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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?"
Fear give those in Power, control of the command person.
I take it you've been dealt an above average hand then.
I don't think the primary motivation for massive surveillance and such things is fear. In my opinion it is about control and power. Being able to silence any opposition before it gets organized and knowing in advance which groups dissent is growing gives you the power to stay in control longer. Fear is only used to gain acceptance of the public: think of the terrorists etc.
Where is the U.S. heading?
Nowhere special. The US has been like this for ages. Apart from some details (TSA, leaks, technical possibilities) there has not been any real big change.
The fear has been around for just about always. And when there's nothing left to fear (like communism or alcohol) something new will be made up (like terrorism or drugs). Since the US spends more on its military than on social security, the military has become some kind of social security. It must be kept busy.
0x or or snor perron?!
This is a really nice, eloquent way of legitimizing a bunch of conspiracy theories which, it turns out, are often true
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.
Same answer as always: You've Got to Be Carefully Taught.
once american politicians realized that they could use a great common enemy as a political tool, it soon followed that all they needed to do in order to maintain their power was to invent more enemies. first "communism", now "terrorism", along with all the other vague ideas america wages war against, it all seems to have its roots in the cold war.
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.
There is no easy answer to these problems as they are deeply rooted in human nature and are probably survival instints. Just ones that were developed as cavemen but have now got way out of control.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Lol Trust me Bush did more damage in one year than the whole of the current presidents will ever do.
The rest of he world is either crying over their dead or alternating between amused and disappointed in US actions since 9/11.
Guns, healthcare, climate change, Iraq war, summary execution without trial and with innocent victims, It's like watching a bizarre right wing satire show. If it was fiction it would be hilarious.
Your country has been undervaluing the importance of education for a long time. No wonder you've got so many ignorant people who are easy to scare, and therefore easy to control.
The "fear" you imagine is your rationalization of outcomes you don't like. When someone gets elected you don't agree with, or some policy emerges or persists that you would rather not have or abolish, you attribute this to "fear" because you wish to believe that rational, courageous behavior would have led to a different result.
The Iraq and Afgan wars are excellent examples of this. Malcontents attribute support for these wars to "fear"; citizens trembling in fear of terrorist boogeymen, and blinded by fear to the crimes of warmongers.
The truth is that support for these wars came from Anger. Bloody, mortal rage. Not fear.
But you go on indulging your delusions. Your echo chamber is plenty loud enough to drown out whatever you'd rather not hear.
Your post is merely confirmation that the biggest problem we have in the US is really stupid fucking people who can only regurgitate bumper sticker talking points, and who prefer to be lied to like two dollar whores instead of using their brain to actually think. People like you are why the fucknuts get elected who go out of their way to pass crap like the Patriot Act, and to invade other countries for no reason.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Or... he could have just worked hard in his life and earned what he has.
Probably more as a plutocracy than a dictatorship.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
And the Kardashians!
Oh and Honey Boo Boo!
And the schools!
We've become a nation of self-gratifying, illiterate dip-shits who would much rather not be informed and learn about an issue and take the time to vote or to become involved even when your liberty is at stake. Human nature being what it is, It's easier to panic and pray that the leaders we elect can actually lead and take everything they say at face value. Unfortunately for the rest of us, your { congressman | senator | president } is senile or so wrapped up in pandering to big campaign contributors or party interests that they have little stake in protecting your liberty; for them it's all about getting re-elected. That's why when things like the patriot act come along we all say "it's a good thing because it will protect me from all the terrorists out there." "Terrorists are bad mmkay?" and the spin doctors go on all the news talk shows that drone on and on about issues like Benghazi and then suddenly shift to Obamacare because Benghazi is so like last year dude! Because you don't become involved and you keep voting that party line you suddenly realize now that you have to have a virtual strip search just to board a plane or that TSA agents will stop you getting off of a train and search you. Why? Because those terrorists are bad people and they hate us so you have to give up your privacy and your liberty in order to win the war on terror. And all the while you hear "we're winning!" That's right, we're winning and just because every new drone strike creates more hatred and more enemies for us to kill, we'll be able to keep this war up as long as necessary or until we can't sell anymore bonds to pay for it all. Because we're "in a war" we'll then create more government bureaucracy and will give money to your local law enforcement so they can all dress up like jackbooted Nazis with sub-machine guns!
So keep watching the Kardashians and just leave your safety to those folks you elect, who get re-elected over 70% of the time, who you've probably never met, who have staff that create talking points that become sound bites, that play video poker during important hearings, that lie to you about keeping your health insurance, who really were "C" students in college and were drunk all the time, who receive all that money from special interests that feed off of your tax dollars, who hand feed pieces of legislation they never read already written up so they really don't have to work and slap their name on it, who pass legislation because it's so massive "You just have to pass it to see what's in it" and because they go through special lines at the airport and don't get nudeo scans.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Yep, sounds like one of these trust fund baby Marxists. I will grant the GP the following: the saying "easy come, easy go" is true. Things worked hard for are valued relatively much higher in the eyes of the person who did the work. HOWEVER it doesn't follow that therefore the whole point of life is to suffer, nor that by making your fellow man suffer needlessly you're doing him a favor. Of course most employers/managers seem to believe this, but that is sadism not compassion.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
This is a pretty tall claim. Any evidence to back it up?
