3 on 3 hockey. I know her and she is not the brightest bulb and was a supporter of the trucker convoy, although she does not seem to understand what it was all about, she thought they were having a good time. She is the type that always knows several friends whose children have been affected by the vaccine which I said to her name one. She just looked at me, then she said Trudeau was a dictator and I said really? do you know he has a minority government, do you even know what that means? How is he possibly a dictator, she says the vaccine and him declaring the emergency act. I asked her if she understood why he did that? She said because he is a dictator, I told her to go and learn a little more about the nuances and then come back and discuss it. I asked her if her company (she works for an insurance company) mandated vaccines and she said yes so I ask is your CEO considered a dictator? Well no she says, I say well you know Trudeau is like the CEO of government employees and government regulated employees and it costs a lot of money if people get sick and can't work so he is only doing what any other CEO would do to protect their company except his company is protecting our tax dollars. She just looked at me and said well they are all liars anyway, whatever the hell that is suppose to mean. These people really really are stupid.

constructs and cults construct a whole narrative like a religion. Having faith is a human capacity that means people will work well together and get things done. They ride a wave. It is why Europe ruled the world and China did not (buddhist follow a philosophy that does not require as much faith). Something that is good in some cases is bad in other cases..... in this case faith people becomming Trumpists. They did a study and conservative voters are ones who feel vulnerable as people. Liberal voters feel like Superman. It is not their fault unions were attacked and destroyed and programs that help people rise were gutted. That was intentional by the GOP movement Conservatives. More people became vulnerable. Republicans took away a secure retirement from these people and they started voting passion/faith and without reason because passion was free and it spread.

I don't think ignoring the nuance of their situation helps us. That is what we accuse them of..... afterall if the dream of retiring to a cabin in the woods was still possible for them they would not be dreaming about Trump and belonging to something bigger than themselves. The cabin would be a big enough dream. So there were hundreds of thousands whose lives fell apart financially. They had nothing to hope for. They went republican. Then Trump. Then the delusions of the masses took over with the internet. These are people who feel vulnerable and Fox News keeps them there.

We do no good when we engage them in debate which includes making them feel stupid or vulnerable. We need to do a positive vision that includes them. Like Biden is doing.

what the read on social media and everyone on social media is their friend it seems. Sorry they have no constructive argument and in Canada they are followers and totally ignorant on how our government even works let alone have any critical thinking skills.

percentage who are evil. There is a percentage who are followers. They are a mixed bag for sure.

This seems a more likely answer.
"China and Europe are different in many ways, but one is that after the Mongol conquest in the 12th century, China remains a unified empire run by a single Mandarin bureaucracy. There is nothing that competes with or threatens China. China does get invaded by Manchu tribes in 1644, but they don’t change the structure of the state. They learned to speak Chinese, dress like Chinese and eat like Chinese."

"In Europe, no one ever succeeds in unifying it, and you have continuous competition. The French are worried about the English, the English are worried about the Spanish, the Spanish are worried about the Turks. That keeps everybody on their toes, which is something economists immediately recognize as the competitive model. To have progress, you want a system that is competitive, not one that is dominated by a single power."

Last edited Fri Apr 8, 2022, 03:00 PM - Edit history (14)

the capacity to have faith in the human construct of monarchy and then faith in the human construct of the nation state and really believe in that and go abroad and live a life full of risk to administer (abuse and rob) colonies. It takes a leap of faith. Go somewhere and make your fortune. And then they (USA and France) jumped into the human construct called democracy. That took Americans more faith than the Chinese have for democracy. They just can't jump.

It is the concrete fear of retaliation and punishment that floats the boat called China instead. The downside of faith is cults, populists, and demagogues. You don't need faith in an autocracy. You just need trust that you will be sorry if you don't do what you are told. If you have faith people too use that, give them cults and religion, and control those, and you have a role for them in the autocracy. Different farm animals have different pens right Trump?. Or decide, like china, to destroy the least favourite religions or the most threatening to autocracy if people have too much faith.

