In addition, he says that there is no one who needs the medicine who doesn't get it. If they don't have insurance, he claims they can get Deraprim for free. — Agustino

Might be true, might not. A lot of companies have "compassionate donation" programs where they reserve a certain number units for those who can't afford them. However, that benefit isn't (usually, as far as I know) extended to countries that can't afford to buy stocks of this (or any other) drug.

his argument seems to be that there should be research to produce better drugs, but at such a low price point, there isn't enough money to invest in research. — Agustino

Sometimes new drugs just aren't needed. For instance, syphillis (Treponema palladium) is still treated with penicillin, after 70+ years of use. For some reason Treponema palladium just didn't develop immunity to penicillin. Of course, some people are allergic to penicillin, and other drugs (antibiotics) are employed.

I don't know whether to believe Shkreli about the side effects. The FDA Rx page mentioned bone marrow suppression in conjunction with other rather potent drugs. The FDA also said that the drug is toxic at a level close to the therapeutic window -- which is not all that unusual. Overdoses can be fatal. It may increase the likelihood of cancers, but that was in patients who had taken the drug for quite a while (2 years) and mice. Normally the drug would be taken for a matter of weeks, with dosage reduced over time.

My thought is that Shkreli's motivation was purely venal.

Good idea. But if you are immunocompromised (like when the cops catch one at a very inconvenient moment) best to have somebody else do it. Airborne particles.

It's not why I get out of bed in the morning, In fact I am so tired with the meaninglessness of those acts... Yes they are helpful and make others feel good, but WHY even do that? Where is it going? It's as if I need a great cosmic foundation of purpose underneath life in order for those gestures (generosity, mercy) to be somehow even worth something, otherwise they are just as meaningless as the waves breaking over sand. — intrapersona

Sigh. You are an advanced case. Quite beyond my competence, I'm afraid.

You are waves of desire breaking on the jagged rocks of meaninglessness. Find a different shore. There are shores of sand; in the sand you can build the meaning you desire. Impermanent meaningless, you will probably say. You are a difficult case. Yes, impermanent meaningfulness, but that's OK. You don't have to come up with meaning forever. Just until the waves of desire withdraw and you go out to sea with them -- hopefully contented, and a long enough time from now.

they need to be expensive in order to be able to fund the research — Agustino

What research? The drug has been available since 1953. Toxoplasmosis (a brain infection) is not a communion disease, but not exactly rare, either. (Cat feces is a common source.) Generally it occurs in immunocompromised people (AIDS, transplant patients, other causes). It's also used on certain intestinal parasites (single celled parasites, not worms).

Burroughs Wellcome (now part of GlaxoSmithKline) charged a great deal for AZT (azidothymodine) in the 1980s. BW didn't invent the drug--it was a failed cancer compound. Was it very difficult to manufacture? I don't know -- but the price of the drug seemed to have been set on the basis of how greatly an effective drug was desired, more than anything else. As it happens, AZT wasn't all that effective, and at the dosages used, had severe side effects. (It's still used, but in combination with other anti-vitals, at lower concentrations.)

This new anti-inflammatory drug being tried out for heart disease which also seems to work on certain kinds of lung cancer--canakinumab, a monoclonal antibody--is priced at $200,000 a year. My understanding (very small) of monoclonal antibody drugs is that they are very complicated to manufacture, and generally years of research has been done before they are brought out. Maybe at this point it is justified.

You might not be taking any medications regularly (you are still a young guy) and you certainly aren't buying medicines in the United States. Most drugs sold in the US are sold at a much higher price point than they are in Europe, for instance. Why? Because our terminally fucked up health-care financing system allows drug companies to charge the highest possible price the market will bear. Most country's health financing systems aren't that fucking dumb (to use the technical term for it).

It's for this

In September 2015, Shkreli received widespread criticism when Turing obtained the manufacturing license for the antiparasitic drug Daraprim and raised its price by a factor of 56 (from US$13.5 to US$750 per pill), leading him to be referred to as "the most hated man in America" and "pharma bro".[10][11][12][13][14][15]

he became the most hated man in America. But then, as luck would have it, Donald Trump was elected and snatched the crown off Shkreli's head, and wears it proudly.

