Apropos nothing, a 2011 quote from an interview with literary critic Harold Bloom, whom I’ve been reading and googling a lot lately for entirely nonpolitical reasons.
[quote]He also has very vivid views on politics. For one thing, he is quite disappointed with President Barack Obama. “We had high hopes for Obama,” he says. “I’m afraid he turns out to be a Chicago pol. He doesn’t have much fight in him.”
“It all started with that absolute dreadful creature Ronald Reagan,” he continues. “It was Reagan who came along and persuaded the whole nation that it was all right to be selfish, that it was an American virtue to be selfish. And all of these Tea Party-ites wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Reagan as their trailblazer. Incredible, the cigar-store Indian George W. Bush…the worst president in American history. The more-than-outrageous, the insufferable Donald Trump in today’s newspaper describes Obama as the worst president in American history. I’ll tell you what’s scary. Just one step beyond, and it will be early Nazi Germany. If the Tea Party, which already has a huge majority in the House, should also capture the Senate, you might start seeing sanctioned violence.” He also decries that group’s “racism, endless racism,” noting members of it have depicted the President of the United States as a chimpanzee.[/quote]
Elizabeth Warren and others want to make hearing aids cheaper by making “over-the-counter” versions available. Gun rights groups feel this will threaten hunting because it may make sound amplifiers used by hunters to listen for game regulated by the government. Also, Elizabeth Warren is Hillary 2.0 and all, so that can’t stand.
[quote]
A bipartisan group in in the Senate introduced a bill in March to make hearing aids more affordable by allowing them to be sold-over-the counter. Only a handful of manufacturers make hearing aids, and most state laws restrict the selling of hearing aids to licensed audiologists, giving them an effective monopoly.
After a huge markup by the manufacturer, the audiologists add another premium, bundling the cost of the device with the cost of their services.
As a result, hearing aids are out of reach for more than 80 percent of people with hearing impairment. So a market has sprung up for affordable sound amplification devices. They are not hearing aids, and users will struggle with them in noisy situations like restaurants, but they’re better than nothing.
The devices — they’re called personal sound amplification products (PSAPs) — can’t legally be advertised as treating hearing loss without FDA approval, but marketers of them push as close to the line as they can. They are popular with hunters, who use them to hear animals in the woods and also to compensate for rifle-related hearing loss.
The bill wouldn’t stop PSAPs from being sold the way they are now. But it would give sound companies like Massachusetts-based Bose access to a brand new market, and drive down the cost of hearing aids for millions of hearing-impaired people.[/quote]
Sounds like a good time to showcase a much better Word of the Day than “covfefe”:
Timex
3763
This seems like simple reverse psychology may work on these folks.
“We absolutely do NOT want Trump to be impeached.”
Or “we want you returning intelligence assets to Russia”
Canuck
3766
This. Hey guys, I’m a great negotiator but I can’t say this to your face so let me run home to the White House and then I’ll Tweet it to you! Bye!
To that point:
*
Whereas pro-Trump conservatives “believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake,” anti-Trump conservatives have a less Manichean view of politics.
“While they strongly differ with the Left, they do not regard the left–right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation,” he wrote. “On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do. That is why, after vigorously opposing Trump’s candidacy during the Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a Democrat had been elected president.”
Conservative policies and positions do actual harm, whether it’s the erosion of civil rights, voter suppression, corporate interests over consumer rights (or even at the expense of small business), increased pollution and environmental destruction, ignoring climate change, imposing (Christian) canon law or even shrugging off an adversarial nation’s manipulation in the democratic process because it helped their side win.
Liberals OTOH want to raise taxes on the 1% and extend civil liberties to all peoples. Maybe I’m missing something, but what actual harm in the mind of conservatives have liberals done? How did Obama destroy the country? Everything they profess to fear (sharia law! UN take over of the country! FEMA camps!) are bullshit conspiracy theories.
Surely you’ve noticed all the brown people in the public schools? That is the “existential threat” people are upset about, and it is freaking them out at the lizard-brain level.
I ask this question out of ignorance.
I want that fully out there so people don’t mistake it as an attempt at snark.
Suppose we take bigotry and tribalism of all kinds out of the mix; just imagine for a moment it doesn’t exist. I want to do that, because it’s an easy bugbear with ultra-conservatives and the emotions connected to it can potentially create tunnel vision. With that gone, what is the existential threat that pro-Trump people perceive to this nation from liberals? I can come up with some ideas, but they don’t seem to make much sense:
Higher taxes leading to mass poverty - Higher taxes won’t end the country. Depending on the tax bracket and how the funds are spent by the government, it may make life more or less tolerable for any one person, but that’s not a real threat to the nation.
Weaker military leading to invasion - Is there a real fear of a “Red Dawn” scenario? Beyond the crazification factor, is there a sizable cluster that believes a Democrat wants to disarm our military? While we know some hold onto this paranoia, most people in the nation would surely dismiss that as fantasy akin to the “my shotgun will protect me against the Blue Hats when the UN takes over the world” kind of stuff.
