The metaphor, ‘Pain reveals Reality,’ suggests that suffering acts as a catalyst, bringing to light hidden truths about us, our nation, and the world. It can also help us discern what is important and what is not. This often leads to a deeper understanding of ourselves, others, and the situations we find ourselves in. Pain compels people, including voters, to introspect and identify the causes of their suffering and pain.
Browsing: Opinions
After he won the Nevada Republican caucuses in 2016, the current President crowed his victory. “We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
I got a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet!
“ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” – Donald J. Trump
Interestingly, the tariff announcement did not apply to Russia, North Korea, Cuba, and Belarus, supposedly because they don’t run a trade surplus with the US. Except that Russia does.
Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times came away from a China trip convinced that cooperation to regulate and contain artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the single most urgent, and most neglected, issue in US-China relations. While “fully aware of how absurd it can sound calling on the two of them to trust each other to collaborate,” collaboration is essential “to create a global architecture of trust and governance over these emerging superintelligent computers.” Otherwise, they and the robots they create will surpass us, with unpredictable consequences in trade, warfare, labor, and much else.
This growing interest in nuclear weapons is especially noticeable in Europe, where Trump’s berating of NATO and Putin’s threats of nuclear attack are particularly unsettling. Although Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor-in-waiting, dismissed any notion of Germany developing its own nuclear weapons, he has stated that it must explore “whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, could also apply to us.” Furthermore, several German think tank experts have floated the idea of building the infrastructure that, if necessary, could produce German nuclear weapons.
In 1790 Edmund Burke, founder of conservatism, said, “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” Enter Trump, and the Christian Nationalists, who are pulling down government institutions. Built by American democracy with deliberation and foresight, those institutions have served the common good for over 200 years.
But the women of Liberia, faced with years of a brutal war and a dictatorial rule, rose up in nonviolent noncooperation and stopped the war even as they gained democracy.
America’s voters remain mindful of the tragic fate of the famous Titanic, once labeled as unsinkable. Captain Smith was the typical headstrong seaman unwilling to listen to chief Mates and Maritime advisors. He ignored three warnings of dangerous icebergs in his path. Due to his stubbornness, the Titanic rests at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. Currently, America’s Democracy appears metaphorically haunted by the Ghost of the Titanic.