I wrote this post one month ago, it received minus 29 votes and 6 x’s.
Do people still feel the same way? Or are you now realising that this man is trying to turn the US into his own personal Russia? That there is a model for this that he is following—look at Turkey or Poland or Hungary or Slovakia or Brazil or Argentina or Venezuela. All slighly different, but similar in the way that an apparently stable, mature democracy was hijacked by a populist movement and eventually became an authoritarian state where the constitution and the rule of law were gradually replaced by the whims of one individual.
I spent some time in Venezuela when Chavez was in power, and it is scarily similar to the US right now. At the time, it was early in Chavez’s rule, the economy was still working, the country was rich although with a lot of terrible poverty and many people, even educated people, supported Chavez’s vision of a more equal society. But now the country has been destroyed.
I have read a wonderful novel, Europe Central, by William Vollmann, which describes what it was like to live under Stalin. So much parallels what’s happening in the US today, from punishing people for expressing the “wrong” opinions, to, for example the way Stalin was the person who decided if Shostakovich’s latest works were acceptable or not—just like the way Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center.
And this is happening to the most powerful country in the world, the country that used to be the good guys in a world where Russia and China support so much that is bad.
To me this is utterly terrifying. And I’m not sure why EA’s don’t see this as a problem.
Is it that EA’s are secretly libertarians who actually think that some of what Trump is doing is good?
Or is it that we rather focus on narrow problems that seem more tractable, and leave the global political problems to others?
I wrote this post one month ago, it received minus 29 votes and 6 x’s.
Do people still feel the same way? Or are you now realising that this man is trying to turn the US into his own personal Russia? That there is a model for this that he is following—look at Turkey or Poland or Hungary or Slovakia or Brazil or Argentina or Venezuela. All slighly different, but similar in the way that an apparently stable, mature democracy was hijacked by a populist movement and eventually became an authoritarian state where the constitution and the rule of law were gradually replaced by the whims of one individual.
I spent some time in Venezuela when Chavez was in power, and it is scarily similar to the US right now. At the time, it was early in Chavez’s rule, the economy was still working, the country was rich although with a lot of terrible poverty and many people, even educated people, supported Chavez’s vision of a more equal society. But now the country has been destroyed.
I have read a wonderful novel, Europe Central, by William Vollmann, which describes what it was like to live under Stalin. So much parallels what’s happening in the US today, from punishing people for expressing the “wrong” opinions, to, for example the way Stalin was the person who decided if Shostakovich’s latest works were acceptable or not—just like the way Trump is taking over the Kennedy Center.
And this is happening to the most powerful country in the world, the country that used to be the good guys in a world where Russia and China support so much that is bad.
To me this is utterly terrifying. And I’m not sure why EA’s don’t see this as a problem.
Is it that EA’s are secretly libertarians who actually think that some of what Trump is doing is good?
Or is it that we rather focus on narrow problems that seem more tractable, and leave the global political problems to others?
Are those of us in Europe missing something?
Could anyone enlighten me?