I agree with much that was written in this last post. I moved to the US in the late 1990's from Canada, after years of traveling back and forth for business. I thought at first I had a grasp of the scope of the dichotomies, especially with respect to illegal immigration as my first years in the US were in Houston were one could see how both the "left" and "right" exploited the situation in that "illegals" are a source of cheap labor and for others support for "illegals" vicariously fulfilled some sort of belief that the country was progressing. In other words, it appeared that both sides were gaming the system without being held directly responsible.
Instead those who were held responsible were those who paid the bills namely tax payers and those who health insurance premiums were sky high to subsidize the cost of those who crashed hospital "ER"'s as there is a law that says that no one can be denied health care if they go to a hospital ER. When my wife had her first daughter, a pregnant Mexican woman showed up by herself to the ER. She was alone. But, by the end of the day, when I went to see our daughter in the nursery, the viewing room was full of the woman's relatives. Indeed, we moved away from Houston because the situation was so broken as we were told that because our child was white, she could not go to kindergarten, as it was the belief that to offset the advantages of her being white that minorities only could send their children to kindergarten as a way to give them a head start.
I understood some of the rationale for the kindergarten for truly poverty is structuralized in the US via the way taxes are collected and redirected. In Alberta, Canada where I am from, taxes are collected by federal government and redistributed essentially on a per capita basis which over a few generations had ensured that most Canadians have the opportunity for a decent education and access to affordable health care. I believe in the utility of such a system, it's far from perfect but it is good starting point. I don't mean to ramble on rather to give the some background for what I have been witnessing these past 20 years or so years.
The first time I came to really understand the depth of hatred and resentment within some parts of the US is during the Gulf War v2. It was like the situation with all the "if you not with us, you are against us" mentality had combed up how the latent hate that one read between the lines in the history books that discussed racism. IMHO racism in the US never went away it just morphed into the form of tribalism that Thucydides described in his book on the Peloponnesian war. It morphed, and morphed and solidified which is completely understandable in retrospect when one appreciates that the US has only two political parties with each becoming more shrill in their denunciation of the other. IMHO, each side is guilty of mendicity to a large extent. But, until of late, being a white male I was missed the blatant sexism that goes beyond the objectification of woman that most of the western countries are guilty of....
And, to that end, I don't truly understand what I just witnessed, but a large contributing factor to Harris's lost is because of sexism. I had heard before the election that many minorities were uncomfortable with the idea of a woman President. In retrospect, I must concede that the sexism that I am talking about is the kind that is insidious and pervasive and the cause of why many women become bitter as they get older. My mother hated men before she died. My sister often said things about men that caused me to reflect at times even though I often failed to understand what she meant. She often said that "men are never satisfied" and she wasn't talking about sex (more like men like to have their toys).
What I am talking about is not just the constant ying/yang that has been going on between the binary sexes since whenever, I am talking about some sort of collective anger/fear men have toward women as a consequence of the world evolving away from the traditional roles that men and women played.
I could go on about the crazy stuff I heard that some people want done to subjugate women. For example, I heard some states want women to take a pregnancy test when they travel out of a state. I read of a woman who was arrested after she had a miss carriage because they were suspicious of what was the real cause of the miscarriage since apparently she had five children already.
I'm not a sensitive new age guy (SNAG). I am a man, think like a man, like being a man, etc, but rather I am saying that until now I had no idea how far some individuals would go to impose their world view onto the rest of us because of their so call pretend religious belief. The core of faith is choice as the main argument for why God does not reveal itself is that how honest is a person in their actions if they act out of fear. It's interesting how many thousands of dollars people will spend to prevent a woman from having an abortion, and how little those same people will spend to make sure that the baby is properly cared and fed.
Last, I too am frustrated with the lack of progress on addressing the root cause of the rising cost of health care, education and rampant use of hidden taxes to subsidize social programs that have solved nothing. I think the Democrats failed to understand the depth of fear and frustration especially with the younger generation that preserving the status quo was the long term solution for the ever rising cost of living. True, many of the said issues are complicated but virtue signaling is not substance. Biden spending billions of dollars in loan forgiveness for some students does not solve the problem of the extreme cost of post secondary education. Putting a cap on insulin is a good thing, but how many people died before it was done, and it did nothing to lower the over all cost health insurance for most Americans, not address Byzantium rules that govern Medicare. The ACA is a scam for most young people for forcing people to buy insurance with high deductibles is just a way of generating revenue that on paper helps to offset of providing care to lower income people. In reality it just allows the insurance companies to charge more.
Th ironic thing is most Trump supporters I have met, and I have met many never talk about anything but their hatred of the Democrats. I used to hate Parliamentary systems but it does seem to me now that they allow for a population to accept the idea that there may be a range of views on a particular issue and thus to move forward some compromise is needed. Often compromise allows for experimenting with different approaches that may serendipitously open doors to new solutions. This isn't happening in the US. Argumentatively, individual states were once thought to be laboratories for exploring new ideas like marijuana reform laws, but they too suffer from the same bi polar reality distortion condition that a two party state creates.
Perhaps the US will solve some of their internal issues, but my hope is that the rest of the world realizes that the US for many counties is akin to what the Nord Stream pipeline was to Germany.
I read Peter Turchin’s book ‘End Times’ over the past two days. I highly recommend it. The election result made sense to me after reading it, especially about how the GOP is now a revolutionary party led by counter elites…
I downloaded a copy from Audible and am looking forward to listening to something (during my runs) more modern than historical materialism which IMHO was Marx's great contribution to western culture rather than his ideas on Communisms which completely failed to appreciate what happens when the management of any social institution becomes too concentrated.
