hawks and doves

So, not much interest in income equality?  Not much interest in if the government should do something about it?  Beagles has a strong libertarian streak in him, but I think he split from Ron Paul on isolationism.  Whatever happened to hawks vs doves?  That used to be the big issue back when I was declaiming about color tvs.  I remember some tour bus full of Japanese came down Telegraph Avenue when I was in Berkeley and they had some kind of rest stop and one of the guys ran up to me and with the two or three English words he knew asked me if I was a hawk or a dove.  I was a proud dove of course and that settled, he got back on the bus and the world went on,  Hawk and dove continued to be a thing throughout the proxy wars of the cold war, then had a resurgence during the Iraq invasion, but has now dwindled down to almost nothing.

There is still a hubbub about terrorism.  CNN and the network nightly news were abuzz about that guy at Ohio State, was he a terrorist?  Clearly he was some lone nut, the kind we have had forever, but what if he was some operative?  What would that mean?  Would it mean we dropped another bomb on ISIS, take that you crumb bums.  I'm pretty sure we are bombing them.  There is that Mosul thing with the Kurds and Shiite militias, and some regular army Iraqis I think,,and there are Irani and Turk forces in the vicinity, and some American advisers,  And I think we do bombing sorties on their behalf.  There was some talk about boots on the ground early in the republican primary, but it failed to become as popular as kicking immigrants in the balls, and then nothing was as important as Trump, and that's where we are today and nobody is talking doves vs hawks anymore.

I suspect a strong libertarian steak in Old Dog as well.  Individual responsibility sounds like something that they like, as opposed to say, some government agency telling us how to behave.  I didn't learn much in college, and my grades showed it, but I do remember, probably in some lit class becoming aware of this essay by Orwell about Dickens.  I have read a little Dickens and found him rather slow and oh, melodramatic, but not in a good way, moralistic in the sense of good guys vs bad guys, which is something I don't care for much,.  But I guess that was Orwell's point.  I believe he was still a commie or at least a fellow traveler when he wrote this.  Dickens never really attacked the institutions of society.  If good people ran the institutions everything would be hunky dory,  The problem was with the people.  His mission as a novelist was to make people more moral.  Orwell and his ilk were like fuck that, the problem was the institutions.  Change the institutions and you would change the people.

The commies changed the institutions, but that didn't change the people and now communism is gone.  On the other hand none of the novelists or Bishop Sheen or anybody has had any success in changing the people from good to bad either..

This started out about economic inequality, but I haven't done any of the research I should have done, and well, I wander.

TV used to be the opiate of the masses and now it is the internet, which I posit is much stronger because people carry it around in their pockets nowadays.  Also it took a lot of people to put on a tv show, and hence some cooperation and responsibility, whereas now the work of Macedonian teens, cutting and pasting various articles to make a new article and putting it out to get as many clicks as possible because they get paid, looks just the same on the screen as a respected journal such as this one.