Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

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spottybrowncow
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Re: Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

Post by spottybrowncow »

We have never had a democracy, and we don't need one now.
A democracy is "two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for lunch." Tyranny of the majority.

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Bob Butler
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Lessons Learned from This Crisis?

Post by Bob Butler »

spottybrowncow wrote:
Tue Aug 09, 2022 8:51 pm
We have never had a democracy, and we don't need one now.
A democracy is "two wolves and a lamb voting on what's for lunch." Tyranny of the majority.
The problem with the wolf analogy is that you need many more predators than prey. In a true democracy, the prey would always out vote the predators.

This has not always prevailed. Elites with money can dominate. Racists can subdue minorities. Those that hold to older values have been able to resist change. No, we have never had a true democracy. That doesn't mean we can't work to achieve something better than we have. The Revolution got rid of colonial imperialism and noble privilege. The Civil War got rid of slavery and enhanced the Industrial Revolution. In FDR's time we learned to regulate the economy and contain autocratic aggressors. In each crisis we have learned to attack the greatest flaws in society, but there are always more problems to face four score and seven years downstream.

The old Agricultural Age stank. Each crisis lets us get rid of a few problems. Due to those that cling to the old problems, we still stink. There remains more to do.

What problems are we targeting this time?

Russia is reinforcing the lesson of containment from the last Crisis. We will protect from aggression more proactively. Any tendency towards aggression will be confronted sooner and more forcefully.

China spent considerable effort building stuff they didn't need, leading to the problems in their building and banking industries. Running a planned but irrational economy will become seen as a bad idea.

Trump lied. With social media being a new thing, we didn't know the hazards of liars lying or believing a liar. We need to punish liars more quickly and firmly.

Globalization can easily be overdone. Each culture must be self sufficient to a great degree. There will always be trade, but a greater degree if independence for each culture is desirable.

Will this get rid of all the stink? Of course not. There will remain things to do. I do not fear there will be nothing to do when the next crisis comes around.

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Bob Butler
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Treating Others Well

Post by Bob Butler »

Cool Breeze wrote:
Wed Aug 10, 2022 12:19 pm
You can't have values without a belief in God, or an attempt to revere the godly, since they will quickly vanish due to not being based on anything but sand. We can't unify because people would rather worship mammon than God, and the overlords are all too successful in stoking these passions to subvert it.
It may be that your own values are based on God and the godly, but it seems wrong to imply that you cannot act with principles without being religious. It shows a lack of intelligence or understanding, a lack of the love God commands.

I went to Sunday school. The nuns taught ethics with a godly twist, and I still act on the “love thy neighbor” commandment. I have since become atheist and secular. I could go through the Bill of Rights, pick out the rights, and grant them to you while expecting you grant them to me. The two approaches, religious and secular, catholic and human rights, are roughly equivalent. You get to a similar place.

The difference, if there is one, is religion says to love, while the law says what you must do. Christianity commands that you love, even if many Christians don’t. Or they love their own kind. They want to preserve s special place for folks of their own race, religion or nationality. The secular values say what you wind up doing in response to that love.

A historian on MSNBC recently put it this way. I will defer to you, but expect you to defer to me. I will grant you equality, free speech, due process and the rest, and expect it be granted to me as well. This isn’t exactly love. Love is not required. It is just prudent and proper. The result is the same. Either way, one treats and expects to be treated with honor, respect and freedom.

It falls apart if love is conditional. It is easy to say one is commanded to love. It is another to truly love. Do all people calling themselves Christian really love everyone? If the other guy is of a different race, religion, nationality, or (shudder) progressive, do you really show equivalent love, equivalent treatment?

At any rate, to say if you don’t share a specific worldview with another the other doesn’t have a worldview would be false. The question is how to treat others with honor, respect and freedom. True love would do it. A real Christian would make a decent neighbor. A real Christian is not the only person that would make a decent neighbor.

Review the parable of the good Samaritan, and recall that the Jews and Samaritans of Roman times did not get along. The Samaritan had freed himself from prejudice, had learned to love all. That was more important than nationality. Loving all is a good thing. I won’t pretend to have achieved it. But there are certain things that all are owed.

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Re: Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

Post by Cool Breeze »

I know what the commands are and how hard they are to achieve. In this, we agree. But you conflate things that aren't godly with things that are. As a result, you are a very confused individual. Yes, Bobby B, you'll be judged according to what you did, also in accordance to the abilities and gifts you were given. So will I.

My point was that we "used" to have values, because Christianity was the backbone of the civilization (and in reality all civilizations in the modern world borrow from it). Now we pay lip service to the values, and act like they are there, but my point has been proven - you pay lip service and all of those godly things, even if people didn't believe in them but acted on them in some way, have vanished. You actively (you and your cohort) call things that are good bad, and bad, good. Because you reject the life giver and the law giver, both. But those you support claim they are better than the christians, whatever their faults - but continue in rejecting and slandering Christ! Ironic.

Part of love is telling the truth. You can't love someone without telling them the truth. That's a major point. Also, sometimes one must chastise, as they do their children, because they love them. That doesn't mean you can't be humble, forgiving, considerate, etc.

The false Jesus you proclaim is the hippy who, because you desire it, treats people in only one way. That's not God, and it's not godly. It is part and parcel to the feminization of degrading western world. The rejection of men and the father (including God, Our Father) is a prototype of the chaos that is now revealed, and which you promote.

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Re: Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

Post by John »

I would remove cools offensive post, but I know that Bob can take care of himself.

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Bob Butler
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The Dance

Post by Bob Butler »

John wrote:
Thu Aug 11, 2022 11:55 am
I would remove cools offensive post, but I know that Bob can take care of himself.
Not particularly offensive in my opinion, but he serves my point. You can have values without sharing Cool’s values.

