How A Truly Fear-ridden Average American Reacted to the Democratic Debate

to look again, I said to myself yesterday, at how America is being terrorized. There is an online company called Discus which provides comments sections for a good deal of both hard and what I would call "opinion" news. Everybody's got a quiverful, and in 2015 it takes only minutes to project one's keyboard voice around the world.

I turned to a story about Donald Trump calling Bernie Sanders a maniac by Twitter during the first Democratic debate. Trump's wild, general, often outright anti-diplomatic, and in great majority unsubstantiated and socially inappropriate remarks are not only turning the American political process into a laughingstock to outsiders but also apparently demonstrating that we truly are an uncompassionate nation, only interested in being part of the community of nations to make, uh, killer deals.

He is outright encouraging people to think in the compartmentalized way he does. People are scared stiff of what the deuce we are going to do next.

I have always scorned hiding behind pseudonymic internet anonymity. Now, this fellow according to whose comments I have organized these remarks MIGHT actually be named Jim Rockford, but I leave that to you to conclude.

This is a terrorized man. Check him out.

JIMROCKFORD

A mild mannered respondent got to him before I did:

EDWARD CHARLES

JIMROCKFORD continued:

After that piece of inanity I just couldn't resist setting this poor fellow straight, while giving him credit for possibly possessing the capacity to understand. I responded,

What do you base your insane prediction on, Jim? How many of the latest mass killings-- Roof, Breivik, the kid in Oregon, the Columbine kids-- have been leftists, hmm? How many American mass killers period have been leftists? Were the US Cavalry when they massacred man woman and child of the Cheyenne leftists? Were Tim McVeigh and the neoNazis who backed him leftists?

Your question is disingenuous. The right question is, "Do you really think that enough of the American people are going to rebel in any meaningful way against non-durable-product consumer capitalism, or are Americans just going to cower in the shopping aisles and quietly do business-as-usual until it all collapses?"

The second is far more likely than that there will ever be any armed resistance by any group or coalition of people with a common ideological perspective of socialism, much less state socialism, i.e. communism.

There are not enough leftists in this country to commit any terrorist acts that remotely threaten the national security of the United States. In Europe there has been an honorable left tradition and participation in government since before the French Revolution. The left in America has never sat at any table of political power in America.

It has never even seen the chairs. Eugene V. Debs got the most votes of any avowed leftist, and that was 1920, and he was in jail. Ralph Nader was suppressed in 2000 by active collusion between the two Parties, and no other leftist candidate will ever be allowed to be part of a debate. This is a right-center country, and both you and Bernie Sanders know it. More's the pity, but the average American voter is so low-info, (s)he's such a pawn for behavioral manipulation.

Jim Rockford then really showed how thorough the politico-behavioral manipulation of United States commercial authorities, through their political catspaws, can be.

JIMROCKFORD

Obama is much further Left than Sanders.

Obama nearly single-handedly saved capitalism in 2009, Jim. And in foreign policy, Obama, like his incompetent Secretary of State John Kerry, and the one before him, Hillary Clinton, is a neo-liberal "compassionate interventionist." That is, neocon-Lite.

It is by no means sure that Obama would have been called a liberal in the days of Eugene McCarthy and Tip O'Neill. Rather, looking at his record, Obama would have been approximately a centrist Democrat.

As far as Obamacare goes, if that's the criterion by which you're judging him, well, the insurance companies still set the rates, and the drug companies set the rates for the medications.

I am 66, and now eligible for Part A and Part B Medicare. I pay $104.50 per month out of my social security for Part B.

At Christmastime last year I had a severe cellulitic infection (my third, my left leg is permanently damaged) which put me in the hospital for 5 days.

My hospital bill totaled over $11,000, but because of Medicare Part A, I payed a bit over $1300. Doctor's fees totaled about $2000, and not yet even eligible for Part B (until May 2015) I talked compassionate hospital administrators down to about $1000.

In socialist countries people don't pay for health care. But I am pleased to say that I payed a total of a little less than 20% of the retail expense for treating this unavoidable illness.

I am grateful that my country would give a citizen even that much help. I'm still a working man at 66, and I could not easily have generated this thirteen-odd thousand, nor would I likely be able to pay for whatever strikes me next, especially it is more serious.

But it's NOT socialism, Jim. It's still capitalist for-profit business. There is nothing leftist about Barack Obama.

Once upon a time, almost two decades ago, there might have been, though that is debatable by anyone who reads his autobiography (a real good read, wherever one stands politically. Obama is a talented writer). But not now, not since at least the time he was in the Senate and voted for each and every war appropriation GW Bush asked for, AS DID BERNIE SANDERS.

Then there was this dude.

I mean, sometimes I enjoy nothing more than poring over hoary baseball statstics in my Baseball Encyclopedia, no music on, nothing but the sheer joy of reflection upon a full long life in and around sports. Sometimes I similarly love a good game or two of chess.

But sometimes I just can't help-- maybe it's something akin to morbid fascination that makes people watch horror films-- responding to people as completely behaviorally modified as this (from his avatar) dog owner:

ALL LABS MATTER

I am a leftist. I am, as far as my connection with the American national election process, a completely disenfranchised veteran, a socialist, a revolutionary, and a scientifically oriented planetary survivalist. Capitalism, and all the other hyperbolic vectors (overpopulation, non-renewable resource expenditure, pollution, melting of the icecaps), are threatening human and all life.

The last two great rainforests, the oxygen exchangers of the world, are being cut. In Borneo at least, the American "Tree-Farming Company," Weyerhaeuser Inc., is doing the clear-cutting, as they have done to forests in many US woodland regions. These capitalists don't even care what use any of us might have for clean air to breathe with plenty of oxygen in it!

Economic concentration at the very top is one of these hyperbolic vectors I refer to above.

I suppose a short explanation of a hyperbolic vector is required. Remember in eighth-grade algebra class where you learned about making graphs. A hyperbola is a graph with an X and Y axis. The X axis represents linear time. The Y axis represents the actual present, which constantly recedes into the future.

Consider the graph of technological innovation since the beginning of the 20th century. There have been magnitudes more in those 115 years than in the entire preceding history of the human race. The increase in innovation has been logarithmic, particularly after 1945, when a very special innovation was first "applied."

Overpopulation is not so starkly approaching the Y axis as the example I have just given, but earth's human population has doubled more than 2 1/2 times since the turn of the same century, and virtually nothing has been voluntarily done by mankind to not breed ourselves out of existence. Psychologically speaking, humans have not progressed past the millennia-old idea that procreation is some kind of sacred duty!

Of course, to see the wisdom of not overpopulating the earth to the point of collapse requires vision, and compassion. Certain humans have decided that it doesn't matter what happens to the planet as long as they have fun for the time they've got left. Bleep grandchildren or grandchildren's grandchildren, as long as the quarterly bottom line doesn't look too bad, profit-taking will continue! The Big Ship Sinks Slowly and In One Piece, they say.

Capitalism, which besides being an economic methodology is a human social ethos in which the aim is specifically for each individual to make just as much short term gain as possible in as quick a time as possible (classical Adam Smithian ideology from "The Wealth of Nations," 1776), devil take the hindmost, makes it impossible to turn from that path of destruction.