school, and we had the opportunity to watch his documentary in the classroom. Among the many predictions, this rate of escalating change has always stood out for me as a consequence of being repeatedly reminded of it throughout my lifetime. I thought the beginning of the Information Age represented a peak of speed of change, but that was just the beginning of ramping up the rate of change to come.

With great changes come great uncertainty, and that fires up anxiety levels everywhere.

Making matters worse has been the class warfare reaching new peaks of disparity driven by thefts of the working class by the tens of trillions over the last few decades as world politics began shifting rightward.

Before Reagan and Thatcher, many of the democracies in developed nations around the globe still viewed the government as somewhat of an ally, even after experiencing perceived betrayals through global events like the war in Vietnam and Britain’s mishandling of the IRA in Ireland and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” JFK’s assassination shocked the world. Labour strikes rocked the world.

People were fed up then with disruptive elements and had developed a level of comfort with their daily lives and their expectations for their future that they lost touch with the value of disruptive events like strikes. No one then realized how a disruption to their air travel plans was a positive and necessary event in a healthy democracy when negotiations broke down. The general attitude of entitlement to expectations of service became an easy wedge to force between the public and the labour organizations fighting to maintain equanimity between the classes.

Demonizing government became a path to power within government because the people in democracies began believing corruption was also as endemic to the government as unions. Political systems began being viewed through a cynical lens, while conservative politicians have since leveraged that sentiment to gain political power for themselves.

Regan’s firing of air traffic controllers was accompanied by a cheering public who saw their travelling conveniences disrupted rather than their quality of life being protected. People had begun forgetting almost a couple of centuries of sacrifice in fighting for fundamental rights and protections like weekends off, overtime pay, and healthcare benefits.

Employers had begun implementing progressive strategies for supporting staff, so the protections provided by unions began to seem redundant and perceived as an unnecessary cost for supporting a political organization that often ignored the needs of its constituents. Unions began being viewed as corrupt organizations rather than protectors of the middle class that they helped build and grow.

Conservatives took advantage of this new embrace of the ownership class and cultivated a belief that it was within reach of everyone who worked hard and lived responsibly. The American dream was possible by the beginning of disassembling the structures that gave rise to the middle class.

Reagan’s tax cuts and the heyday of spending, which characterized the 1980s, made it seem like the wealthy were just like everyone else and were equal members of a human community willing to share in the prosperity.

It was easy to support conservative ideology because it seemed the most pragmatic. Even today, people will describe themselves as “conservative” more out of an avoidance of needlessly attracting unwanted and disparaging public attention and appearing reserved than out of an embrace of a political ideology.

When people refer to themselves as “conservative,” they usually do so to appear “normal,” “predictable,” and “approachable,” while those who are not are generally viewed as “erratic” and “disruptive.” This perception is what has made conservativism most popular. It is easy to equate “fiscal conservativism” with sound financial management strategies, even though political conservatives constitute the worst among the worst economic managers. We have had decades of conservatives blowing up debts across every nation they held leadership roles in and are still publicly viewed as fiscally competent.

Conservativism represents an imaginary form of stoicism in which people hunker down and do what needs to be done because that’s the only way to survive adversity.

In times of stress and fear, withdrawing from positions of risk seems generally the safest approach toward surviving adversity. We’ve had countless generations learning to do without to make ends meet. Our forefathers lived during times of scarcity while production efforts scrambled to keep up with demand.

Most people lived independently and without the social support fought for and won by the progressives in society who demanded equitable treatment from the ownership class. They also responded to adversity by hoarding their assets as a survival strategy through adversity. Scarcity was a fact of life until only a few decades ago when our means of production exceeded our demand.

We are already living in an entirely new world, while most people born before the advent of the information age still live as if scarcity were a challenge for the human species. Most do not understand how dramatically opportunities have shrunk for people starting today like they did yesterday. Many, if not most, perceive today’s complaints and social disruptions as a consequence of overreach by attitudes of unearned entitlement.

Many live in today’s world as if it were still the 1980s without realizing how much they once took for granted has been stolen by the ownership class. What they see is increasing disruption to the predictable life and world they once knew, and they seek to blame progress itself as the culprit responsible for their anxieties. This causes people to turn inward in a protectionist strategy for survival.

The attitude of protectionism has been steadily rising while being stoked by conservative politicians as they have cultivated a cynically misanthropic attitude among their supporters toward their fellow neighbours. They take every opportunity to demonize concepts that make people feel uncomfortable and politicize them for personal gain.

