Hello Raymond,
Ah at last, you clearly point out that there are two separate issues. One is how to prevent the sky from falling and the other is how to increase the probability of avoiding the worst consequences when the sky does fall. I personally strongly think that these issues should be discussed on separate threads because I can't see much commonality.
It's a wild guess on my part but I suspect that you have no dependants. If this is the case then I can see why the second issue might seem to you even ridiculous to consider. But before you began to post on it, this thread was entirely devoted to this second, in the large sense more trivial, issue.
Like many or most who post I have a number of dependants. I have even a larger number of people whose jobs depend on me and if I die I'd like to have a big reservoir of cash to keep the business going into high profitability. If we can keep the sky from falling this will still be a problem. I can imagine scenarios in which the sky fell but somehow my enterprise would flourish or need only some more cash to do so. Similarly, enterprises fail all the time even in good times when we don't have such arrant thieves in the US government. So it's a great concern to me. I am spending money on political campaigns (on the left you can be sure) and donations to charity but I'd like to have a lot more money even though it will absolutely not alter my standard of living one bit. And that has been the role of this thread, to find out how to solve issue number 2. As for the number 1 issue I agree with you 90% of the time. However characterizing the present US as a fascist state not only horrifies people like the lady whose family fought the real fascism directly but also alienates ordinary people who live in the US and are not wakened in the middle of the night by secret police and escorted away to nobody ever knows where. You lose massive amounts of credibility with equating what you see coming with what's there now.
It seems to me that to get people to change their ideas about changing the world and the need for it, you need to engage them, ask them more questions. Preaching to believers becomes just a pasttime, not a useful exercise.
Anyway I dream of two separate threads, HOW TO CHANGE The World and the more trivial one, BOOMS, BUSTS and R.
Regards,
Malcolm |
