[ExI] you'll never see this again

[Keith Henson]

<spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

snip

> No worries, you are so pleasant about it and refrain from campaigning in the
wrong place.

The reason I don't say much is not good.  The problem is in the poor
economic outlook of the red state voters.  They have become irrational
because their future looks bleak.  In the stone age, the solution to
an economic problem (resource crisis) was to go to war, kill the
neighbors, and take their resources.

I know that by historical standards people are well off.  But living
things respond to relative stimulus and a very large number of the red
state voters face a life perhaps not of poverty, but they are not
doing close to as well as their parents.

This makes them subject to the spread of xenophobic memes and makes
them likely to support irrational leaders since that was a winning
combination for a million years in the stone age.

I can see what led up to the unpleasant situation in the red states,
shipping manufacturing to low labor cost markets, and importing
low-wage people for the jobs that could not be sent offshore, like
meat processing.

But this knowledge, so far, is just depressing.  I have no solutions,
so from my viewpoint, the situation is bad and can be expected to get
worse indefinitely.

> I don't necessarily disagree with John either on some things.
I definitely disagree on the value of the US system: in my view it's great.
It prevents totalitarianism.

Can you think of any other country with a constitution that went
totalitarianism?

snip

> Ja I am told this, but in my view POTUS isn't a leader, and I don't suppose
that that office should be a leader.  POTUS is a politician.

Most places in the world, and for most of the US history, the POTUS
was both a politician AND a leader.  I would say the current one is
not much of either, but I also have to say that we have what the
dissatisfied want because that's the way a million years of stone age
evolution shaped us.

Some years ago I predicted that the Chinese would not start a war as
long as their economic outlook was looking good.  I don't know how
they will recover from the current set of problems.  Hope they do, but
it's hard to say.

> An example of a leader would be people like Sal Khan, Elon Musk, Bill Gates,
Peter Thiel, those kinda guys.

At least one of those you mention is not the sort of leader anyone
sensible would want.

Keith