Ask a psychologist. — Gotterdammerung

Many people held in solitary confinement for a long time (many years, sometimes) tend to deteriorate. But then, prisoners aren't in the hole as a voluntary act of solitude. Plus, it isn't quiet in solitary. Quite often there are other fairly deranged prisoners in nearby cells yelling and screaming. So, it's like being in an office where everyone listens to conservative talk radio.

Is it crazy to ... create your own ideal, imaginary friend to argue with? — John Days

It may be crazy, but it is also very common. In fact, most people talk to an ideal, imaginary friend. God. They find it helpful.

this is true. I hope the creep gets the maximum possible sentence.

Is language an adequate vehicle to ask these questions and to provide answers? — Bryan

It is, and there isn't any other vehicle. So stay on and ride it.

The reason why I'm writing this post is that I've hit a wall recently, in that I can't honestly accept anything to be true but I'm also too early into studying philosophy to remedy this. — Bryan

You've gotten swept up in old word games, like, "How do I know I am real." OMG, I don't know the answer; maybe I don't exist!" That sort of nonsense.

My recommendation is to experience life and not try to learn about it from studying other people's lives. — Rich

Very good advice.

Here's a conundrum for you: Existence precedes essence. What the hell does THAT mean? "Basically, we exist first and then we do things that define ourselves and live our lives in whatever way we choose (and this determines our essence, and what it means to be a human being.)" (source: Google -- knows all, sees all...)

So, you have a life to live. (My guess is that you are a young guy, so you have much more life in front of you than behind you.) Live it. And as you live it, you will be engaged in that most important task, defining who you are. One defines who one is through interacting with others, making choices to do this and not that; how one works, plays, prays, preys, etc. What you choose to think about, what you choose to read and write, and so on.

Get to it and enjoy.

The dead.

For me it means that we as a species leave responsibilty in the hands of a few.
While the rest live life with no feeling for the well being of the human race as a whole. — trueself

I don't know that we deliberately give responsibility to the few, but I do not believe that the rest of us lack a feeling for the well being of the world.

We need to learn that the power needs to flow from the few to the many. — trueself

no no no no

That's the problem: the few have power. Power isn't going to flow toward the many.

The many can get power by "seizing it". By "seizing" I don't mean taking over banks at the point of a gun, or attempting to grab control of a large army base. The many seize power by organizing themselves and then deploying their organized power. The many do not get it as a gift from the few. As they saying goes, "Take it easy. But take it."

The 99% of Americans (or the 99% of any other country, or the 80% of any country) who have little power have the capacity to organize and seize it from the 1% to 5% who monopolize wealth and power. Will the rich and powerful resist? I would certainly think so. But there is nothing invincible about their power.

I am a bit surprised that this thread didn't launch. Is it because... everything that could be said about adultery was most throughly said in previous Agustinian adultery threads? (This isn't a criticism; the previous adulterous threads were just very long.

What is the nature of your brother's illness, if I may intrude?

My partner died of cancer some years back He made it 12 months after it appeared. The cancer was painful and disfiguring (a tumor in a salivary gland, to start with). Treatment appeared to be successful but was arduous and took about 4 months. (surgery, radiation, chemo). Unfortunately, the cancer had metastasized to the spine, in the first few vertebrate. Paralysis from the neck down ensued, and hospice was the only option.

I thought he seemed reasonably content -- he knew the prognosis, he knew about how long death would take, he could eat (he had to be fed) and could talk. His hospice care was first rate. We spent a lot of time together, talking, holding hands, sharing food. Then he began to slip away, and died quietly one morning. He had not been conscious for several days.

Despite our talks, I have been haunted by the question of what those long days might have been like for him. He did have quite a few visitors (more in those three months than in 5 years previous). I know he liked that. But what was his interior reality like? Bob had never been much interested in philosophy; I'm not sure he would have found a discussion of his reality interesting, helpful, or maybe even tolerable.

It is not a phenomenological analysis so to speak but it is respecting the phenomenology of others. How would feel about being paralysed? I don't know but I can't safely impose that speculation or model on someone else. — Andrew4Handel

I have not undertaken this kind of heroic task. If I was in your brothers condition I would want someone who didn't just decide what I was feeling, what my existence was like.

Sorry about your brother. I totally understand not getting into conflict here. Most of my nieces and nephews (and grand nieces and nephews) are more tolerant than their parents or grandparents are. My sisters and brothers (6 in all) managed to accept me and my partner, but their acceptance doesn't extend any further. A brother-in-law has been totally unaccepting. As they get older (we're all on social security) they are getting more conservative and intolerant.

