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albacore

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Gender: Male
Hometown: Poulsbo WA
Home country: United States
Current location: Poulsbo
Member since: Sun Aug 26, 2018, 12:47 PM
Number of posts: 2,110

Journal Archives

"Paranoid Style in American Politics"...

I try not to be pedantic.....but I was a teacher, and gave reading assignments...(!) I strongly recommend historian Richard Hofstadter's writings about America.
(I know...I know.... too many words. But words are all we have that separates us from chimps.)
"The Paranoid Style in American Politics" was written in 1964, and it explains much about where we are today. It's the guns.. but add our national paranoia to those guns, and you can see how we got here.

(snips)
"American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant."
" In American experience ethnic and religious conflict have plainly been a major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but class conflicts also can mobilize such energies. Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.
We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."


(I don't know if you'll hit a paywall)
https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/

I know that everybody has seen this by now, but....

... I am fairly confident that if a Dem had written anything like this for EASTER, ffs, the Party would disown that person and question their sanity.
He's the Repub frontrunner.
WTF is wrong with those people?

People have accused me of having trump Derangement Syndrome...

Yup.
As long as he is the Repub front-runner, I'm unhinged at the idea that a creature like that could even run for President.

Where oh where can trump find his rewards for all his hard work....

...when the indictments start to pile up?

Luckily, he has an old friend to fall back on.

Can't find the password for my macmail

.... only the dots. Any way to find out?
It's not on the Keychain.
Are they stored somewhere? I have an extensive list of passwords on an encrypted file, but that Mail account is so old that the password got overlooked.

My Mail program at xfinity must have been hijacked and stuff bounces off the macmail application saying it can't send because it can't find an address I have never seen before.

I now speak fluent Filipino and Hindi... to no avail.

Advice needed:Time to replace my natural gas furnace. Should I get a heat pump instead?

I live in Kitsap county.... 1200 sq ft, one story home.
I have gas water heater and fireplace.
Before I call a dealer, I thought I'd look for some DUers with experience and/or expertise.

Yes.. I know it was Bernie's project...

But Biden was the guy who got the insulin price dropped.
Bernie ... or Biden... doesn't make a difference to the poor people who need the stuff. The price is down, and the Dems did it. The Repubs fought it every inch of the way.

My (rhetorical) question is:
How can anybody depending on insulin... or the families of people depending on insulin... vote for a Republican?

WTF is wrong with people?

Help me out with some DU snark...

A poster in a local chat room posted this:

"I believe our country would be best served if we steered clear of both, Biden AND Trump."

So far, I have "Because they both led insurrections? They both have countless court cases pending against them?... including sex offenses."

Help me out... I have a tight schedule but don't want to let this slide.

I've lived thru a lot of SOTUs...

...and I don't remember any Dem cat-calling a President during the SOTU address.
If anybody knows of an incidence, please let me know.

I turned on MSNBC just now...to check on the daily shootings...

Instead, I got an NBC poll that people are unhappy with Biden, country headed the wrong way, etc, etc...

WTF do people WANT, anyway?

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