Where is moderation: -1 False?
Since 2001 things have changed.
Before 2001, those in power, politicians, fought eachother.
Since 2001 these guys teamed up with the corporations and multinationals;
their differences vanished in a double sense. The moral dissonance that
this brought on (lost sense of duty) created a tremendous fear. Fear, by
those in power, of the hordes. The hordes that would one day be enilightened
to find they had been quad-crossed and fucked over all the while being
taxed to support the privileged.
This fear of discovery, small wonder, translates into paranoia, which translates
into control. Fine gems such as Feinstein are an excellent example.
This is class warfare of the opulent against those who provide. Provide
through taxes. The latter which are exactly their achilles' heel.
Yep, America has lost it's nimbus, and I think it won't be able to regain it again.
Perect safety comes with a steady state that's a fact.
You don't understand - it's the position that corrupts, not the person that is corrupt. You could "elect" the most honest person, and end up with the worst tyrant. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a reason this is not a new saying.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sure it is, it's just not happening where it used to happen. Been to Latin America lately? Hell of a boom down here. We're not that poor anymore.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The fear mongers are trying to gain more power by peddling fear to the masses---all the while wealth and power is being redistributed.
Constitutional liberties are eroded one by one in the name of "National Security" and the "Greater Good".
Fairly soon, the USA will be an oligarchy policed by the government's jackbooted thugs standing on the necks of those who oppose the will of the government. Nothing can be hidden from the cameras, wire taps, profiling, meta data, and cameras. All must obey or be put on secret lists, subject to secret laws, and held in secret prisons.
It's older than that. People haven't changed for 10s of thousands of years. We just have better records of the more recent stuff.
For the hundredth time.
Capitalism does not reward hard work.
It rewards marketability and cunning investment.
The whole point of the "capital" in "capitalism" is to NOT have to work hard. It's an economic system which takes advantage of human laziness. You may think this is good or bad, workable or unworkable, but that's still how it is.
The hardest workers I've ever met are all dirt poor. They either lack the fortune or the inclination to make money - IOW they're either disabled, dumb or idealistic. (And note well that there's nothing wrong with being any of these, with the proviso that being thick does not include wilful ignorance.)
If food an games aren't sufficient to keep your populace at bay, you'll use fear. Using fear has it's limitations, because once people will get hungry because you don't provide them with food, they will revolt. History has always proven this principle right and it will do so again. Over 40% of the USA citizens are around or below poverty rates and this number is still growing each year. Regardless of what political party is in control when that happens, there will be mass protests and plundering going on, just like in Egypt or any country where hunger and poverty is abundant and only a few rich people have control.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
We'll have the "Slightly Less United States of America", or maybe even "The Independent States of America". It's already becoming more and more divided (from an outside perspective).
It tends to corrupt, but that doesn't mean everyone becomes equally corrupted.
It's easy to ruin any public figure's reputation, so powerful interests have them all by the balls. If humans weren't such a bunch of self-righteous sanctimonious cunts who want glorious heroes rather than efficient administrators, we'd have politicians expert at things other than propagandising ("PR") and lawyering.
Define "honest" first. Some of the most despicable sumbitches in history have been scrupulously honest. They believe everything that they ever said, and they honestly believe that they are creating a better world. While I despise Dick Cheney, and I only despise Bush slightly less than Cheney, I can make a pretty clear case that both were "honest men".
I would hope that you value honesty, but I would also hope that you don't naively equate "honest" with "good" or "effective leadership" or "honorable men", or much of anything else.
"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
This is the third world verion of "we are not poor", of course.
A cousin married into some Indian aristocratic family. They're not that poor either.
Today, Americans fear terrorism.
A few decades ago, it was communism.
Before the fear of communism, was the fear of black people.
Before the abolition of slavery, was the fear of the wilderness (what lied beyond the American frontier).
Finally, before the fear of the wilderness, was the fear of tyranny — i.e. from the English crown.
I suppose that fear is quite simply an integral part of American society's fabric.
(Note that those events sometimes overlap. I did not imply that, for a given one event to start, the ongoing one needs to stop.)
P.S. : I can't remember where I read or heard this. It was most likely during American civilization class.
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
This has been going on for a very long time and I saw it as a kid. WAY back when there was rampant Trick or Treating, there were vague reports of "razors in apples" and stuff like that. It's just nonsense. As a child, even I saw it as nonsense, but my mother took it quite seriously every year inspect our haul piece by piece.
We have systems over-run with parasitic lawyers who live on fears which eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
And the Vietnam "domino theory"? That war on "communism"? Once again, I have seen this for the farce it was since I was a child. When I learned what communism is, I thought "hey this is a great idea for the future of man's civilization!" And when examining what existed, we saw extreme violence against the people and an elite power structure that benefited themselves while making their people miserable. That's not communism. And THAT image is what got everyone "fighting the war on communism." From that we got the Cold War, the Military Industrial Complex thrived on the fears of a whole nation.
It has been going on far longer than partisan politics in its current form. You realize that "the conservatives" were once the democrats and "the liberals" were the republicans a few decades ago? But that was before the republicans pulled "god on their side" to get the religious vote.