There are, indeed, real hazards in speaking freely against the dominant paradigm. I've been fired a couple of times on the basis of expressing my opinions. As a gay man, socialist, and non-believer (or at best, rather heretical) I know what is like to be in the extreme minority.

There was an editorial in the New York Times about how people used to just disagree; now they send death threats. People don't just disagree, quite often. They want to go farther and destroy the careers or lives of people they don't agree with.

Velociraptors, instead of monkeys, would have become the Earth's technological species. Maybe it would have turned out a lot better. — Michael Ossipoff

Possibly. Certainly, there's no reason why a sentient species has to be 98.6º, vertical, symmetric, bipedal, 5 fingered, and two handed. For sentience, it's the brain that matters. For technology, however, there have to be appendages or organs that can manipulate matter. One of the problems of some imagined aliens is that they are soft and squishy without any clear means of manipulating much of anything. Velociraptors would have been a candidate species. Nicer than us? Maybe not.

I grew up in a strict religious household where you were never allowed to question. I suppose there was a notion of absolute truth as well. So I had a lot of private (solipsistic) reflection.

I think you need to create en environment where people can express themselves without censure. Free speech seems to be the first thing clamped down on by a dictatorship or autocracy etc.

But I think there are many forms of censorship and I think I have felt powerless or trapped for most of my life. — Andrew4Handel

There are, indeed, many forms and locations of censorship. The work place, foremost among them.

Once in high school I wrote an enthusiastic essay about Thoreau's views on civil disobedience. The teacher told me that it was OK to think about stuff like that, but one shouldn't take it seriously. I did take it seriously, still do. It was one of the many forms of censorship and thought policing.

The best defense against censorship is to speak up, speak openly, and speak often. There may, at times, be some costs associated with saying certain things, but that's a cost of freedom. (Unless one thinks freedom means "nothing left to sell".

.
BC Are we on track to being a super-advanced civilization?
.
MO Hell no.
.
BC Suppose we solve our current problems,
.
MO Ain’t gonna happen. Humanity is its own problem — Michael Ossipoff

Let me return to something that comes up in these discussions:

It is possible that sentient beings don't make it to "super-advanced civilizations" or even stay at "civilization" for long. Why? Because becoming technologically sophisticated (a piece of civilization) tends to use up resources at a fairly fast clip. It also solves serious problems with highly disadvantageous consequences. Being able to feed many more members of the species usually means more members of that species survive and reproduce. Before long, they press up against the food supply. More technology is applied, and so on. But not ad infinitum. Eventually there is a crash of resources and population.

Technology can get civilizations only so far before then run out of 'steam', so to speak.

If sentient beings were to avoid the exhaustion problem, they would have to become extremely wise and sophisticated before they started developing any technology. How likely is that? That when they invented the wheel, they would ask "In which beneficial and harmful ways will this affect the development of our civilization?"

It might also be the case (armchair exobiologists have speculated--and aren't they all armchair professionals?) that complex civilizations end up in turmoil before they can figure out how to deal with it.

The civilization we would really want to have at hand are the Organians (or something like that) from the original Star Trek. Our intrepid travelers whizzing beyond all sorts of places no man had gone before (naturally, because they were the first), land on Organia to stop a war that has been going on for a long time. Kirk and company quickly end up being arrested and thrown into jail.

Eventually they get a hearing where they are informed that no body has died on Organia for thousands of years because they are incorporeal creatures--energy beings that can't be harmed by physical means (or other means, either, apparently.) But they are not powerless: in response to a threat from the Enterprise, all of their weapon and weapon controls become too hot to touch (Organean mind over earthly matter).

Unfortunately, the Organeans are not interested in earth's achievements, adventures, or problems. Kirk and company are sent on their merry way.

If there isn't reincarnation — Michael Ossipoff

I, for one, hope there is no reincarnation. Once has been more than enough.

super-advanced civilization — Michael Ossipoff

Well let me ask you:

Are we on track to being a super-advanced civilization? Suppose we solve our current problems, find loads of minerals on the moon, Mars, and the asteroids, and figure out fusion. Suppose we figure out how to buzz around our end of a galactic arm, and become competent space travelers. Suppose we also find a drug that keeps our brains from sizzling with neurotic obsessions and vicious hatreds (so we become nicer creatures), will we then be a super advanced civilization?

