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Where Does America's Fear Come From?
An anonymous reader writes "While far from a dictatorship, the United States has employed a number of paranoid tactics that delegitimize its democracy. And the motivation for doing so is — fear. That seems to be a long way from 'So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is...fear itself: nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.' Where is the U.S. heading?"
My family visited Europe this Fall and were surprised at the level of civility experienced there.
It seems that fear and paranoia drive Americans to give up liberties in trade for some vague promise of security. "Stand your ground" laws and the vast supposedly all knowing NSA wiretapping program are just two small examples of the manifestation of all pervading fear and paranoia.
Other First World Nations have a different balance between liberty and security. It's not that they don't spy on each other. It's not that good people don't die at the hands of bad people. It has to be experienced elsewhere to know that things don't _have_ to be they way they are in the US.
I can't help but feel it has to do, in small part, with basic civility between humans. Too bad America can't/won't follow these better, more secure examples.
You know, I think there's something to this. In Europe, for example, facts and figures are checked and cross checked. When opposing parties discuss the direction of public policy, they discuss, often from very different ideological points of view, from the same set of facts and figures.
By contrast, in the US, anyone can make up their own facts and figures to "prove" their point. No one can act as a trusted source because no one trusts the opposition's ideological basis for anything. It's all smoke and mirrors. There is no legitimate fact or real world number-based authority over which reality can be argued. In America, highly charged emotional perception is the rule.
... Faux News
"Second: guns. Having a gun is a sign you are afraid. What are you afraid of? Ans: all the other people with guns."
Your first statement suggests that you might have a clue or two. Then you make that second statement, which suggests that you're actually pretty clueless. The one thing that defines a free man, is the right to keep and bear arms. Suppose that you take away all the guns. Suppose that you invent something tomorrow that can find and destroy every single firearm in the United States. The one weapon that YOU fear most is gone. The cops are without firearms, the criminals are without firearms, the honest citizen is without firearms. No one can any longer reach into a pocket, pull out a firearm, and kill. No one. Security guards and armed robbers alike are without guns.
Do you REALLY believe that no one will be murdered again?
If I really feel the need to murder someone, I may resort to a rock, a knife, a sword, a club, an electrical booby trap, poison, assault with a vehicle, assault with a trained animal, or just choke or beat the guy to death with my bare hands.
Wake up and smell the roses. PEOPLE murder people. Guns are as impassive and inanimate as any kitchen utensil.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's not a new thing. Remember the Red Scare? Remember the Internment Camps and Witch Hunts? It's the ancient fear of the unknown, of other tribes to be precise.
Fear is instinctual in humans, granted to us through millions of years of evolution. It exists, and need only be cultivated into hysteria to cloud minds. The fear comes from within, that's what makes it powerful. It should be considered a crime to wield fear against the ignorant masses. Those stoking the fear are fearmongers, or scaremongers -- The word looks familiar because these are the same as warmongers. As the Chomsky showed us decades ago, fear and filters are used to manufacture consent.
For what ends? Oh, I think we know that too, very well indeed.
The question is wrong. We know where the fear comes from. The more apt question is why we are more scared of terrorists than fast cars and fast food, which combined claim over four hundred 9/11 scale attacks in victims every year? The answer isn't no one is brave. The answer is no one is educated. It's been over a decade. That's four thousand 9/11 scale attacks in victims... Will you still drive and occasionally eat junk food? Yes? Then how can anyone justify the spending to prevent such a minuscule threat to life in terrorism at such a great cost? It's because they're ignorant.
A small child turns on the light to reveal what the dark has kept from them, and is no longer afraid. Without ignorance there can be no fear. The scale of the threat is never given context, so it seem more ominous than it is; When in reality its not that big of a deal. Terrible, yes, but so are car accidents and heart attacks, yet we wouldn't agree to give up our Freedoms, Privacy or our French Fries to prevent them.
The warmongers who want to line their pockets with trillions we could be spending to actually protect and benefit us at home claim Terroists are nothing to sneeze at, but if you set a 9/11 scale attack next to the Flu, you'll notice there are six times more dead Americans every year from the Flu. Fire the liars. Fight fear with facts.
Dude, This is fucking America. We have never, ever all agreed on anything. In this case a significant proportion of the people who fought the Revolution were extremely pro-aristocracy.