Before people can see past the current partisan politics, people have to be able to see a history that hasn't quite made it into the books.
The fear comes from propaganda penned by the elite. The elite that control America's politics and economy are constantly afraid of the Sword of Damocles -- an angry mob of Americans calling for their blood for their failure to do something or other. Fifty years ago it was a fear of a communist revolt, where the people take away their power if not their life. Now it's a fear of some crisis happening and being seen as not having done enough to prevent it. As a result, politicians want to be seen as "doing something", even if what they're doing is ineffective or counterproductive. If there's supposedly a "drug crisis", politicians will pass laws to be seen as "tough on drugs". It works the same for terrorism or any other societal ill, real or perceived. Opportunistic politicians, as opposed to being afraid, turn this around and sponsor a bill, make a story and pretend as if there's a real problem, in order to gain popularity or power; this is the malice on the flipside of the former problem's ignorance.
Despite most Americans being more interested in money than politics, big business and finance tend to get less public scrutiny than government. These sectors are equally afraid of the people though: witness how quickly they used government resources and propaganda to cause the Occupy movement to lose steam.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
USA has absurd working conditions and very poor welfare systems. Most people spend most of their time at work. With despotic middle managers, shitty working hours, very little time off. You ask why people are easily manipulated wrecks?
Didn't take long to disintegrate into partisan politics, huh? As Falconhell already pointed out, Herr Bush instituted most of the stuff that Obama plays with today. Think about it, Herr Coward.
"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
In the sense of merging of corporation and state, America's as close as the world has got to sustained Italian corporatism, i.e. fascism in the pre-Hitler sense.
(Hitler wanted the same thing, but he also wanted a land war in Asia, and that's where he went too fa.. oh wait. Seriously though, America is fascist, for the traditional European definition of fascism.)
Uhm. You're demonstrating yourself as being a participant of the problem itself. Look here for my comment on what you have just stated. I don't want to be too redundant.
Go back in time, if you're old enough to remember, the long history of fear-peddling in this country. We have gained a "grazing herd of farm animals" level of instinctive fear in this country and we, as a people generally buy into the narratives without question. The media has catered almost exclusively to the "lowest common [intellectual] denominators" for decades on end. You think that hasn't affected the development of the US culture over the decades?
It goes well beyond what you're trying to suggest. You're looking at a single symptom and excluding all of the rest of the data.
Loads.
You have a very rosy view of european politics :)
Fox News may play fast and loose with the facts, but that doesnt change the fact that sources like MSNBC are much much worse.
CNN: 54% factual reporting, 46% commentary/opinion.
FOX: 45% factual reporting, 55% commentary/opinion.
MSNBC: 15% factual reporting, 85% commentary/opinion.
Here is the full report.
"His name was James Damore."
. . .planted the seeds that have bloomed, revealing what is tantamount to aristocracy.
1. The Big Senate no longer represents the people meaningfully.
2. The Little House no longer represents the 50 States United, or offers any thoughtful feedback to the Big Senate.
3. The federal government has eminent domain over your wallet.
4. DC is printing money at will, demolishing the value of what you think is in your wallet, and obstructing reform.
5. We're all modern monetary theorists now.
So shut up, peasants, and avert your gaze when your Progressive Overlords pass by.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
No, it's not the position that corrupts. It's the system that requires either candidate, who is successful at getting his name on the ballot paper, to screw-over, lie, back-stab and manipulate, in order to get there. No honest person would ever make it through the selection process. Nor would they ever be able to bring themselves to do all the things necessary to raise the millions of $$ needed to win (or: rather, buy) the campaign.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
... and its promotion of a xenophobic education system, xenophobic religious presence, and xenophobic foreign policy.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
... a corporate dictatorship. How americans can view obama as a socialist is a testament to corporate propaganda. There is no leftwing in america. Just the hard corporate right and the one party corporate system with two halfs (R&D).
Historians will have a field day about how the american mind using science and modern media have successfully been brainwashed via school and ads to believe things that are false and go against their own interests.
GÃring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
GÃring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.
Well we have at least 25 centuries of Chicken Little/Henny Penny folklore warning us about the dangers of Faux News and the society destroying consequences of it. We obviously have a had time to collectively assimilate the danger however given that news organizations can now legally lie to you.
Despite the technological advances we as a species have been here before... and going by history - it is going to get ugly before it gets better.
Don't forget luck. That's an important factor, too.
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.
...We obviously have a had time to collectively assimilate the danger however given that news organizations can now legally lie to you. ....
And a president and secretary-of-state that lies to us too...
Wait what?
Which party was it that accused the other of wanting to kill old people, wanting to poison the water, pollute the air, and starve little children?
It wasn't the GOP.
Some damn monkey saw a snake and we've all been scared ever since.
Ask your progressive friends how much they depend on MSNBC for news, and ask your conservative friends how much they depend on Fox News. Also ask them what they perceive the news to opinion ratio to be on each. That's the real difference.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Capitalism rewards profitable work. Whether that work is easy or hard is immaterial.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Well, the politicians are probably as corrupt as everywhere. However the media in most of Europe are mostly working well. Although there's also already an erosion of media quality going on. I'd not bet that in ten years, the situation in Europe will be any better than the situation in the US.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There is no difference in parties in how they sell their platforms. Republicans use fear of foreign powers, fear of government, fear of immigrants and fear of loss of financial independence. Democrats use fear of racists, fear of religious institutions, fear of loss of government subsidies and fear of foreign powers.