What evidence is there that we, as a species, can be capable of managing our own affairs? — Michael Ossipoff

Because we have been managing our own affairs, solving many difficult problems. We've been a successful species for somewhere between 150,000 to 100,000 years. Granted, that is giving a very positive spin to our history. The kinds of problems we do least well with are those that involve very basic economic conflict. Solving global warming involves a realignment of economic investment. Obviously, the loser-industries (that is, the people who own them) are not happy, and will resist. Much of the intensity of war is driven by the chance of being an economic winner or an economic loser.

There has been tremendous scientific and technical progress over the last 200 years.

Like economic conflict, many of our problems are more political than technical. Politics are driven by conflicting interests (and/or the perception of conflicting interests). Wise men have, on a number of occasions, provided ways of seeing common interests, rather than conflicting interests. Every now and then their advice is taken. Maybe we would listen to wise aliens, but maybe not.

It would be nice if the aliens in Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End showed up. Their approach was to lean rather heavily on resistance (putting resisting cities under a polarized shadow, for example, until they caved in. Their time travel devices helped reveal the true origins of religions, which pretty much left the temples, churches, and mosques abandoned by the formerly faithful. Before too long, we all became much more 'adult' in our views and behavior.

But that was fiction, not history.

So it seems coherent to me that one person can have insight into reality based on their own experiences even if they can't express this to others. — Andrew4Handel

Yes, it seems like this has to be true, and the truth of it covers a lot of our experience.

However, we do not want to get "locked in" to our own subjective experiences. Your admission that you have ideas that you can't express to others is useful. We all have this difficulty at times, and by groping through the problem, we may discover the means to communicate what was previously "untranslatable".

"Give me an idea... I mean it literally" - great quote. A really difficult question will be whether to use 5 dots (seems excessive) or 3 (the current style) for the ellipsis following the word "idea". Be sure to decide what you want, because 5 dots could become really annoying.

It's still not as good as people thought it would become but it is a lot better. — SteveKlinko

When I use speech-to-text on my phone or tablet, I get very good results. However, my phone is not doing the processing. A big mainframe computer at Google is providing the fast, accurate speech-to-text service.

The utility company's voice-activated phone answering system is (apparently) using a worn out personal computer from the early 1980s programmed by a glue-sniffing teenager.

It's almost 2:00 a.m. Time for us old folks to hit the hay.

how on earth can you not even see that — intrapersona

Of course I can see that. I am arguing against your view that if you don't live forever, then your life doesn't have any meaning. Or as you say, it would be a "waste of your time". Now there's something to snort over (lol).

predicating it [love,sweetness,acceptance ] as a reason to exist? Maaaan, that's a whole different ballgame... — intrapersona

Right. Love, sweetness, acceptance, and all that good stuff are not a reason to exist. They are a way to exist.

Like I am sure you know, the universe isn't implicitly good or bad. — intrapersona

Yes. I have often said the universe has no particular meaning, and it doesn't provide us with meaning as one of it's custom services.

Therefore it makes no difference how you act in your life,that is "objectively". It only matters in how it improves you life in the direction you want it to. For a psychopath, hurting others improves their life so don't assume that kindness, mercy, bravery, love, generosity, creativity are the things that I had better do before i die. — intrapersona

Just because the universe can get away with not having any meaning doesn't therefore result in our having no meaning. The universe doesn't need any meaning to do its thing. We do. We are meaning makers, meaning traders, meaning dependent beings.

Hurting others does not improve the lives of psychopaths. Where did you get the idea that psychopaths live to hurt others? Psychopaths aren't demons, they are people with an inability to feel guilt and be guided by fear of punishment. What would improve their (often unhappy) lives is to have normal responsiveness to feelings.

so don't assume that kindness, mercy, bravery, love, generosity, creativity are the things that I had better do before i die. — intrapersona

Is what's good for a psychopath is good for you? Why the hell shouldn't I assume that kindness, mercy, bravery, love, generosity, creativity are the things that you should do before you die? Just guessing, but you probably do these things already, when the opportunity (like, for bravery and mercy) present themselves.

