General Discussion

Sometimes I just sit back and watch, kind of like an anthropologist studying the strange ways of a newly-discovered tribe whose behavior is deeply puzzling and disturbing. I have some theories about how we got here, although it's hard to evaluate any situation when you're in the middle of it and it's messing up your head. But my theories are drawing uncomfortable parallels to Nazi Germany. Germany got its ass kicked badly in WWI and its economy was in bad shape. Then along comes this guy who has a talent for long-winded speeches and who promises to Make Germany Great Again, and he blames a convenient scapegoat, the Jews, for all Germany's troubles (anti-Semitism already being a thing, just not yet official government policy). You'd think a country like Germany, which had been a prosperous First World center of European culture and arts and education and science for ages, wouldn't fall for blatant demagoguery, but you'd be wrong; it did. And eventually so did we, the biggest and richest and best at everything, but we can't even blame an ass-kicking in a war for it. So I still can't answer my own question.