The biggest difference really is how they view government: Republicans pander to those that fear government and Democrats pander to those that fear the lack of government. The message of fear was beaten by a guy selling hope.
-- $G
Opposing parties also means not just one party, but multiple parties.
Also many times governements are made from several parties. This means they need to compromise. Compromise is a GOOD thing in politics.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Plato urges a foundation of music and athletics in an education that produces a brave populace. Music produces a soul strong enough for bravery and athletics produces a habit of valor. Both also form a mind prepared for more abstract learning so that fear can be confronted with contemplation. Perhaps we are not doing enough in these foundational areas.
This post assumes that the actions of the federal government are in response to people's fears. That's your problem right there, you've got it backwards. It's the government who is acting in bad faith to begin with, and is then just looking for some cover to excuse it.
You didn't really think it takes $4 Trillion to catch a bunch of terrorists, did you?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
This is how low /. has sunk.
... and they're running away from that. They're really not afraid of X or Y, but rather of having to look at themselves, and prefer their little pretend fears to that. The more power you have, the more this applies to you. People in power simply passing on some of the fear that rules their lives.
What do you think makes people lust for power in the first place? Impotence, fear, inability to love -- from a distance those are one and the same thing, so calling it fear is "not wrong".
Down the toilet.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
Capitalism does not reward hard work. It rewards marketability and cunning investment.
Actually, what it rewards most is having capital. And what it punishes most is not having capital.
If I have capital, I can invest it, not particularly cunningly, in S&P 500 ETFs and get a not-terrible return for doing no work at all. At worst, I'll be pulling in 0.5% from my bank with it. If I collect enough capital, then I don't need to do any work whatsoever and I'll be able to live comfortably by demanding other people's work in the form of purchases.
If I don't have capital, then anything that I buy will be done on credit, making it more expensive than if I had bought it outright. For example, if I use a credit card to buy food and don't pay it off right away, than the cost of my groceries is at least 25% higher due to the payments to the credit card company. So that means that because I started with less capital (for whatever reason), I actually have to work harder to pay for the same things that the person with $150K lying around can just buy.
An example from my day-to-day: I was lucky enough to be born into a family that could afford to pay for my bachelor's degree. That gave me an income of $2400 or so higher than classmates who started out earning about as much as I did. 2 years later, that translated into the just under $5000 I needed to buy a car to get to a better-paying job, saving me about $3000 a year in car loan payments. So now I'm basically earning $5K more than an equally-hardworking and responsible colleagues and classmates, and that allows me to save up for all sorts of things more easily than they can. The uneven playing field happens to be tilted somewhat in my favor, solely because I started with assets rather than debts.
I am officially gone from
That looks at the percentage factual reporting vs. opinion reporting. That's a completely different question from the accuracy of the facts.
Example:
Foo reports: "The most powerful person of the U.S. is the president. The American president has green skin. Only Martians have green skin. We should not let the fate of America be controlled a Martian."
Ratio of "fact" reporting to opinion reporting: 3:1 (three "fact" sentences, one opinion statement). Number of actual facts: 1.
Bar reports: "The most powerful person of the U.S. is the president. However his power is not absolute. But his power should be absolute. It is not a good idea to divert some power to the congress."
Ratio of fact reporting to opinion reporting: 1:1 (two fact sentences, two opinion sentences). Number of actual facts: 2.
The fact/opinion statistics would prefer Foo. However Bar, despite its higher and obviously stupid opinion part, has only actual facts, and even more of those than Foo, where two of three "facts" are fake.
Now I have no idea about the quality of facts of Fox vs. MSNBC. All I wanted to point out is that the statistics you quoted is completely unrelated to this question.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What's your point? Both sides are bad so watch Fox News? All cable news sucks and you'll find fewer liberals who religiously watch MSNBC than conservatives who watch Fox News.
In a post that said nothing good about Fox News, but instead only gave citation to Fox not being even close to the worst, your first thought was that the post was not only support for Fox, but a recommendation to view it.
Do you even see the problem with the whole line of twisted assumptions that you have just made, probably instigated and influenced by what I guess is a clear hatred of what Fox represents?
It is no surprise that fewer people watch MSNBC "religiously" as you call it, given their horrible ratings. What point are YOU trying to make?
"His name was James Damore."
Anyway, fear is part of human nature. Groups like governments or nations seem to exhibit the same good and bad personality traits as individuals do
I think the tall claim is " 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.".
Do you have any evidence to back THAT up?
(I'm from Europe, politicians never let facts and figures get in the way of ideology).
TFA sez:
And the motivation for doing so is â" fear
Dunbal sez:
Nothing has changed because basic human nature is the same. This is the way it will always be. So you get to choose whether you want to be part of the herd near the edge looking for the wolves, or oblivious somewhere the middle, or if you want to be a wolf. Being near the edge isn't a problem because you see the danger coming, so you get a head start. Being in the middle, you don't even realize the danger is there until the whole herd is moving.. And of course being a wolf has its own unique advantages: you get to eat mutton and you get to watch the whole herd fear you. But you have no herd for protection and in trying times, the other wolves don't mind eating wolf, too
Both the above have failed to realize that there is another entity in the picture --- the one who puts ***FEAR*** in the midst and use it for its own dastardly agenda.