Communism we know only ran as totalitarian states after the first bit of equity. There was a time in our distant past when we shared everything, so it was easier to believe in when you looked around and the poor were not being taken care of at the turn of the 20th Century. Many people no longer believed in the construct of monarchy. It was a failure. Tear it down. Tear up wealth. But communist countries almost instantly became death traps. There was no innovation because, like you said, that requires competition. They saw the construct of communism as a failure too, and went capitalist in two or three generations (in my grandmother's lifetime). But neither China or Russia ended up democratic.

Just a lens you can look at history with. You can see the GOP, like de santis, pounding away at people who believe in democracy every day. It is a scary religion to them. It needs to be destroyed. Why Thiel called Warren Buffet a sociopathic Grandpa. The faith in democracy people have and support is a danger to them. They'll go after our (small "d" ) democratic totems one by one and smash them, taking apart the infrastructure of the liberal order, all the while trying to make the voter feel vulnerable so they vote Republican.

to believe in religion, the human construct of monarchy and nation state than to go to war?

autocrats go with industrial violence they don't put themselves in danger of being hit. But like putin, the lack of competition or free press has allowed corruption and destroying any leadership that might one day depose the autocrat, degrades the information and the army. That happens when the leader is in a bubble. But war is faith in your nation state or monarchy or autocracy plus some other things. I don't know what they are. I think older soldiers think they might die. They are young mostly so that may make them think they themselves are indestructible. Don't know really. They were given propaganda before the Russians invaded Ukraine so there is an element of faith but perhaps it is just pure and separate delusions. My grandfather went to WWII when he was 40. He had gone to military college. He smoked like a chimney when he was abroad. ISIS fighters were on some stimulants. Why it was called Jihadderall. The Navy used to give sailors booze. Endorphins are involved in the 'brotherhood'. It is more than faith.

then China has plenty of faith. They fought lots of wars. Their earliest Dynasty was in 2070 BC. When would you say was the earliest large government in Europe?

there might be an earlier one its the Minoans and Mycenae in 2000 BC. If that is the case the the Chinese at 2070 BC had an earlier large government then Europe.

Last edited Sat Apr 9, 2022, 12:52 PM - Edit history (1)

blind followers. Culture too. My grandfather grew up in a time when signing up to fight was admirable. Even the rich signed up. Of course sometimes you don't have a choice. I would fight if I was in the Ukraine by helping out local hospitals or feeding old people who can't leave or something. There is no future in oligarchs taking all the wealth of your country and forcing the locals into permanent poverty as the Russians have done to the parts of Ukraine they already had control of. I suppose there is the lure of honor and immortality in war too.

it doesn't change the fact that saying that China lacked faith is the reason they lagged behind just doesn't make sense when you look at all the facts. China has one of the longest stretches of governments if not the longest in the world.

His father was mid to high up in the Chinese trade and diplomacy arms of the Chinese government. The Tamils had just ben over-run in Sri Lanka. People were desperate. There was a big Tamil demonstration on Parliament Hill, 10 blocks away. I was over at my brother's and the Chinese guy, smart and doing his economics thesis, was pacing and shaking. He was really scared at what a demonstration would mean and he said so. No concept of there being some respect in demonstrators for government and the rule of law that was unwritten. Democracy in action. Democracy respected. Democracy believed in. He could not process it. And the Tamils' only beef with Ottawa was that they wanted the international community to demand the health and welfare of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

I'm not saying they lagged behind. Just that they seem to have a different trajectory. And now they are culturally genociding more than one group of people. Maybe they need a few generations of rampant civil society to build some trust in their fellow personkind.

And democracy. But that doesn't mean it was because they lacked faith in the religious or non religious sense. You can make that argument of course, but that discounts any geographical, societal and historical evidence for something that has no evidence. Just the war of China and Japan discounts that. All the dynasties they had, their expansion from western china to eastern china. Their history like I said is one of the longest ones there are and its not full of people sitting around doing nothing. They are the second largest country by landmass. That says everything in itself.

Unfortunately there are more of them than I thought.