For a while when I was studying martial arts, the instructor taught Taoism. A major point was the advantage of weakness. If a male was strong, he got drafted into the army, so he did not exalt strength. If a woman was beautiful, she would be taken as a concubine, so she dressed humbly. If a butcher was skilled, he could cut with little force. Thus, there was an unusual by western standards slant on the advantages of weakness, of not standing out.

I could see it given the culture that created the values. Yet, at the same time, I had trouble believing weakness was a more proper value to center one’s beliefs than love. Each religion, each civilization, would have its own set of values, mindsets, or beliefs. We’ve gone back and forth between conservative and progressive values in America, but they are hardly the only possible perspectives. To understand the world, you have to be ready to understand and dive into any of the many various worldviews.

For example, I understand Generational Dynamics emphasizing how hating other culture makes your army more effective, but is that significantly more important than love, weakness, human rights, racism, capitalism, or any of the various other values and principles that people will emphasize? Marx, Rousseau, Jesus, Keynes, Franklin, Newton and so many others have championed various ideas and perspectives. It is not particularly wise to exalt one perspective and place it above and distinct from all the others.

As an aside, when practicing martial arts, the instructor once asked what was the sound of the Tau. The correct answer, or at least the one he was looking for, was “silence”. Still, it was summer and the school was in the middle of the woods. I said “crickets”, the dominant sound at the time. The Tau is not extreme, while silence is extreme. The Tau is of nature, as was the sound of crickets. I could have defended the answer, which came almost as a reflex, but it was accepted.

The ritual “correct” doctrine is not necessarily the best. No doctrine is always best, but you have to be ready to dance among the many ideas.

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Tom Mazanec
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Re: Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

Post by Tom Mazanec »

The most human position to have is to protect the weakest human, regardless of race, creed, age, etc.
ALL ages. Even the first three trimesters of life.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”

― G. Michael Hopf, Those Who Remain

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Bob Butler
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Imposing religious and moral positions on others...

Post by Bob Butler »

Tom Mazanec wrote:
Fri Aug 12, 2022 3:19 pm
The most human position to have is to protect the weakest human, regardless of race, creed, age, etc.
ALL ages. Even the first three trimesters of life.
Others believe slavery immoral, that groups of cells that are by no means sentient are no more significant than any other group of cells, and that imposing one’s own religious or moral positions on another is improper. This is a difficult legal, religious and moral issue. As usual, such positions are always questionable, many can be respected, but you get into trouble when one tries to impose one’s own position on another.

Most human position? Hardly. It can show a lack of respect of others, advocation of slavery, a disrespect for freedom. Of course, the opposite position is equally problematic. My own position is that respecting the position of the lady involved is the correct thing to do.

spottybrowncow
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Re: Polyticks: Bob Butler's Perspective

Post by spottybrowncow »

Perhaps the worst part of the abortion situation is that is is largely being used instead of birth control and family planning.
As another example of subsidizing and enabling poor decision making, it's a perfect part of the left's plan to completely destroy American society.

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Bob Butler
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Conservatives and Progressives

Post by Bob Butler »

spottybrowncow wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 3:04 pm
Perhaps the worst part of the abortion situation is that is is largely being used instead of birth control and family planning.
As another example of subsidizing and enabling poor decision making, it's a perfect part of the left's plan to completely destroy American society.
John wrote:
Fri Aug 12, 2022 1:03 pm
Salmon recipe was stabbed in the neck by someone with a knife as Rusty was giving a lecture in Western New York. His condition has not been revealed.

Salman Salman Salman Salman Rush d rush d Rushdie Rush d
If I were silly enough to assert a spell checker had a mindset and values, I could assert that the line John meant to quote was mangled horribly by a program that did not in the least understand John. The program knew how things should be spelled, and did not in the least understand what John was trying to say. "I am right. My way or the highway. He meant to say Salmon Recipe."

This could be a metaphor for the conservative / progressive pattern. The Conservative faction wants to maintain the old values / mindset / perspective. The progressives have seen how the environment and technology changed, and wish to adapt to it. They clash. Whether you are dealing with John's spell checker or abortion, you get a total disconnect.

In the American crises you can see at least two issues in each. The Revolution dealt with colonial imperialism and noble inequality. The Civil War dealt (or didn't deal) with slavery and the government enabling the Industrial Revolution. In FDR's time, we learnt how the government could try to regulate the economy and worked to strengthen containment. In each case, there were conservatives who wanted to keep things as they were. In each case they were wrong. By the time the next crisis came along, it would be hard to find even the most devout conservative who wanted to go back to the old way of doing things.

Conquest is part of normal international relations, and Putin is just doing what has always been done. Planed communist economies are better that capitalist competition, and China's economy is doing just fine. Lies work wonderfully in Social Media and there is no reason to correct Trump. Salmon Recipe was attacked in New York.

In a crisis, some will try to do as they have always done, not recognizing that the world has changed, that others have adapted to the new and different. Crisis is about America becoming more than what it was before, about the culture catching up with the technology and environment.

This is not to say that the Confederates believed in colonial imperialism and royalty, or that the conservatives in FDR's time believed in slavery. What it means to stick to the old values is very different in each crisis. The new is new and resisted along different fault lines.

But it is wrong to claim that if people don't have your own values they have no values. Your solution is not the only solution. Others will be more willing to take advantage of the new environment and technology.

And four score and seven years from now, it could be that your ideas will seem quaint.

But in the meanwhile, try to consider if the other guy is adapting to a new environment and technology, adopting new values which will be accepted as America grows.

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