A simple message to people around the world watching America - from Plato

originally posted by: visitedbythem
If voting really did anything, they wouldnt let us do it.
Sam Clemens

Could not have been more fitting for this thread. Which is why Twain's quote is so relevant. "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled."

People should really think about these two quotes long and hard.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

Great Thread S&F.. I will add just a few things from the past of long ago// They will mean different things to different people.

Confucius Say: It's OK to let a fool kiss you; but don't let a kiss fool you.

"Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges."
"(The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.)"
Cornelius Tacitus (55-117 A.D.)

It was Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 BC - 43 BC) in the timeless "The Traitor is the Plague" who said:


“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly.

But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.

A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”

And something all should consider when a country is divided.

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

To me Trump and Sanders are not outsiders, but part of the system, and part of the script. They like the rest of the politicians are just glorified actors/puppets. The whole election to me is no different than a WWE show.

a reply to: Sublimecraft
Crazyness..must be in the air ...k so i just entered into a art contest submitted on the same day, the title of my piece..."illusion of choice", even my little blurb for the description matches the content in this post. Solders endure the hardships of war long after the battle is won, and return home to find the battles they fought in no way benefit the people they fought with.

Design by kobalt7
The illusion of choice
you can vote if you want, I just felt the similarities were uncanny.

“In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.” ― Plato

That's the explanation for much of Congress and the top of big business leadership. Our lives shouldn't be run by the winners of the beauty pageant and popularity board. Not much chance of a change since most people get fooled by it,

Kepp up the good work Sublimecraft.
If only the people would listen!

a reply to: dreamingawake



So, you mean after sporting the hybrid Hillary Bernie, I shouldn't have considered switching to this?

And I guess maybe the one I have now I shouldn't, but I chose it because I noticed a spate of people tossing the Nazi and fascist labels back and forth, myself included, and decided to adopt it as a reminder that I needed to stop. It gets no one anywhere.

Generally, it is also my way of keeping sanity in this election season.







I had also considered all of these. Mainly because I still have a sense of humor and am trying to be bipartisan. Someone has to laugh about it all.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

I enjoy the Presidential race, I've called it for Bernie and would like to see the Trump/Sanders master-debate and would like to see Hillary behind bars, but hey - that's just me. When watching it through my eyes it only reinforces my views on whats going on in the world today.

You just shot down your open mindedness. The choice we've been given between 'two sides' denotes divide and rule. We are divided amongst ourselves, how can the people win?

The candidates don't represent us, they represent themselves. At its core the game they call politics is lies, deception and manipulation. Your vote for either or is just a vote for them, not you.

a reply to: intrptr

Did I say bipartisan above?

Let me clarify. I am not bipartisan when it comes to my personal preferences on which way I'd like to see the country go, but when it comes to seeing the humor in the situation. I can absolutely laugh at all of them. Not a one is above that.

a reply to: TheBandit795
Exactly. I can't watch either one.

If the election process were truly open they would be digging the dirt, presenting it in open forum, letting ordinary people ask questions on air, live.

Let the entire process be an expose, of by and for the people.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

Everybody in the US needs to read your post.

When a government stifles free speech, when it spies on it's citizens, when it takes away liberties and freedoms, when it is accused of voter fraud, when it invades sovereign countries based upon lies,

I cannot help but find irony in the above.

"One of the things I'm going to do if I win, and I hope we do and we're certainly leading. I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money. We're going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected," Trump said.

source

Trump opens every rally slamming the very media that carries his message. His proxies are on all of the major networks several times a day. He's dominated the headlines from the time he entered the race. He's the ultimate manipulator. He not only has a long history of attempting to stifle speech of individuals and attempting to intimidate the press with lawsuits, he promises to make it easier to sue for "purposely negative" articles? If you need examples of some of these lawsuits, I'll be happy to provide them.

Trump is pro-surveillance.

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Tuesday sided with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) over Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on restoring surveillance measures under the Patriot Act.