... everything is meaningless so there is no point guiding anything in any direction. We might as well just die right now. (Obviously there is a flaw in what I just said — intrapersona

There is a flaw. The universe may be meaningless, but you aren't meaningless, and your human environment isn't meaningless. Yes, you could go to bed and stay there until you die, which would be an act of self-destructive meaning.

As far as your experiences (your existence) disappearing when you die, that would only be so if everyone who had every had any contact with you in any way, shape, manner or form ALSO DIED when you died. Everyone who had read your posts here, for instance, would have to die with you. The web site would have to disappear too, so nobody else could read anything you said, in the future.

IF we all go together when we go, every Hottentot and every Eskimo, THEN your experiences will disappear FOREVER, because it is the human narrative that carries forward our contributions after we die.

by some standards, (like JC's) a man who hates his brother is already a murderer, so by that measure, whether you wish to hurt someone for a short period of time or an eternity doesn't make much difference.

But you don't have an eternity. Unless you are an unlimited being living, sadly, in a limited world.

I didn't say you did, but others have. Which is fine, more posts to them. No, it wasn't a dig at your post on desires continuing after death.

Now that you mention it, I'll have to come up with a really good dig for you.

I know I don't want to live forever because that would be a drag, but i feel instinctively deep down in my unconscious like i want to live forever. — intrapersona

I also think living forever would be a drag - a great big monumental fucking drag. It would be hell itself.

But... do you have so much access to your unconscious mind that you know it (your unconscious) wants to go on forever?

And even if your unconscious mind wants to live forever, who is running the show -- you or your unconscious?

So, if it doesn't last... "forever"...why do good things versus atrocious things? Shouldn't I just do what catches my fancy? How do you predicate this idea that I should do useful things? — Noble Dust

Is your judgement as to whether it is better to do atrocious things or good things affected by whether you have 1 day or an infinity of days to do them? I wouldn't think the time remaining on the clock would make any difference.

What is the wellspring of atrocities and beneficences? Isn't it whether your mind is driven by cruelty or love? Bitterness vs. sweetness? Resentment or acceptance?

I suppose you will do whatever catches your fancy at least some of the time. So will I. We do useful things, don't we, in order to obtain the results of utility, and because we have decided (for some odd reason) that useful things are better than things without any use whatsoever?

Mostly our choices of actions are predicated on the short run--sometimes the next 15 minutes. Once in a great while we plan to act for the intermediate future (say, 25-50 years). We all find it pretty difficult to think about a longer range future, like a century. Are you making any plans for late August, 2117? Probably not.

You must be living under a rock then. That question is incredibly popular. Just type into google "why live if you are going to die?" and see the immense amount of posts,articles, blogs etc. I have even seen it on this forum quite a bit. — intrapersona

Of course, "seeing it on this forum" is not much of a recommendation, really. Some people here go on at considerable length about the imposition on beings that don't exist yet of conceiving them and bringing them to birth. without their consent. How nonexistent beings can give consent is beyond me.

Tbh all i wanna do is fuck bitches get money... forever... — intrapersona

I suppose you could aim a bit higher, but if that's all you want to do, you still have to do it in the limited time you have here. So you had better get busy and start fucking those bitches before time runs out. Where does money figure in there?

I don't know the mind of all men but... I'm pretty sure that very few people would say

if I don't live forever then everything I do is just a waste of effort — intrapersona

What do you think led you to this impasse? (And it is an impasse -- you are definitely not going to live forever).

The proper course for you is clear enough, and its the same for everyone else: whatever worthwhile, acts of kindness, mercy, bravery, love, generosity, creativity (and more) you are going to perform, you had better do it while you are here.

Or maybe they just don't care about helping us--But I don't like that one either, because it seems to me that compassion would come with advancement. — Michael Ossipoff

I'm fairly certain there are other worlds occupied by sentient beings. It just "seems likely" because of the very large number of stars that would host 1 or 2 planets that were suitable for life to flourish. So why don't they send us the message that help is on the way?

1. The galaxy, let alone the universe, is vary, very large and the distances between stars are literally astronomical.

2. Even IF a technologically sophisticated society on a distant planet noticed an attenuated and meaningless signal from us, it would take a signal a long time to come back to us.