A true analogy : Fish farmers who ship live fishes in flexitanks used to be troubled by the large number of fish turned belly up during the transit, and finally someone found a simple way to solve the problem --- they put a live crab inside the same flexitank with the fish.
Because of that one live crab, the fishes were pre-occupied with fear throughout the journey, and as a result, up to 95% of the fishes arrived at the destination still alive.
Same thing happens in the United States.
Because of the fear that has been instilled by the government the people forgot about everything else and willingly surrender their rights, their liberty, their privacy, just so they can remain "protected".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Yes, I agree that USA is gripped in fear. as the the exact reason, I'm not sure.
I recently visited from Australia and had a couple of people comment to me how dangerous it is here in Australia since we have "Had Our Guns taken Away from Us In Australia..."
You never see people walking around here with guns. One of our friends we visited there had a couple of loaded revolver cylinders sitting on his kitchen bench along with his coffee cups and stuff. That would never be seen here.
I feel MUCH safer in Oz than in America. And the level of shootings in Australia are much lower than in the USA.
We noticed how fearfully Americans seemed to be to us, and my wife is from there originally. She is so happy to be living in Australia instead of America.
Our observations seem to us that the gun lobby works hard to generate fear to justify their stand, and I think your government and your media are both lending a hand too as it is a lot easier to control the masses if they are fearful.
Just this afternoon some friends of ours introduced us to the TV show, The Newsroom.
We have only seen a couple of Youtube videos, one part of the first episode where the main character was interviewed in a collage I think, and the other his news report on the Tea Party. Both are so true.
I would encourage you all to try to look at media other than your main networks as your "normal" media is very controlled.
There is a joke going around, at the USA's expense, that unfortunately has a lot of truth in it.
It goes as follows..... "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography".
On one of my trips to America, I had someone ask me to say something in Australian. They really did not know what my native language was.
That is pretty sad.
We love visiting America and have a great number of wonderful friends there. You do have a great country but it is in real danger of being destroyed by the fear and suspicion generated by various lobby groups.
The fear that interest groups there have put into the public mind about changes to fix your heath system is very apparent to those living overseas. That is a great example of the fear being used to push an agenda that keeps those that profit from your very expensive and VERY BROKEN health system going.
My wife had to have a hysterectomy and here in Australia it cost us NOTHING!!! We all pay a small amount extra in out taxes and so we are covered. If it is critical, you get seen pretty fast, but elective stuff can take quite a while. One can take out private insurance (not tied to your work) to speed that up.
One of our USA friends had a 3 hour stay in your intensive care while his insurance did not cover him as he had just been sacked from his work. It cost him $42,000 for the 3 hours!!! There is no way that that is moral. But your vested interests there want to keep you all paying lots for you heath system, and are plainly using fear to do it.
Sorry for this bit of a rant, but we really worry for our friends and my wife's family over there. It is very plain to see "from afar".
This isn't really true.
In Europe they generally agree on things that government departments say, but then again in America we also generally agree that the actual numbers the Congressional Budget Office spits out are accurate. Our media is actually a lot more tame, and even-handed then a lot of European media. British tabloids, for example, make Fox/MSNBC/CNN/etc. look like the BBC.
What I suspect is different isn;t the amount of rancor in debates, it's the length of debate. In the US we have two political elites. The Conservative/rural elite says the government should fire itself, cut taxes to the bone, stop regulating financial behavior (ie: no individual mandate in ObamaCare, banks do what they want and die if they screw up, etc.), and strongly regulate certain personal behaviors (ie: homosexuality, RU-486). The liberal/urban elite says the government should hire a bunch more people, strongly regulate financial behavior (ie: stronger mandate in ObamaCare, banks get strongly regulated and bailed out, etc.),regulations on personal behavior should not touch sex, but should touch gun-ownership.
Since the conservative/rural elite runs the US House, but the urban/liberal elite runs the Senate and the Presidency both elites have to agree or the budget won't pass and the entire government gets fired.
This means lots of BS debates dragged out over years. Literally. The taxes-vs.-deficit spending debate has been going on since the 2010 Congressional elections, and will only pause if the 2014 elections get rid of Boehner.
OTOH almost all European countries are run on the principle of Unity of Powers. You can't have a leftish Head of Government and a rightish House of the Legislature. If somehow that happens the Head of Government loses a vote of confidence in Parliament and the people decide whose right in a new election. Which happens within 2-3 months. You can't have a debate last four years, and cover three elections cycles.
Which means you ain't gonna find out when the Social Dems disagree with the Christian Dems on basic facts, whereas in the US the only thing worth paying attention to in politics for much of the last 4 years has been the basic factual disagreements between the GOP and Obama.
IOW they're either disabled, dumb or idealistic.
Or some of us just love our jobs, despite the fact that the pay sucks.
You only have to walk around certain Virginia suburbs, where the multi-million dollar houses are all owned by people whose companies comprise the intelligence/industrial apparatus, to know that it's all about the money, not about fear.