Everything about the conservative ethos today has been geared toward hating anyone and anything that can potentially disrupt the sanctity of a predictable existence. Fear and hatred have been the weapons of choice wielded by conservative power mongers, and it works because people respond to threats on a visceral level before they can afford the risk of examining them for their rationale.

Conservativism is a “shoot first and ask questions later” approach to anxiety, and that used to work on some levels in a simpler world with simpler problems. Unfortunately, it only exacerbates the issues we face today.

Fortunately, within the hard swing to the right throughout these last several decades exist the seeds for reversing the course of a political pendulum that has been perpetually swinging to either extreme before being yanked back to an inevitable centre where stability lies.

It may be that we will continue swinging further rightward, but the further we go to the right, the more powerful the backlash becomes. If we find ourselves facing full-blown fascism as a clear threat to our democracies, then we may be in for some seriously chaotic times, but that’s when the voice of reason becomes influential as a guide out of madness.

We desperately need bold leadership that can press for the necessary changes we must make to our systems to ensure our transition into a fully automated society creates minimal casualties, or we will risk warfare. We can no longer afford capitulating gestures because the conservative opposition has been clear that it doesn’t negotiate in good faith. Like all situations with bullies, the only solution to their entrenchment is to meet them on their level and overpower them to such a degree that they relent.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, where tit for tat is the only way out of this mess right now. We can face the issues head-on or watch everything collapse, hoping some miracle saves our assets. We are most definitely at a crossroads as a species, and the right appears hellbent on subjugating everyone not approved as core representatives of their tribe.

Why would it be possible to live without the government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora and can also be accessed via “Why would it be possible for people to live without the government?”

It’s not.

Without government, we would barely survive while struggling with anarchy and doing our best to avoid the bullies among us who would have free reign to terrorize anyone they please.

Life would be cheaper than it is now. Justice would be non-existent, and perversions of it would be meted out by force and without any form of protection for anyone without the power to dominate others.

Virtually all scientific and technological progress would halt. If government ceased to exist from this point forward, we would be facing a nuclear holocaust through much of the world as centuries-long enemies would no longer be restrained from indulging in their worst fear impulses. The mid-East would essentially be vaporized and rendered uninhabitable for the next century. India and Pakistan would decimate each other. Much of Eastern Europe would be bombed into rubble. China would decimate its neighbours and indulge in its most significant expansion across the globe… or it could fall apart into factions ruled by powerful interests within the nation whose infighting would also collapse the country and leave it vulnerable to external aggressors seeking revenge.

Whatever may exist of what you call home would have to be protected by traps and a twenty-four-hour armed security detail. You would sleep in shifts.

Your environment would be like living in a perpetual purge. That would likely last until we’ve culled most of our species and our numbers shrink from eight billion to a few hundred million within a few years at the outset.

Once we’ve burned ourselves out from a pent-up violence orgy, we’d start seeing primitive tribal infrastructures negotiating arrangements to secure our survival as a species. At the same time, we would find ourselves living in an entirely hostile world as we experience ecological collapse all around us from our careless mismanagement of the environment ramped up into overdrive from global conflicts.

We would make the world of the Mad Max mythos manifest and find ourselves severely humbled as a species.

As much as people may hate government and as much as many criticisms are justifiable, we need government for the simple reason that the one in five who currently manifest the mental health pandemic we’re living with is a perpetual threat to human existence.

Once we succeed at reaching a point of optimal mental health where we have overcome our psychoses, human society may evolve to a degree where government is as much an automated system as the rest of the industrialized world promises to be.

Until then, our best bet is to become more engaged in our self-governance as a collection of democratic societies — which, at this point, means “taking our government’s back” — out of the hands of the few with too much power and back into the hands of all of us.

Humanity’s worst threats have always been the few with too much power victimizing the many with too little power. This is why democracy was born and has dominated the landscape over the last century.

Sadly, those with too much power in today’s world hate it and are actively undermining it to send us all back to a medieval state of existence as a two-class society of rulers and serfs.

As much as many people may wish to mock democracy as a fundamentally flawed system while pointing out the advantages of an autocratic system, the reality is that we have never truly committed to making democracy work. If we had, we would do the necessary thing — equip everyone with the education, skills, and insights required to make proper decisions reflecting what’s best for all of us.

This last American election showed us that people are still trapped within the paradigm of what’s best for them personally in a zero-sum game that necessitates the existence of losers to support the winners.