I agree with much that was written in this last post. I moved to the US in the late 1990's from Canada, after years of traveling back and forth for business. I thought at first I had a grasp of the scope of the dichotomies, especially with respect to illegal immigration as my first years in the US were in Houston were one could see how both the "left" and "right" exploited the situation in that "illegals" are a source of cheap labor and for others support for "illegals" vicariously fulfilled some sort of belief that the country was progressing. In other words, it appeared that both sides were gaming the system without being held directly responsible.
Instead those who were held responsible were those who paid the bills namely tax payers and those who health insurance premiums were sky high to subsidize the cost of those who crashed hospital "ER"'s as there is a law that says that no one can be denied health care if they go to a hospital ER. When my wife had her first daughter, a pregnant Mexican woman showed up by herself to the ER. She was alone. But, by the end of the day, when I went to see our daughter in the nursery, the viewing room was full of the woman's relatives. Indeed, we moved away from Houston because the situation was so broken as we were told that because our child was white, she could not go to kindergarten, as it was the belief that to offset the advantages of her being white that minorities only could send their children to kindergarten as a way to give them a head start.
I understood some of the rationale for the kindergarten for truly poverty is structuralized in the US via the way taxes are collected and redirected. In Alberta, Canada where I am from, taxes are collected by federal government and redistributed essentially on a per capita basis which over a few generations had ensured that most Canadians have the opportunity for a decent education and access to affordable health care. I believe in the utility of such a system, it's far from perfect but it is good starting point. I don't mean to ramble on rather to give the some background for what I have been witnessing these past 20 years or so years.
The first time I came to really understand the depth of hatred and resentment within some parts of the US is during the Gulf War v2. It was like the situation with all the "if you not with us, you are against us" mentality had combed up how the latent hate that one read between the lines in the history books that discussed racism. IMHO racism in the US never went away it just morphed into the form of tribalism that Thucydides described in his book on the Peloponnesian war. It morphed, and morphed and solidified which is completely understandable in retrospect when one appreciates that the US has only two political parties with each becoming more shrill in their denunciation of the other. IMHO, each side is guilty of mendicity to a large extent. But, until of late, being a white male I was missed the blatant sexism that goes beyond the objectification of woman that most of the western countries are guilty of....
And, to that end, I don't truly understand what I just witnessed, but a large contributing factor to Harris's lost is because of sexism. I had heard before the election that many minorities were uncomfortable with the idea of a woman President. In retrospect, I must concede that the sexism that I am talking about is the kind that is insidious and pervasive and the cause of why many women become bitter as they get older. My mother hated men before she died. My sister often said things about men that caused me to reflect at times even though I often failed to understand what she meant. She often said that "men are never satisfied" and she wasn't talking about sex (more like men like to have their toys).
What I am talking about is not just the constant ying/yang that has been going on between the binary sexes since whenever, I am talking about some sort of collective anger/fear men have toward women as a consequence of the world evolving away from the traditional roles that men and women played.
I could go on about the crazy stuff I heard that some people want done to subjugate women. For example, I heard some states want women to take a pregnancy test when they travel out of a state. I read of a woman who was arrested after she had a miss carriage because they were suspicious of what was the real cause of the miscarriage since apparently she had five children already.
I'm not a sensitive new age guy (SNAG). I am a man, think like a man, like being a man, etc, but rather I am saying that until now I had no idea how far some individuals would go to impose their world view onto the rest of us because of their so call pretend religious belief. The core of faith is choice as the main argument for why God does not reveal itself is that how honest is a person in their actions if they act out of fear. It's interesting how many thousands of dollars people will spend to prevent a woman from having an abortion, and how little those same people will spend to make sure that the baby is properly cared and fed.
Last, I too am frustrated with the lack of progress on addressing the root cause of the rising cost of health care, education and rampant use of hidden taxes to subsidize social programs that have solved nothing. I think the Democrats failed to understand the depth of fear and frustration especially with the younger generation that preserving the status quo was the long term solution for the ever rising cost of living. True, many of the said issues are complicated but virtue signaling is not substance. Biden spending billions of dollars in loan forgiveness for some students does not solve the problem of the extreme cost of post secondary education. Putting a cap on insulin is a good thing, but how many people died before it was done, and it did nothing to lower the over all cost health insurance for most Americans, not address Byzantium rules that govern Medicare. The ACA is a scam for most young people for forcing people to buy insurance with high deductibles is just a way of generating revenue that on paper helps to offset of providing care to lower income people. In reality it just allows the insurance companies to charge more.
Th ironic thing is most Trump supporters I have met, and I have met many never talk about anything but their hatred of the Democrats. I used to hate Parliamentary systems but it does seem to me now that they allow for a population to accept the idea that there may be a range of views on a particular issue and thus to move forward some compromise is needed. Often compromise allows for experimenting with different approaches that may serendipitously open doors to new solutions. This isn't happening in the US. Argumentatively, individual states were once thought to be laboratories for exploring new ideas like marijuana reform laws, but they too suffer from the same bi polar reality distortion condition that a two party state creates.
Perhaps the US will solve some of their internal issues, but my hope is that the rest of the world realizes that the US for many counties is akin to what the Nord Stream pipeline was to Germany.
Interesting article: https://x.com/jherrerx/status/1845887414675689478?s=46&t=EqzXHuww-GZ4MQ9feX8xKg
Thx for your words, Tanja.
I read Peter Turchin’s book ‘End Times’ over the past two days. I highly recommend it. The election result made sense to me after reading it, especially about how the GOP is now a revolutionary party led by counter elites…
I downloaded a copy from Audible and am looking forward to listening to something (during my runs) more modern than historical materialism which IMHO was Marx's great contribution to western culture rather than his ideas on Communisms which completely failed to appreciate what happens when the management of any social institution becomes too concentrated.
I also recommend Pippa Malmgren’s book ‘Signals’….