When you build tanks and planes, you have to have huge factories, lots of space, lots of overhead. Bear Stearns and other companies only need a fancy headquarters and a few cubicle farms, and the rest is profit.
Surveillance is the new defense contracting boondoggle.
I don't believe it's about fear at all. It's about greed and easy money.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is pretty good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Oww4Ap3YZA
but it doesnt explain why US tv, particuarly news, is so much more paranoid than in europe
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
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.
Capitalism rewards giving people what they want. Hard work has nothing to do with it, nor luck or cunning. Marketing can affect what people want, but at the end of the day you make money by exchanging goods and services with people. If nobody wants it, you aren't going to make money. Please note that what people say they want is not necessarily what they actually want.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
I think he's trying to say that Fox News is one of the very few conservative biased news sources whereas the liberal biased media sources are so common the average viewership of each individual station is less than Fox News on the whole. Which isn't really supporting any actual argument at all, merely pointing out that a population spread into more groups generally causes smaller groups.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
In a long-lived slashdot tradition, it doesn't appear that anyone on this discussion thread read the fine article. It argues that freedom is the root of fear in America. More specifically it is the freedom myth - that we are a nation founded in freedom - that is the root of all fear and paranoia in America. He compares 3 countries with what he defines as cultures of fear based in freedom myth as the root of their anti-democratic evils: the US, Israel and Apartheid South Africa.
In his view we are slaves to a culture created in the back of covered wagons, with women and children cowering in fear from the isolation and danger crossing the frontier alone.
I suppose it is left to the reader to divine what the solution would be if the problem is that we venerate freedom too much.
As to stand your ground laws and yurpians: nowhere in Europe will you find a duty-to-retreat law. If you want to be more like Europe, have stand your ground laws everywhere (but without so many guns)
If you harm an attacker while defending yourself, a court will judge whether it was proportional (decapitating someone for poking your with a finger would not be proportional) and necessary (after disarming and disabling an attacker, killing him anyway would be considered excessive). If so, you'll be aquitted.
You don't understand - it's the position that corrupts, not the person that is corrupt. You could "elect" the most honest person, and end up with the worst tyrant. Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. There is a reason this is not a new saying.
Dude, if they were corrupt we'd be in a much different mess. Think about it.
The people with the money to pay the biggest bribes are in business. They'd prefer lower taxes and an end to regulations, but what they really need is certainty on things like the debt ceiling and the Federal budget. If it was just a matter of spending $50 Billion on bribes Tim Cook could cut the checks himself, tomorrow; instead of thanking our lucky stars that they delayed the budget/debt ceiling dispute a few months we would never have heard of a budget/debt ceiling dispute.
I agree that if Congress were more ethical we'd be in a much better situation, as would most people. The problem is that I define ethical much differently then a guy who thinks ObamaCare is evil would. Since guys who agree with me won half of Congress, but guys who agree with him won the other half, we get this constant BS arguing and brinksmanship over the same BS they were arguing over and brinking over back in 2010.
Keep in mind this is what the founders wanted. They believed that a government where Congress and the President were constantly arguing would protect freedom because no evil policies could possibly get passed.
With zero chance of facing a ground invasion for at least the last 50 years, but at times a very high risk of death from above, Americans (and to a lesser extent Canadians) were forced to empower themselves by looking for "the enemy within" typically in the form of spies, unlikely to ever repel an invading soldier themselves.
When terrorism made that enemy within even more insidious, the paranoia spreaded, and it wasn't long before "scope creep" set in, causing large sections of the population to mistrust each other not as terrorists, but for simply not sharing each other's interests, for the potential to change their "way of life".
To be fair - the damned monkey watched as the snake ate all her babies. Yeah, there's good reason to fear snakes, unless you've grown to be so big that a snake no longer views you as a menu item. Which also explains why some people don't like those little miniature panthers that other people like to keep in their houses.
"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
The dominating political party then coerces the reports for various media by limiting access to the 'people in power' as a means of picking only those reporters that will 'follow the party line', meaning favorable reviews and reporting or else you are out.
Hence, reporters fear of losing their 'contacts' and 'stories' drives them to support the fear of the power party, or risk losing their job, as so many of the reporters are just that, acting as a Pravda hard copy for the party in power.
The American propaganda machine (lead by the 24-hour news channels like Fox, MSNBC and CNN and backed up by other news outlets) dwarfs anything seen in Germany under Hitler or Russia under Stalin.
And, as others have said, its all about the bread (or rather Big Macs, Original Recipe and Coca-Cola) and the circuses (or rather Big Brother, Iron Man and Lady Gaga).
Someone needs to find a way to make politics as exciting as reality TV, that might get people to care more about how their country is run...
the Democrats and Republicans are really the same party, they are both controlled/owned by the banking cartel & military/industrial complex, they only put on a ruse of being separate parties to deceive the US population of being two parties, elections are fake, this nation has been taken over by a corporate/fascist totalitarian kleptocracy made up of a banking cartel & a cabal of industrialists, and the mass media has everyone fooled in to thinking it is democratic
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
On the other hand, voting people into office that have already be corrupted by other influences, such as religion, money, power in the corporate world, etc. is an exceedingly bad idea, as they are sure to be corrupted by the position almost immediately.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A natural reaction can also be highly self-destructive. The "appropriateness" of such a reaction then depends on whether you want the human race to end or not.