3. Not compassionate? How would they know we needed help? In fact, we don't need help. We are perfectly capable of solving our problems. They don't know that, of course, but they also don't know what kind of problems we face. THE PROBLEM we face is our collective unwillingness to do what needs to be done. The best thing a ship full of aliens could do for us is give us a good swift kick to get us moving toward self-salvation.

4. It would take a very, very, very long time for a distant civilization to travel to earth, which of course means they had noticed us in the first place.

5. Maybe advanced civilizations have learned to leave well enough alone. When we humans have come across other human civilizations we didn't know about, we generally rubbed them out--accidentally or deliberately. Maybe distant societies have had similar experiences. Maybe they've learned that showing up is the beginning of the end for the civilizations they visit.

6. Maybe they know about us and just don't care. "Oh yeah, another civilization. That's 6 new ones this year, on top of the 2358 we have already discovered. Same old, same old."

7. Maybe God said, "Oh, you discovered Earth. Isn't that great! Just for your information, Earth happens to be Hell. If you don't straighten out, you'll be going there a lot faster than warp drive, and you won't be coming back anytime soon. Consider yourselves warned."

Of course there is a difference -- it's a matter of severity. But the wager worker is no more free to stop working than the slave is, because in both cases the consequences are very negative.

Granted: a wage worker can choose the site of his wage slavery; a chattel slave can not.

there's very unlikely to be anyone else in the galaxy. based on the dearth of visits and messages so far. — Michael Ossipoff

Or, it's an indication that there are many civilizations which don't last long enough (once they get past a certain point of development) to come visit.

I'd choose the Yellowstone caldera to go KAPOWY over nuclear war.

The caldera is located in the northern Rocky Mountains just west of the Great Plains. The area is relatively sparsely populated. Some major cities would be lost, but the total population in the area is most likely less than any individual pair of major cities elsewhere in the world that might be bombed. Seoul, S. K. has 20 million. All of the nearby states, and states in the Northern Plains add up to about 25 million. That's almost as many as Seoul, South Korea has. Add southwestern Canada and there is probably another 5 million-10 million.

In terms of total death, atomic war would be much worse.

However, the Yellowstone Caldera would cause a lot of damage, no doubt. I don't know how fertile the dust from the explosion would be. A lot of it would land on the northern plains which are important for world agriculture.

John Michael Greer — Wayfarer

Ah yes, the Arch Druid. He's not quite my cup of tea, but some of my best friends read him religiously.

Sorry for the long response. It would take several volumes to explain all this fully.

You are bringing up a lot of interesting issues here.

First there is parental care, then there is education, and finally, work in an institution. I never went to high school in the states; but, is the same sort of developmental progress taught in the US? — Posty McPostface

I haven't been in high school since 1964, but this is a basic pattern which is more or less common to all industrialized / industrializing countries.

What went wrong than in the US or what went right for those who value said features of personal freedom and responsibility? — Posty McPostface

Some significant changes have occurred in the political culture since WWII.

Before 1964, the set up looked like this:

On the liberal side, there were "Rockefeller Republicans and northern Democrats.
On the conservative side there were Republicans (some, like the John Birch Society, were extremely conservative) and there were southern Democrats (which included some Ku Klux Klanners).

Liberals could be either social and fiscal liberals or they could be social liberals and fiscal conservatives. Liberals of both parties were progressive. Conservatives were either obsessed with maintaining the racial status quo in the south (southern Democrats) or were obsessed with Communism (John Birch (whoever he was) or Senator Joseph McCarthy (R, Wisconsin). Conservative republicans were almost always fiscal conservatives as well as social conservatives.

Kennedy and Johnson inaugurated the period of The Great Society (increased social spending), the Vietnam War, the decade-long Apollo program aimed at landing men on the moon, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and so on.

The election of 1964 marked a turning point. Very conservative Barry Goldwater (R, Arizona) won the Republican nomination for President. He lost, but in the process he managed to get rid of a lot of the liberal Rockefeller Republicans. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 and Johnson won the Democratic nomination in '64, but a conflict that had been brewing for a decade was settled. Northern Democrats, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, had been pressuring the Democratic Party to reform. The issue came to a head in a Credentials Committee fight over the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation vs. the regulars, headed by Senators Eastland and Stennis -- two paleoconservative pro-segregationists. At the end of the committee fight, the MFDP suffered a "pyrrhic defeat". The regulars walked out, the MFDP were not accredited but they sat in the regulars seats, and before the 1968 convention, the Democratic Party changes its rules to bar racial discrimination in voting.

