In my mind any good he's done was long erased by his informercials for scam supplements -- no wonder old folks hate the Government, most of what they see advertised on TV is fraud in plain site and nobody does anything about it.
The unelected experts in Government tried to do the right thing. It’s the people who were so easily misled that forced the end of regulation for dietary supplements.
Paraphrasing what Terry Pratchett said, the problem here isn’t that we have the wrong sort of government, it’s that we have the wrong sort of people.
Older me has come to see these slap fights as generational, a la Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. It's a really big deal. Until it isn't. Marriage equality, cannabis legalization, banning cigarette ads, yada yada.
One of my political friends worked EIGHTEEN YEARS to pass the most modest portion of some family medical leave legislation. These reforms take tenacity, undying optimism, and no small amount of nuttiness. (Normal people choose to do more normal things.)
If you zero out everyone who ever worked for a filthy oil company, pharma, held bad beliefs, buys or sells harmful products, etc... there isn't much that's decent in the world.
High standards is a good thing, and we should strive to live our ideals but there is a gulf between our ideals and our present reality. "To hell with reality" is not a viable perspective.
If you are reborn born a pharaoh's prince tomorrow, is the only moral path fratricide?
from The Gulag Archipelago,
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
I laugh when I see so called progressives acting the same as puritanical early Americans in their infantile understanding of humanity.
Leonard Cohen's Anthem is about something similar:
Ah, the wars they will be fought again / The holy dove, she will be caught again / Bought and sold, and bought again / The dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering. / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That's how the light gets
George Martin quotes a William Faulkner all the time about fictional subject matter. “The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.”
It's why his fantasy stories have that gritty realism. The knights of Gondor riding against the evil horde of Sauron meme becomes parody. Good and evil is more subtle, cuts through the heart of every human being... regularly. The fantasy element is just about scale. It might be a choice between being kinda jerky and nice. Most people can be both. Novels get into a character's head. Stories where good and evil is a conflict within that head feel more real, because that's what it's like inside our heads.
Did you see the video of the chinese man beating Uygur children that were "given" to him because their parents were harvested off to whatever the fuck the chinese government are going to do to those parents.
As a father of three daughters, I would personally kill that motherfucker for what he did to those three little girls.
My actions would be an objectively GOOD thing for humanity by killing that piece of shit. His actions were objectively EVIL and if anyone can watch that video and think there is *anything* ok with it, then they are also objectively EVIL.
Statistically, that older population are the very population that votes for representatives pushing looser regulations/enforcement on businesses that enable these sort of behaviors. Representatives clearly looking out for business interests over the average voter's interest (the consumers) don't help matters.
R gets elected and proceeds to sabotage government
R: See government doesn’t work!
Example: Trump put Rick Perry in charge of the Department of Energy including our nuclear labs. Rick Perry had previously said the Department of Energy should be dismantled and should no longer exist.
Today it’s escalated... bs supplements are like a form of money laundering. How do you think every angry talk show host says the same exact thing at the same time?
"A major funder of the anti-vaccine movement has made millions selling natural health products"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2019/10/15/fdc...