So, no, while fear can be a natural reaction, it is never appropriate in a complex world. It always does tremendous damage, while never helping with the problem. I assume, of course, that the continued existence of the human race is desirable.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Woops, lets hope that is not the reason why the US wants to modernize its nuclear arsenal...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
" People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both. "
-Ben Franklin
just like religion uses the fear of death and hell to manipulate their congregation, the govt uses fear to manipulate the population, seems like there is always some ghost of an enemy wanting to take away our freedoms and kill us, and it seems the biggest enemy of our freedoms turns out is the US Govt themselves
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
cigarettes
Nucular!!!
assorted foods, depending on era - fats, carbs, red meat, alcohol, trans-fats, whatever the bugaboo-du-jour is today...
cell phones in cars
guns. since Kennedy was killed, guns have been one of our favorite bugaboos - doesn't matter how rare an event is (I'm looking at school shootings), it'll be used to panic parents (& kids).
And on and on. There's always something to be terrified of in the news, most of which, in the big picture, don't matter a hill of beans....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
About 50% of the population is wired to be afraid. It's a survival trait. They generally gravitate toward the republican party because of this orientation bias. Ask the media to stop pandering to fear to get click throughs.
Unfortunately not. There is no reward for feeding the starving poor - even though food is definitely what they want, and there are very many of them.
The reward comes from giving owners of capital what they want, but not "people" in general.
And by reward, I mean financial reward, ofc.
All motivation ultimately comes down to love, whether that's for people or shiny. If you love people, you can certainly gain reward from just being lovely to them.
That is called networking now.
It's not what you know, it is who you know...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not so bad once you get used to it. Lot's of people have them and say they're wonderful. They have to. All Hail Dear Leader
Chomsky? Manufacturing Consent?
I don't think so.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
America is 'the land of Opportunity", that is "I can succeed". It is a land of personal wealth and invidual accomplishments.
Don't get me wrong, there are MANY people that make a difference for a lot of other people. But the central premise is individual success as a primary objective. And Greed, at some minor or maor level, is a motivator to succeed personally.
So you've succeeded, and your greed helped. Now you have success, and you want to keep it.
So you are afraid.
And you want to control the situation to keep what you got
And control others to keep them from getting what you got.
I'm sure Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) doesn't get her news from Fox, and she's plenty afraid. So while Fox likely amplifies the prompting for panic, I think its origin is somewhere else.
And it always has. Just now its far stronger and targeted.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think we need to be careful about the distinction between "thinking differently from me" and "corrupted".
As long as one is totes open about insane religious affiliation / desire to worship corporate masters, they're all welcome to run for office on these stands. For example, the Westboro baptist church are lots of horrible things, but I wouldn't call them "corrupt" - they're almost victims of their own too-good interpretation of the OT. Ofc lots of puritan types are anything but pure, and that's certainly corruption.
By asking a question like "Where Does America's Fear Come From" your audience will presuppose that fear is the cause. But is that really it? I don't think the average American is afraid of terrorists. Things like anger, self-righteousness, and the military-industrial complex are more likely explanations. The "fear of terrorism" thing is an after-the-fact justification. Those in power need justification, and 9/11 fell right into their hands. I suspect that it is going to be a lot tougher to milk that for another decade. But the damage is already done, the power grab successful.
The article opens by citing a fictional character. These TV show characters are not indicative of actual Americans. They are overdone stereotypes. Let us not look at the caricatures to understand ourselves. The average American is, however, gullible and apathetic. That is why America was unable to stop the power grab.
I've been poor (but I was not), and I've been what I thought was rich. This is what I'd say about fear.
To answer this question one source of inspiration could be high stakes investment psychology. The more you have the more you fear to lose. The more you fear, the more you fear to lose. Arrogance blinds us to reality.
Fear of an easy life?
It's tough at the top.
So.... dream of a higher top.
A blog I run for the wealth
From experience I can tell you: Nobody ever got rich by "hard work". Getting rich is mostly doing the right thing at the right time and having an incredible dose of luck. Hard work has little, if anything, to do with it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It rewards profitability. Whether you actually work for it is purely optional.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Good post - indeed, the most important ingredient for success under capitalism is to already have success!
But it's still true that you'll be best rewarded for the most cunning investments - assuming you have any money to invest. Of the remainder, those who are most marketable will be able to earn an initial amount to invest. It's the old "10 starving dogs in a cage with enough food for 5" thing, though - one will take half the food, 2 will eat reasonably, a couple more will win a few scraps, and the other 5 will starve.
You may think you are joking but much of the fear is indeed spread through the media and news channels.
Sometimes I joke that the only reason to watch the news any more is "so I know what I am supposed to be afraid of today."
Try reading between the lines of any newscast. It always goes beyond just reporting facts abut the news. Note the condescending tone in the reporters voice as they talk about some group of people. Notice how they only show bystander interviews that represent their views, such as a parent parroting "You can't be to safe!" rather than the one that says "lets not go overboard worrying about this". Ask yourself if there could be another side to the story, and notice that it is usually missing or poorly represented. Listen carefully as the anchor injects brief commentary at the close of the story such as "very scary stuff". And for broadcast news (such as noon or 5:00pm news on the major networks) flip between the channels and notice that they usually have the exact same stories even when there are no major events going on.