Our number three or four guy General was "Lord Stirling," our top trainer as "Baron von Steuben," we received aid from extremely aristocratic France, and the officers of the Continental Army created a hereditary order (the Society of the Cincinnati) at the end of the war specifically intended to become our new nobility..
As for the rest, increasing the House to 30k is simply not practical. There's a reason the Indians, with a population triple ours, have a Parliament that is less then double ours. It's just not practical to run a Legislative body with more then 600 or so members. You'd have to have a working group in DC much smaller then the 30k Congressman, and you'd probably need actual Constitutional amendments governing how that working group was chosen, when the 30k could meet to fire the working group, etc.
As for points 4 and 5, you really don't understand Progressives. At all. It's not that we think sovereign debt is a good thing, or even a not-bad thing; it's that we think the problem with sovereign debt is that it leads to inflation. OTOH the problem with cutting government spending is that it involves firing people, which reduces salaries for everyone by increasing the supply of available labor while reducing the demand for said labor. If the economies doing great, inflation is real, and the employment situation is fine government debt is a bad thing to have.
But we're in the middle of a years-long employment slump, with basically no inflation, it's foolish to cut the deficit. We'd cut everyone's salary, to solve a problem that simply does not exist.
That would be like a guy whose house is currently on fire sealing up his basement because a flood is sure to hit real soon now.
To extend the analogy a bit and pay additional credit to the wolf, some wolves can and do function quite well as sheep dogs. In keeping with the nature of wolves, sometimes the line between what is perceived as a protector and what is perceived as a threat is only a matter of interpretation on the part of leaders that are ill-equipped to make the determination in the first place. To clarify the point a bit, you cannot ever truly tame a wolf. You can establish a relationship with it based on mutual respect and hierarchy, but you cannot bend it entirely to your will. Dogs are another matter, and can be broken.
I speak from experience, having been fortunate enough to have a wolf as a member of my family in my life.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Have you read or watched Game of Thrones?
The basic theme of the books is that when you have a government where almost everyone is 100% honorable at all times, and always refuses to compromise, the entire world is fucked. Off the top of my head I can think of two characters who died of being honorable, both of whom also managed to set back their personal causes greatly; and a third who merely managed to set back her timetable by several books. And I stopped reading so long ago I can't remember the title of the last book I read.
But back IRL the problem isn't that the Congressional leaders we've got are dishonest. The problem is half of them are actually being honest when they say "If we don't fire half the government, cut taxes on job-creators by 20 points, and end ObamaCare." The other half are being equally honest when they demand more government spending, higher taxes on the wealthy, and strongly support doubling down on ObamaCare.
This means that, for both sides, the only honest or honorable thing to do is fight to defeat the other side. Since our government is a complex dance between two Legislative houses with power, an independent Executive, and Judges who frequently heckle, this results in lots of arguing and very little happens except everyone thinks they're well-positioned for the next election.
What purpose do you have to keep it? Are you trying to start a bank now?
Frankly, none of your damned business, but something I want to do with it. Something to benefit me, not you.
Obviously?
Yes.
Government administration is generally shown to have lower costs.
Bullshit, that is a lie.
I'll keep my fangs, and damn the government. And, damn the mindless sheep as well.
There is more to it than just that. Our civilization has allowed more and more purely physical power to be accessible by average folks --think of any 200-horsepower car as being equivalent to owning a herd of 200 horses, and think about all the work that such a herd might have done before the Industrial Revolution. Well, Power is supposed to be associated with Responsibility. It is Education that provides information about "how to use Power responsibly and ethically" --but there are always folks who either don't pay proper attention to the lessons, or don't care, because they want what they want, regardless of the consequences. Thus did the Power of three jet aircraft become misused as missiles, destroying two tall buildings and severely damaging a third large building. If the overall Trend continues, regarding accessibility of physical Power by average folks, then eventually average folks will have access to Power equivalent to an H-bomb. (Note that already lots of folks seem to have access to Modern Biological Power....) One of the proposed Answers to the Fermi Paradox is that every technological culture will eventually face a challenge regarding how to deal with such Power in the hands of ordinary small-minded selfish (and even psychotic) folks --and that most cultures don't survive that challenge. I will disagree that clamping down on Freedom is the correct solution; there are stories about "mad generals", after all. But we most certainly need a solution, and sooner rather than later.
there has not been any real big change
The USA used to have the USSR to keep it in check and provide a limit to the US's more paranoid actions against foreign countries it imagined might harm it. Now that the USSR is no more, the USA allows it's fear and insecurity to run rampant and bomb the crap out of every little thing that gives it nightmares - whether rational or not.