For the most part so far, Republicans and Democrats were still working together on common legislative goals. Major differences, yes, but a lot of consensus, too.)

As a result of the civil rights movement's accomplishments (with the help of Democrats), Johnson's Great Society programs, and other causes, a lot of conservative southern Democrats started shifting to the now-more conservative Republican Party. In 1968 and 1972, Nixon was still quite a bit more liberal than the conservative wing of his party, and he was also a crook. (He said in a television interview, "I am not a crook." Which of course convinced a lot of people that he probably was.)

The 1970s saw a string of events--like gay liberation, women's liberation, legalized abortion (Roe Vs. Wade, 1973), the Watergate Hearings, Nixon's resignation, the (kind of ignominious) defeat of the US in Vietnam--that drove conservatives further right, and made liberals more comfortable.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the presidency. Reagan was quite conservative, quite a big military spender (greatly increased the national debt with his expensive Star Wars program (high tech war), and a very conservative anticommunist with matching social views. He had 8 years to drive the political process, and his successor (George Herbert Walker Bush--Bush I) had 4 more years to continue.

By 1992 a significant change in the political landscape had been effected. William Clinton served under the new regime of more hostile relations between the two parties in Congress. George Walker Bush (Bush II) served during a period of growing conservative politics, heavily flavored by the 9/11 attack and the aftermaths. The political atmosphere was quite poisonous by the time Obama assumed office, and is continuing to get even more toxic to rational political behavior.

Living in the US for about 10 years thus far, I see a strong anti-social attitude towards government and its responsibilities towards the individual. — Posty McPostface

This is neoconservativism. It's very pro-business, anti-government, inclined to foreign interventionism, libertarian individualism, and such rot. The social contract of neoconservatives looks a hell of a lot different than the social contract a progressive liberal would write and sign.

That some of the people spouting neocon rhetoric have the most to lose from neocon policy, is a conundrum. They've been duped, basically.

I often find myself envying Scandinavian countries and other social democracies over the US and see their effort at promoting a well cultivated individual wrt. to society as a feature/causal relationship/confounding factor that makes them all very high scorers in the HDI (Human Development Index). — Posty McPostface

I understand why you would think that. Bear in mind American Exceptionalism. (EDIT 26.8.17;PC leftists just hate the idea.) But one of the "exceptional" parts of American history is slavery, and the anti-central-government politics that flourished in the south for a long time (and still does).

Southerners weren't just against the central government in Washington. They didn't want to grant too much power to their own state governments, and maybe to their counties, either. A lot of them liked the privatized mini-state of the plantation. Private power. The private domain. Private honor. Private justice. All that private crap.

Southern suspicion of central government created a huge problem for them when they seceded from the Union. If they were going to defend themselves, they needed to have some central authority. But they hated that.

There is a band of states across the northern tier of the US (Washington, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, New England, New York... which have followed the Colonial Puritan pattern of emphasizing the importance of collective social responsibility and action. These states tend to resemble Northern Europe and Scandinavia much more than the American south.

Creditable estimates of those in forced labor (unofficially, slaves) ranges between 21 million and 48 million. What countries have the highest percentage of their populations as slaves?

Pakistan 1.2%
India 1.1%
Haiti 2.1 %
Mauritania 4%

People at the top of the economic heap have a great deal of comfort at the expense of everyone else, true enough. But most people are nowhere close to the top of the economic heap. Working people who make up about 95% of the world's population, are all wage slaves. A wage slave is someone who is entirely dependent on a daily, weekly, or monthly wage to sustain themselves and their families. If they do not work, they and their family will suffer enormously

Wage slaves have to work, and companies (big or tiny) give their workers no more than what it takes to keep them from starving and still coming to work. Sure, an American or German auto plant worker expects more for an hour of their labor (in equivalent dollars) than a Bangladeshi worker in a Nike shoe factory. Because living costs are higher in Germany and North America, companies have to pay more. They pay much less in Bangladesh because they can pay less.

Wage slavery is the primary form of exploitation in capitalist economies. You work for a wage, or you die. And most of the value of the products workers produce goes to the owners of the company (who do not work) and not to to workers (who do it all).

Workers all over the world get the same bad deal. We should all stop cooperating with the owning class.