"I tend to err on the side of security, I must tell you," Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt when asked about the metadata program.

"When you have the world looking at us and would like to destroy us as quickly as possible, I err on the side of security," Trump added.

Trump said his position in favor of the NSA data collection had been the same since before last month's terrorist attacks in Paris, which stoked fears of international terrorism and revived debate over government surveillance measures.

"I assume when I pick up my telephone people are listening to my conversations anyway, if you want to know the truth," Trump told Hewitt. "It's a pretty sad commentary."

more quotes from Trump on domestic spying:

"We're going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule," he told Yahoo News. "And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we're going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago."

source

Furthermore, he seemed to imply in 2013 that he would support executing Snowden:

“I think Snowden is a terrible threat, I think he’s a terrible traitor, and you know what we used to do in the good old days when we were a strong country — you know what we used to do to traitors, right?” Trump said, Politico reported.

“Well, you killed them, Donald,” said fill-in host, Eric Bolling.

Mr. Trump’s response: Well, he is damaging America.

“This guy is really doing damage to this country, and he’s also making us look like dopes,” he said, Politico reported. “We can’t allow this guy to go out there and give out all our secrets and also embarrass us at every level. We should get him back and get him back now.”

source

So you'll have to excuse me when I scratch my head wondering how anyone could possible view Trump as presenting an alternative to "a government [stifling] free speech, [spying] on it's citizens, [taking] away liberties and freedoms."

From his own big orange blow hole, he declares his full intention to not only continue doing these things but to actually escalate the erosion of our civil liberties.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

Could not have written it better! I shall keep an 'eye'.....on this

a reply to: theantediluvian

That should be a deal breaker for reasonable people but it won't. It makes me very suspicious of whether this man is good for my future.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

Might also admit that you are probably more powerful than those that rule this planet and are probably not of this world if you only have 12 Facebook friends and no selfies.

I would probably fear and attack me as well-its understandable

a reply to: Sublimecraft

Great quotes. Plato was the greatest.

I love this one too

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

Winston S. Churchill

Yes you can but It's a long way to Tipperary ...

a reply to: Sublimecraft

When a government stifles free speech, when it spies on it's citizens, when it takes away liberties and freedoms, when it is accused of voter fraud, when it invades sovereign countries based upon lies, when it calls for banksters to be bailed out to the tune of billions whilst average Joe looses his home, when mothers grieve the return of their sons or daughters body being bought back from a war zone - a war fought for consolidation of power for corporate oligarchies.....the citizens of that country are not free but slaves surrounded by propaganda convincing them they are free and giving them the illusion of choice.

I simply can not agree with this. When it was people stifling speech in Chicago.

When it was the state forcing bankers to make loans to people when they knew they couldn't pay them back.

What that money came from the Federal Reserve that prints it out of thin air. When it was the STATE that created Fanny and Freddy that back 95% of ALL US mortgage's.

I will agree that we are surrounded by propaganda, but I prefer Mencken on that one.

What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar. Prejudices, Fourth Series (1924)

That 'bailout' was the state bailng out it's central bank.

en.wikiquote.org...

While there are clear ideological difference between left, and right. In my opinion. It's because we do have the snipping constitution.

We would really be screwed if we didn't.

American politics is a war fought between 535 kleptocrats on Capital Shill.

When it comes to Trump, i prefer this one from twitter....



I guess you could use this for whoever voted the Tories in over here in the UK too.

CX.

a reply to: Sublimecraft

"To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
― Douglas Adams

Plato knew it long ago that you can make a man quack like a duck and if he is convinced he will quack his heart out. So these tactics have been used for a very long time. The same trick working for ages and ages, is this because we confuse history so much? Or human nature doesn't really evolve? Or we don't put enough emphasis on human nature and sin?

Also, I will add that Socrates said something along the lines of: "to instil change you must go for the youths of a civilisation." Depends on who gets them first.