Bullshit.
The Soviets did not help us keep our paranoia in check. They were the cause of our paranoia, and that paranoia caused numerous incidents that were both more illegal and less ethical then anything the NSA is accused of.
For example, there was the time we supported Diem in a coup d'tat against the Emperor of Vietnam. Then Diem himself got to be an embarrassment, and the coup d'tat that replaced his ass killed him. When we realized that Latin America occasionally liked to elect leftists who sympathized with the Soviets we started supporting numerous Latin American military dictatorships. These dictatorships engaged in such brutal repression that nobody knows how many bad things they did decades later. This was repeated in pretty much every region of the world. The recent film "The Act of Killing" tells the story of a bunch of massacres in Indonesia during the Vietnam war era. A million people died. In our defense our Evil Dictators were generally less evil then their Evil Dictators, but when your entire defense is "less evil then Stalin," you're in a pretty fucked up place. I could go on.
I'm not saying mass data collection of everyone is right, Constitutional, or ethical. I am saying that this is a massive improvement over the Cold War when Operation Condor killed upward of 60k, the Indonesians killed a million, etc.
I know NOTHING about fish farming, but are you sure the crab didn't just eat the dead fish?
In 100 years there won't be a USA. There will be a north American confederacy of states, composed of what was the USA and Canada. It will be a massively decentralised confederacy. Most transportation will be by electric train. Personal transport will be by bicycle. The suburbs will have been abandoned and plowed back into farms. Much of the midwest USA will no longer be habitable due to drought and the collapse of the acquifers from draining them and from poisoning them via gas fracking earlier in the century. This confederacy will eventually unravel as the temperatures increase and the southern sections migrate north. Plagues (most flu but also drug resistant bacteria) will sweep through the urban populations, killing millions. In 1000 years, the population, compared to 2013, will have been more than decimated. What is left of humanity will live in valleys in high elevations, or near the Arctic and Antarctic circle. There will be very little metals left, and many people will live as hunter gatherers. Those cursed with civilisation will mostly live in coastal cities in Siberia and Canada and the horn of S. America. Fishing villages will appear in the archepelago of Antarctica. The level of technology will, at best, be roughly that of the 16th century.
In 10,000 years, the few metals will have long ago oxidised. The few million remaining people will live as hunter gatherers in Siberia and Canada and Antarctica. Everything between the 50th parallels will be a hot desert or a hellish jungle where the wet-bulb temp far exceeds human survival. The few temperate forests left will be in the far north and south. The pyramids will be underwater, and the rest of the world's cities were dismantled and stripped for metals 9,500 years earlier. The Anthropocene will have disrupted the glacial cycle, and the world won't grow cold again for another 50,000 - 100,000 years. In 100,000,000 years, the earth will be a bit warmer than today, as the sun continues to increase its radiance as helium "ash" collects at the core. The decendants of racoons will have evolved and grown into furry bipeds with opposable thumbs and complex social systems. They will re-invent the wheel, and perhaps the scientific method. They will dig into the earth and find a thin layer of carbon and radioactivity. They will find our skeletons, most of them dated to within a few millennia, and realise what happened:
At the edge of the forest is where there is the most activity and disruption. Weed species abound - crappy, sappy, trees with shallow roots, shrubs and grasses that strangle other plants, and this constant churn over territory and nutrients bounded by the soil and the sun permits for a great deal of opportunity for animals and plants to reproduce. One of these weed species evolved in Africa 103,000,000 years earlier than these racoonish scientists. The species was bipedal and omnivorous and highly social. Breaking into bands of 30 to 50 and assembling into crowds of 150 they believed that unseen beings controlled their world. They built shrines to these beings after a particularly cold ice age. To build these shrines they needed members of their society in place all year round, and thus devised small villages and agriculture. This permitted over population, but it also created hierarchy in their society. Where previously sociopathic behaviour was not tolerated in the small bands (murderers were punished by death), sociopaths were now able to flourish and institute systems of slavery and domination. These systems evolved the villages into cities; areas of such density that they required the import of resources. Emphasis on require. Soon, millions of people were slaughter by one city or group of cities for their resources. Shortly there after, the species discovered huge carbon deposits which were burned as fuel, and powered this weed species into planetary dominance. The oceans were quickly emptied of fish, and the air was filled with CO2, and the population skyrocketed. All of the metals that could be extracted, were.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
is simply a police state, in the velvet-clad incarnation of a surveillance state. [ This goes true, alas, also for certain western European states, most of all Britain and the Netherlands- ]
Fear, indeed, may be a good label to stick upon some of the deeper undercurrents that began flowing through, or rather: under, western culture since september 2001. As bad a motivator as it is, fear is a powerful one. Couple that with consumption and the benumbedness of the lower socio-economic strata ( in the US case I think explicitly of the urbanized black population in its pit of misery ) and you have the most effective tool there is, for less-than-well-intended or simply *stupid* politicians. to bring society under minute control. All the while, most John Does in that same society will still think they live in a "free" country, even bragging about it.
