Reflections on 6 January 2021 Through the Lens of 4 May 2016

A posting from my Facebook page today.

I posted this blog entry on 4 May 2016, long before Trump became president or even the Republican nominee.

Why do I post this again here and now? To say "I told you so?" Frankly, yes, in part.

But I also want to rub some noses in this in order to drive home a hard lesson. If you act like a child and play with fire, you'll get burnt. While all of these past four years have been shocking they've not been surprising. The utter capitulation of the Republican Party has shocked (and saddened) me. I thought there were more patriots among them. And now, today. I remain hopeful that these events today represent the death throes of a dying regime. But even when Trump is out of the White House, we know that far too many Americans aren't committed to democracy and the rule of law. That is truly frightening. Folks committed to democracy and the rule of law--including former Republicans and anti-Trump Republicans--have gained the upper hand for now. An electoral battle has been won. But we're in a long struggle to win back our American heritage. To bring back our fellow Americans to the value of democracy and the rule of law.

My concluding words from my blog of May 2016:

"I join him [Andrew Sullivan] in urging everyone concerned with the well-being of our Republic to take heed of his warning. This is no longer an issue of party victory or a time to gloat over the collapse of any semblance of respectability in the GOP. It's more serious than that. Much more serious."

These words apply today and for times to come.

SNGTHOUGHTS.BLOGSPOT.COM

Andrew Sullivan Takes on Trump the Demagogue

A reader's journal sharing the insights of various authors and my take on a variety of topics, most often philosophy, religion & spirituality, politics, history, economics, and works of literature. Come to think of it, diet and health, too!

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 6 January 2021

 

David Sloan Wilson, biologist & economics thinker

The Invisible Hand Is Dead! - Evonomics

evonomics.com

Or, as another Wilson (Edward O.) and I put it in a 2007 article, “Selfishness beats altruism within groups, altruistic groups beat selfish groups. Everything else is commentary.

--David Sloan Wilson

Dark Star Rising

Gary Lachman

“Oceania is at war with Eurasia. It has always been at war with Eurasia,” Orwell tells us at the start of 1984—although, of course, as in Vladislav Surkov’s “nonlinear war,” here the sides change according to the directives of Big Brother. With [Alexander] Dugin, however, they remain stable, although for Oceania we should read the Atlanticists; the maritime character is the same. Eurasia has always been at war with the Atlanticists, and if the way in which Dugin’s meme has gone from simulacrum to reality is any gauge, some of the most exciting stages in this battle are to come.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

In Collingwood’s view, historical facts are significant only as answers to questions.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

Men, though they are totally conditioned existentially—limited by the time span between birth and death, subject to labor in order to live, motivated to work in order to make themselves at home in the world, and roused to action in order to find their place in the society of their fellow-men—can mentally transcend all these conditions, but only mentally, never in reality or in cognition and knowledge, by virtue of which they are able to explore the world’s realness and their own.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Since the rise of the scientific approach in the humanities, that is, with the development of modern historicism, sociology, and economics, such questions [the traditional questions regarding the nature of this form of government and the principle which sets it in motion] have no longer been considered likely to further understanding; Kant, in fact, was the last to think along these lines of traditional political philosophy. Yet while our standards for scientific accuracy have constantly grown and are higher today than at any previous time, our standards and criteria for true understanding seem to have no less constantly declined.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

I share Wittgenstein’s mistrust of deceptively clear models: and, as Waismann said, ‘any psychological explanation is ambiguous, cryptic and open-ended, for we ourselves are many-layered, contradictory and incomplete beings, and this complicated structure, which fades away into indeterminacy, is passed on to all our actions.’

The Way to Love

Anthony De Mello

This is what happened: First your society and your culture taught you to believe that you would not be happy without certain persons and certain things. Just take a look around you: Everywhere people have actually built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without certain things—money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, God—they cannot be happy. What is your particular combination?