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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gib Bogle who wrote (2955)	12/29/2005 4:21:21 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 217767

Gib, you are right. I do write to a large extent for myself, [as part of thinking]. People write other things, such as you do, which then reflects back on me and makes me realize things I didn't think of or understand until they write. So it's an iterative process of arriving at better ideas. A few times I have written stuff and not even known on re-reading it what the heck I was thinking at the time. My wife says people have no idea what I mean because of the way I write [though it seems clear enough to me, even if I do sometimes have to give convoluted explications]. I'm not really trying to persuade, though that's part of it, so much as trying to get people to think about things and hopefully challenge my ideas, correct me and thereby save me, as Jay was instrumental in doing long ago by adding weight to the idea that I had best save my bacon by abandoning my position and selling a large tranche of QCOM, which I did, thank goodness, or I would be cleaning cars for a living [which I should perhaps add is not a literal statement - I would probably be begging. Just kidding]. True, I think I also like to shock, though more to dislodge people from cliched thinking rather than just shock. Cliches and rules of thumb are so facile and mindless. If they work grammatically, people seem happy to accept faulty ideas. Plus, it's fun. <it seems to me to be perfectly obvious that democracy is not guaranteed to produce good outcomes, let alone good leaders, your oblique reasoning eluded me > I think it's far worse than that. People like to bundle the world's evil up into a single dictator and a few henchmen, get rid of them, then go on as though nothing happened, when in fact said henchmen are little more than scapegoats for what the mob really wanted and what the mob wanted was what the leaders were giving. It becomes very convenient afterwards to pretend that one wasn't in fact one of those in favour of the carnage. In fact, most people are pretty nasty pieces of work when the right circumstances allow them to let loose with their ids [ dictionary.reference.com In Freudian theory, the division of the psyche that is totally unconscious and serves as the source of instinctual impulses and demands for immediate satisfaction of primitive needs.] Those lessons are being lost in the mists of time. They will be relearned at great cost. Freedoms are being eroded. That process will continue. Democracy is not inherently good contrary to current ideology. Democracy chose Adolf. Maybe barely, but Adolf was not rejected out of hand at 5% of the vote. Most people like a "strong leader". Their use of the word strong is not in a sense which I consider good. Muldoon was strong. Saddam was strong. Yeltsin was strong. Adolf and Stalin were strong. In their usage strong means domineering and alpha male in nature. GWB exemplifies, to me, the strength of democracy. The people got what they wanted; no excuses that they were too busy, had limited understanding, limited knowledge and didn't really want to know. He is pretty much what he obviously was. I haven't been in the slightest surprised by anything he has done. It has all been in character. Now a lot of people are bleating that they don't like what they've got. You see what I mean? Adolf was a good bloke in the electorate's eyes. He was nothing different after the election than he was before, though of course he became as Rumsfeld puts it, the reality creator while the rest reacted to the reality he created. And they decided afterwards that they didn't like the reality they selected him to create, though they told him pretty much what that reality would be. Adolf was a good bloke. He did what the electorate wanted, which is by definition a good bloke, at the time they put him in power anyway. When things turned to custard, they realized they'd made a mistake. Too late. The victors write history and define who is a war criminal. If Germany and Japan had won, you can be sure that those who dropped atomic bombs would have fitted the category of 'war criminal'. Whether one destroys a city population by bayonet and bullet as in Nanking, or Hiroshima bomb, or by fire as in Dresden, or by Zyklon B, or machete in Rwanda, it's much the same on the receiving end. Mqurice