The only thing that would help here were revolution, a revolution of courage. I think of citizens, united in new parties, declaring independence - of or in smaller states. Although for a very unjust cause, the southern states were fighting for just reasons and stood on justified ground. Their attempt at breaking away from the Union could be repeated with peaceful means. Next year, Scotland will be voting on formal independence from the UK - an historical opportunity to get those hateful cameras off their streets, and GCHQ out of their backyard. In the Netherlands, it will needs be done with different means, as breakaway is nearly impossible in such small entities.
All in all, though, I wonder how millions of reasonably smart citizens can undergo the current climate of repression [ see Sarah Harrison's comment on calling a duck a duck ] without a tinge or mere inkling of revolt ?
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
AD = CE. CE expands as Common Era, and is generally more accepted in a global context, because it doesn't reference a god you may not believe in or adhere to. More than half the world's population does not follow an Abrahamic religion. The dates are exactly the same, just a different name.
You did know that AD means "Anno Domini", right? In English, that's "the year of our Lord". If you want to claim adherence to the Christain God, that's fine. You have that right. But don't expect me to pay lip service to a God that, to me, comes off as a petty, cliquish and vindictive sort, according to your own holy books.
Not my god either, but I see two objections to trying to replace AD with CE:
Firstly, it doesn't achieve your stated aim of avoiding reference to Christianity, because it continues to use what was (probably incorrectly) thought to be the year of Christ's birth as its epoch. Any pretence that the one is not derived from the other is frankly ridiculous.
Secondly, I can't comment about yourself, but most CE proponents are quite happy to use a calendar system that is replete with reference to other deities such as Thursday after Thor, January after Janus and so on. Both July and August are named after gods who we know from our history books were not exactly role models for ethical behaviour. In this context it is hard to believe that aversion to the term AD is driven by a purely secular motivation.
In the beginning, humans knew that they were only one bad mood from the gods before they met with death and destruction. Disease, famine, injury, war - all these and more could maim or kill you. In in an era where leveraged force was more the exception than the rule, even a minor injury could put you out of the game and possibly kill you and yours.
So people made sacrifices to the gods and hoped for the best, knowing that even the most benign gods were prone to go on the occasional rampage.
In the last few centuries, however, we've abandoned the gods. We think we have made ourselves masters of our own fates, because we can cure many diseases and injuries, have exterminated or reduces many of the external threats, learned to grow crops more efficiently and formed into nations and trading units extensive enough that one part of the country can keep others fed when local conditions such as drought would have previously wrought havoc on the population.
In other words, we've come to think that peace and plenty are the natural state of all civilized beings.
But not all humans are civilized, either individually or in groups. And while it helps if you're not a member of a targeted group, ultimately just about any group can be targeted. And, thanks to the incredible leverage that modern humans possess, a single person can kill hundreds with little effort. So paradoxically, the safer we get overall, the more we fear. As in many cases, the closer you get to perfection, the more it costs you. And the fewer the everyday fears, the more impact the extra-ordinary fears have.