Comments by "Dan" (@Dan-ud8hz) on "The Hill"
channel.
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"... the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation."
(Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History)
"If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever increasing inequality."
(Stephen Hawking)
"I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals."
(Albert Einstein)
'THE IMF CONFIRMS THAT 'TRICKLE-DOWN' ECONOMICS IS, INDEED, A JOKE' https://psmag.com/economics/trickle-down-economics-is-indeed-a-joke
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Ever hear of the acronym "DARVO" regarding behavior of abusers?
Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim/Offender.
It's also the root of modern "conservative" politics.
"The embrace, by working Americans, of policies that hurt their own interests can be understood on the basis of Ferenczi’s model of identification with the aggressor. Intrafamilial child abuse is often followed by the abuser’s denial. Children typically comply with abuse, in behavior and by embracing the abuser’s false reality, under threat of emotional abandonment. Similarly in the sociopolitical sphere, increasing threats of cultural and economic dispossession have pressed working Americans to adopt an ideology that misrepresents reality and justifies their oppression. In society as in the family, there can be a compensatory narcissistic reaction to forfeiting one’s rights that, ironically, encourages feelings of power and specialness while facilitating submission."
(The traumatic basis for the resurgence of right-wing politics among working Americans)
DOI: 10.1057/pcs.2015.53
"When effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases."
(Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism)
10.1177/0146167212439213
“If all you had ever felt toward another person were the cold wish to “win,” how would you understand the meaning of love, of friendship, of caring? You would not understand. You would simply go on dominating, and denying, and feeling superior. Perhaps you would experience a little emptiness sometimes, a remote sense of dissatisfaction, but that is all.”
― Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door
"You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him."
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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If you're interested in the pursuit of happiness:
"Political scientists traditionally have analyzed the effect of politics on subjective well-being (SWB) at the collective level, finding that more liberal countries report greater SWB. Conversely, psychologists have focused primarily on SWB at the individual level and shown that being more conservative corresponds in greater SWB. We integrate the theoretical foundations of these two literatures (e.g., livability and system justification theories) to compare and contrast the effects of country- and individual-level political orientation on SWB simultaneously. Using a panel of 16 West European countries representative of 1,134,384 individuals from 1970 to 2002, we demonstrated this SWB political paradox: more liberal countries and more conservative individuals had higher levels of SWB. More importantly, we explored measurement as a moderator of the political orientation-SWB relationship to shed some light on why this paradox exists. When orientation is measured in terms of enacted values (i.e., what the government actually does), liberalism corresponds in higher SWB, but when politics is measured in terms of espoused values (i.e., what individuals believe), greater conservatism (whether at the individual or country level) coincided in higher SWB."
(The Subjective Well-Being Political Paradox: Happy Welfare States and Unhappy Liberals
) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263889192_The_Subjective_Well-Being_Political_Paradox_Happy_Welfare_States_and_Unhappy_Liberals
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