[FRIAM] Hope or Despair

[John Dobson]

My son who works for Google explained why the tech CEOs met with Trump.
The general rule out there is that you always "take the meeting."  Taking
the meeting in no way obligates you to do anything as a result of the
meeting, but it does give you more information about the topics discussed
at the meeting.  In his view, this was a smart thing to do for the techies,
but it is hardly surprising that they were not overly gruntled about the
conclave.  So your comment about them resembling Ring-wraiths is spot on.
But it certainly does not mean that the meeting represented any sort of
endorsement of the Donald.

On Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 7:18 AM, Jochen Fromm <jofr at cas-group.net> wrote:

> Many scientists and journalists feel desperate now that Mr. T-Rump will
> rule the world, especially climate scientists like Eric Holthaus
> https://twitter.com/EricHolthaus/status/817503888500633600
>
> What are we going to do, hope or despair, resist or surrender? I'm not
> sure if we are heading towards climate hell, criminal abyss or nuclear
> apocalypse, or if America is just turning into Trumpistan...
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/opinion/america-becomes-a-stan.amp.html
>
> Do you remember this odd meeting where Trump met the bosses of the big
> IT-companies? None of them looked happy, but they all came. It felt like
> Sauron is going to meet the Ring-wraiths. Each of the Ringwraiths already
> owns a ring of power. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple have enormous
> power, some say a single one of them is worth more than all corporations at
> the Russian stockmarkets together. In Tolkien's epic story Sauron is beaten
> by the Hobbit Frodo who destroys the ring of power in the mountain of doom.
> Frodo seems to stand for the ordinary Joe, i.e. the ordinary people, who
> eventually give up the desire for power. Now if everyone would give up
> using Twitter and Facebook, Mr. T-Rump who lose his social media power
> there immediately, he would become bored of politics and quit. Too good to
> be true.
>
> Likewise if the ordinary Joe would give up his desire to become great,
> rich and famous, then Trump wouldn't have been elected in the first place.
> Isn't it remarkable how Tolkien has observed that totalitarian
> dictatorships rest on the shoulders of the ordinary people? In Russia it is
> similar, the dictatorship here rests on the few shoulders of the small
> people, who depend on the welfare state that feeds them and tells them lies.
>
> -Jochen
>
>
>
>
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