Business regulations leading to job losses - Whether it’s the EPA, FCC, or some other agency, I’m not sure how this could be a threat. Sure, some businesses can be regulated out of existence and thereby jobs can be lost, but that just creates a vacuum for others to come in. Regulations won’t put the country out of work. As with taxes, they can make individual lives better or worse, depending on how applied.
Can anyone else come up with something aside from bigotry and tribalism?
The Evil Gummint will tell you how to live your life by making you wear a seatbelt, which denies me my FREEDOM. (But it’s perfectly fine if corporations drug test you every five minutes or churches prevent you from having birth control because it’s only Evil if the Gummint does it.)
Oh, and all taxation is theft. Unless it pays for the military in which case it is required to Support The Troops.
KevinC
3773
That’s my father. If a politician ran on a platform of openly taking away his social security, his medical care, his home, he’d still vote for him as long as he thought the other candidate might take away his guns.
I’ve spent decades trying to understand the mindset, but at this point I realize I never will. I also don’t understand how for 8 years he lived every single day believing that Obama was going to take away his guns at any moment, which of course never happened. Yet as soon as the 2016 election cycle started, it was back to “Hillary’s going to take our guns!”.
Sigh. I can understand gun rights being an issue important to some people, but I can’t understand how it can be the single biggest issue that drowns out everything else.
Funny thing about that is Johnson-Reed Act of 1924.
What I’ve never seen brought up by anyone - though surely someone somewhere has - is that Baby Boomers were born and grew up in the Johnson-Reed Act years, until the Immigration and Nationality act of 1965 abolished the quota system. While it’s true that American is a nation of immigrants, from 1924 until 1965 the deliberate policy of the government was to preserve racial / ethnic compositions. So the “golden years” of Baby Boomers really was in a country where ethnic change through immigration was probably at it’s lowest level in history.
They semi-consciously recognize the dilemma of guns as being socially corrosive. The more the shootings continue the more pressure to restrict guns. The more the pressure to restrict guns, the more tightly they clutch their guns and the more they support organization that promise to guarantee them.
I think gun owners see shootings ect as a “them” problem. Responsible gun owners care for their firearms and respect them. But all those other people, the listless, irresponsible, mutty masses, they’re the problem. Not us! If society is going to fall apart, guns aren’t going to change anything one way or another!
MikeJ
3776
Whenever I read military sci-fi, the “liberal dystopia’s” seem to be based on a self-reinforcing cycle of “helping people to death”. Basically people on the dole become dependent and lose the mindset and habits of self-sufficiency and productive work. People on edge economically say why do the hard thing now and get sucked into the dependency trap. As the number of people on the dole increase, the fewer remaining productive people carry a higher and higher burden of taxation and regulation and can’t afford to invest anymore. Economic progress slows down. People on the dole require an increased standard of living and have the political power to demand it, so more income is redirected from productive investments to consumption, the economy slows down further, etc.
Basically your “higher taxes lead to poverty” argument iterated many many times.
I think some forms of government support can have this effect. It depends on how the program is designed. I think the difference is that I think some programs are helpful long-term and some are damaging, and we can learn from poorly-designed programs. I also think there are countervailing factors the self-reinforcing cycle. Basically I think the devil is in the details.
Others figure that the vast majority of programs are long-term harmful and only see accelerated decay and growing poverty long-term.
rowe33
3777
I assume it’s because many gun nuts can no longer achieve orgasm without cold steel in their hands, or stockpiled in their gun safe. The deep state government is suppressing the scientific studies that prove this is a legitimate medical condition. The liberals want to take away their guns to prevent them from reproducing as the good Lord intends, thereby turning the country over to the brown folks.
I think you’ve passed right by the obvious reason and zipped ahead to warfare and economic downfall. Certainly, the fears of invasion or spiraling into a third-world economy are real, but there’s a simpler, but more insidious fear. A liberal USA will leave you behind or otherwise judge your lifestyle as inferior. A more Democratic government and populace will slowly turn America away from “rugged individualism” and “good Christian values” and you’ll wake up one day and realize that you don’t live in the country you grew up in. You are surrounded by people that don’t look like you, sound like you, or behave like you, and these “others” now hold the power over your life.
Frankly, it’s kind of a valid fear. The world is changing and there are people that will be left by the roadside. It’s going to suck for them, and I’m not sure what you can do to help them if they don’t want to change.
Timex
3779
Here is what the real fear that Conservatives used to have is… and what, ironically, Trump actually validated.
The danger that can arise from the ideology of the far left, is a type of statism/fascism.
It’s a dystopia where people are stripped of their freedoms by the state, under the guise of the state doing what’s best for them. That we will sacrifice our liberty in exchange for an illusion of security.
Trump both validates this concern, while simultaneously demonstrating how so many of those who fear it are actually the most susceptible to it. Trump’s adminstration is based upon exactly these kinds of sacrifices, for exactly these sorts of false promises. The fact that these people are embracing statism out of a fear of statism, is maddening.
