Machine intelligence will decide if there is to be a middle class worldwide in the coming years. Until then, I don't see it advantageous for the country to send jobs overseas, bring in say, IT workers to replace US citizens which I have experienced. The Parties have long been on the food chain to the corporations, because it takes billions nowadays to run for office and win seats. Marx and Hume have little weight in modern times, despite their insights. Right now, de facto, we have corporations funding the BLMTifa, and BLMTifa actions in democrat ruled zones, so what middle America now faces is a Junta of globalists, and yes, street stalinists. Not a good thing in my estimation.
-----Original Message----- From: Lawrence Crowell <goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> To: Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com> Sent: Sat, Oct 31, 2020 7:21 pm Subject: Re: This is the man who says he found Hunter Biden's laptop I guess I have to respond to this nonsense. The American middle class was at its apex in the 1950-80 period when the New Deal programs were at their most robust, the WWII was over and the American economy hummed along soundly with high taxation rates on the wealthy and corporations. I has been since the time of Reaganomics and the onward march into the right winged reality that things have become more uncertain and income gaps have yawned. CEOs of corporations have had a 3500% income growth while those in the middle class have seen a modest 10% growth and those at the bottom have fallen off into negative territory. The class warfare did not start because of some lurch into the far left and Marxism. BTW, what is being called radical socialism by the GOP is really just plain centrist stuff a few decades ago. Very few people are talking about Marxism. Even Sanders' socialism is far removed from Eugene Debs socialism of 100 to 110 years ago. Sanders really fits somewhere in the average leftist political party in Europe. The Democratic Party is really a very centrist party, even a bit center right. I wish before people invoked Karl Marx that they would actually take the time to read something of his. The Communist Manifesto is an interesting read, and curiously you might find yourself shaking your head in some agreement. Marx wrote about the fetishization of money or capital, and Wall Street with its myriad gimmicks from computerized microtrades to short selling and pre-trading are perfect cases of this. Marx wrote about how more of life is becoming a market sector, and today so much of life is a market activity. We have lost so many skill people had. Even with computers, people write programs less and less. It goes on. Marx's solution to things is a social metaphysics based on Hegel's dialectics. The dialectic of capital and labor was seen by him as producing a synthesis. This part, mostly in Das Kapital, is dubious. Also Das Kapital is complicated and confusing thing. I only got 50 pages into the first volume. You can skip this. I am not a Marxist, nor am I a believer in capitalism. In my minor in philosophy I found the worldly philosophers the least interesting, which includes both Marx and Smith. These ideologies are a matter of opinion, not logic. I refrain from delving into silly things that ultimately involve opinion, which to a degree is politics. Physics suggests that we should be prudent with the use of energy. Does this prove that we must conserve energy? David Hume argued that saying some state of affairs that “IS” does not logically imply an “OUGHT.” This is the “is-ought” fallacy. It is not hard to prove this within the context of modal logic, but I will skip that for now. So, principles of physics offer up the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that given thermal energy we wish to convert to mechanical energy, we can only do so with some fraction of that. Some of this goes into internal energy that is a bounded or unavailable form of energy. This does suggest that maybe some care is needed in using energy and resources. It does not prove this. Much the same can be said of global warming or other things. It may be wise to behave in some accord with what we learn, but there is no proof of this. Whether to do so or not is about opinion, and this where we get into the muddy field of politics. For this reason I do not become particularly angry if someone tells me they accept global warming as real science, but think we really do not need to do anything about it. At least that is an opinion honestly expressed. If on the other hand people try to say it is fake-science and all a hoax and so forth, that gets my anger level up. The reason is because it is a lie, and this lie is being expressed to convince other people of it. My general sense of opinions of this form is based on what I see according to empathy and a sense of my connectedness to others. For that reason I have liberal proclivities. For those who dismiss these things and think everything should be economic, well that is an opinion and I can accept that. I might disagree with it and they disagree with me, but at least these can be expressed without overt lying. LC On Friday, October 30, 2020 at 11:20:08 PM UTC-5 spudb...@aol.com wrote: For a long time to come, the middle class would do well, to retain the current status of the US, as a nation-state, rather than some alternative, that is never explained, by the progressives. They just know what they hate, and what they hate is the rest of us, those who identify as Americans as opposed to citizens of the world. The middle class is increasingly oppressed by the globalists, the ruling class that fund both parties, in an exchange of campaign donations, for favorable treatment, regulations, and laws from the paying corporations. This is a class war unlike what Engel's and Marx dreamed of. I would say that the trend of human history is now, not in favor of globalism, because of its predatory treatment of the middle class, thus, making it on the wrong side of history. For example, Sony's funding of BLM seems disingenuous to the extreme, and the board of directors, Sony, definitively, have zero to do, much, with their paying customers. So what is really going on here? Whatever it is, the result will never be a redress of legitimate grievances, but rather the exacerbation of extremist actions. -----Original Message----- From: PGC <multipl...@gmail.com> To: Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> Sent: Fri, Oct 30, 2020 11:17 pm Subject: Re: This is the man who says he found Hunter Biden's laptop On Saturday, October 31, 2020 at 3:00:11 AM UTC+1 spudb...@aol.com wrote: Saving the earth is a scam if what somebody recommends won't work. If I promise that nuclear will save us all, and it doesn't makes me either ill-informed or a deliberate scam artist to gain political power. My suspicion is that it isn't a direct scam, but a real phenomena that will affect everyone eventually. How soon and how bad are always left to the public imagination. This is what global warming becomes global heating becomes climate change. You want me to rush to defend anti-abortionists so your amygdala can be happy? My reco is look into artificial wombs. You want a stable climate? R&D on energy. You want 4 more years of orange man? Your peeps in the streets doing riots and arson is how you get 4 more years of Don. There are no "my peeps" or "your peeps". That's what simplistic propagandistic disinformation will have readers believe to amplify engagement. Racist content has enormous engagement capacity. And it's always easier to believe the loud, blaring oversimplifications than sit down and engage with what we don't know and therefore learn the hard and slow way, adapting to a changing world, working on ourselves... instead of cherry picking content/data to validate pre-existing prejudice to self-flatter ourselves. 4 more years of Don, so what? Like people should be frightened lol? I'm ok looking in the mirror, warts and all. All people can adapt and change. Maybe at some point you'll mature to the point where ideological content, identity propaganda and existential prejudice, scapegoating other groups, the comforting clarity of conspiracy theories, boredom with personal delusions etc. will no longer convince you and turn you towards actual policy and their implementation. No "my peeps" and "your peeps". There are just people, who's needs are quite similar. PGC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-li...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/64551b4d-5c78-4dc2-9937-72197436695cn%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/07ad9032-f666-4209-854f-a5721bd82552n%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/681986786.1053861.1604240974621%40mail.yahoo.com.