The solution to our problems is not eradicating what we struggle with but fixing where we fail to make it work. That means improving our education systems by learning to value education on a level as if our lives depend upon it because they do.

Why is democracy considered an ideal form of government?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-is-democracy-considered-an-ideal-form-of-government/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

There is no such thing as an “ideal form of government” because humans are from “ideal.”

What makes democracy a superior form of government to all others is self-determination.

What makes democracy a far more chaotic form of government than all others is self-determination.

No other form of governance is as capable as a democracy of facilitating the full achievement of human potential because no other form of governance empowers individuality.

No other form of governance is as prone to overt assaults against it, while no other form of governance can survive those assaults.

Human nature demands self-determination, while the assaults against democracy today are born of that demand for self-determination — albeit in horrifically corrupted and myopically self-serving terms.

Think about the perspectives of those displaying an aggrieved assault against democracy. They are commonly born from an autocratic mindset which expects the world to conform to their perspectives. They interpret the evolution of society as a rejection of their insular views and a violation of their rights to those views. It is Frankenstein’s monster of cancerous individuality disguising a toxic desire for sublimation to authoritarian rule by people who imagine freedom as their right to dictate the lives of others.

They are not entirely oblivious to the inherent hypocrisies they champion, or they would otherwise not conduct their protests while disguising their identities or hiding behind masks or fake profiles, managing multiple sock-puppet accounts on social media.

They are the disruptive elements in a democratic society screaming a need for a much more coherent strategy for social development. The challenge at hand, however, is not an authoritarian solution dictated to the masses, as history’s failures have made clear. Today’s dynamic in an information-rich society demands a supportive strategy of education and social welfare programs providing opportunities for healing and growth for a species emerging out of a dark and brutal history while still suffering the effects of generational PTSD.

For democracy to survive its current challenges and begin to approach whatever may be deemed as an “ideal form of governance,” our systems must evolve to prioritize the people over the plutocracy seeking to regress human civilization to a medieval state of rulers and serfs.

We will otherwise find ourselves repeating the bloody histories of our ancestors who sacrificed everything to win the freedoms far too many take for granted today.

In today’s world, the closest examples we have to an “ideal democracy” are embodied within the Nordic models of social democracy.

We would save countless lives if we could take stock of how fundamentally destructive the world’s current adoption of right-wing ideologies is for human society and global stability.

Is the defeat of the Democrats a spectacular failure of the left?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is the defeat of the democrats an example of what Stephen Fry call the spectacular failure of the left?”

No. It’s a stark warning to the people of how utterly corrupt the corporatocracy is.

Fifty years ago, a menace like Trump would have been laughed off the stage long ago. He would not have made it past the primaries in his first election.

“Grab ’em by the pussy.” would have been the end of his political career precisely because the Fourth Estate took their responsibility to inform the people seriously enough to challenge him on his policies, his character, and his platform.

They gave him a pass on every ugly thing he said and did while demonstrating double standards applied to every candidate he ran against in all three elections he campaigned for.

They complained about Harris’ complete platform and well-thought-out policy initiatives as being too vague while Donald Trump talked about another man’s penis.

They overlooked Project 2025 and let Trump run roughshod over everyone and everything without so much as a peep. A few talking heads indulged in performative outrage at most, but all those people were marginal media entities. No one who was a significant personality challenged Trump’s horrendous behaviour in any substantive way.

This election and every election that Trump participated in is a scathing indictment of the corporate-owned media and a solid argument to break up the media monopoly that’s responsible for massaging the citizenry’s perceptions into a stupor that will set the world on fire.

He’s not fit to be president, but the people who refuse to see are incapable of exercising their judgment with any form of objective clarity because they’re all members of a cult that has been conditioned to perceive this atrocity as a win. They will need to experience the shocking effect of hitting rock bottom, like every addict, before they can awaken to the horror of their blind choices.

Every Republican woman who gets raped will learn to understand hatred on levels far beyond their current imagination.

Every Republican voter who finds themselves facing medical bankruptcy or the loss of a family member due to being denied healthcare will now have reason to regret their choice on a supremely visceral level.

Every single one of these people will become a ticking time bomb.

School shootings will continue and likely escalate.

Violence will escalate, and the media will benefit from it.

People will turn to the government for support, and they’ll find it’s been wholly repopulated with Trump sycophants, and they’ll get the bird they flipped against the “librulz” they’ve been taught to hate so much.

This era will become even more significant to American history than the McCarthy era in terms of a nationwide fervour that tears it apart.

… and the media will benefit from it.