Realize that the vast majority of people don't have time to think about what they hear, even in the off chance they know how to use critical thinking, and you should easily see how this adds up to ladling out fear and misinformation to the masses.
Who are these cowards ? I sure don't know any. Do they exist, or are they a convenient fiction cooked up by politicians and government contractors?
Here's an analogy /.'ers can understand: Nobody Ever Got Fired For Buying IBM.
This is why legislators and "leaders" at all level make the choices they do. They fear losing their jobs and their power, so they pander to the anxieties of those they work for and will rely on any convenient rationale for their actions. They build their culture on this fear and cannot challenge it or conquer it.
We do have nothing to fear but fear itself, because that is what drives us politically.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
A series of three documentaries about the use of fear for political gain
"Narrator: In the past, politicians promised to create a better world. They had different ways of achieving this, but their power and authority came from the optimistic visions they offered their people. Those dreams failed and today people have lost faith in ideologies. Increasingly, politicians are seen simply as managers of public life, but now they have discovered a new role that restores their power and authority. Instead of delivering dreams, politicians now promise to protect us: from nightmares. They say that they will rescue us from dreadful dangers that we cannot see and do not understand. And the greatest danger of all is international terrorism, a powerful and sinister network with sleeper cells in countries across the world, a threat that needs to be fought by a War on Terror.
But much of this threat is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It's a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media. This is a series of films about how and why that fantasy was created, and who it benefits. At the heart of the story are two groups: the American neo-conservatives and the radical Islamists. Both were idealists who were born out of the failure of the liberal dream to build a better world, and both had a very similar explanation of what caused that failure.
These two groups have changed the world, but not in the way that either intended. Together, they created today's nightmare vision of a secret organized evil that threatens the world, a fantasy that politicians then found restored their power and authority in a disillusioned age. And those with the darkest fears became the most powerful."
(I'm from Europe, politicians never let facts and figures get in the way of ideology).
Nevertheless, you don't deny that European politicians don't let the same facts and figures get in the way of their ideology, do you?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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.
If that were true, then presumably "Europe"--rather a broad concept, isn't it?--should be "better" than the US. But in what way is it? Much worse unemployment, to name only one thing, and on the other hand major efforts by the rulers to do away with the social welfare state that's been in place since the end of World War II.
...Or is anyone else fearful of America continuing on as it's been for the last 12 years? Hell man, bring on the change. it all comes down to local police enforcing the laws. In this way, it's clearly the blind people that aren't thinking, and enforcing ridiculousness that is creating what we are calling 'fear'.
The other day I pulled up to a line of cars that were all waiting behind this one asshole that was at the stop sign. It's a 4-way stop, and at a very relaxed intersection, so to have a line of cars indicated that they had already been there a long time. I was so far back that I couldn't see if the guy in the car was dead, or having car trouble, and all the other people were just waiting. I waited for a full minute, and the guy never moved, so I pulled around everyone. Well, there was a policeman right behind me. That mother fucker pulled me over for illegally passing over a double-yellow line. $180 ticket I have to pay now, and there was no alternative other than waiting indefinitely for the guy in the front to go (this was per the cop).
Honestly I can't care less about fear. It's stupidity that I'm concerned about. When all logic that has been generated by evolution seems to be disregarded, in the name of ideals local agendas, there's a need to get together and discuss/resolve, however Americans are so divided. And I think that is what everyone else is concerned about too, maybe I'm wrong.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
No country in history ever feared anything. But its leaders do. And the leaders of the US do fear. Mostly, they fear their own population.
The citizens of the US are used to a VERY high standard of living. Food, water, shelter were not really high up on the worries totem-pole of the average US citizen. Look back at the 80s and 90s when our living standard reached its peak. Our worries were far, far away from the basic needs.
We lived this life at the expense of a lot of other areas of the planet. Sure, we donated to starving children and sang "We are the world", but face it, we gave because, hell, it didn't cut into our way of living. And it made us feel good (another thing that was quite up there with our "needs", which alone should tell you about how much we really "needed"). The idea that we'd need to cut back our living standards never crossed our minds. This isn't now any kind of accusation that we should have done it, it is simply to state the fact that we're used to our standard of living and that we don't even want to consider lowering it.
Now, the 90s are over and the bubble of the millenium burst, and now we face stiff competition in the market. China woke up and noticed that it has a HUGE worker potential that not only can produce like there's no tomorrow, but that is also not used to as high a living standard as we are. Of course, companies decide to move away. Well, DUH. Competing with China in the dumping wage department, though, is not really an option for a country like the US, for many reasons. Not that it wasn't tried, of course, and also reliably our politicians didn't do anything about it until it's too late now (and they still don't, not that it could revert anything). Dumping wages in the US, like we get to see now, have the predictable effect that we also face now: Less money for the "average Joe" to spend.
The US, though, has an economy that relies heavily on services. Over 3/4 of the people and the GDP were in services. Now, services is the first area people cut back when money gets tight. Well, be honest, if you have money to buy food or get a haircut, which one is it going to be? And if you can't pay your rent that dripping faucet isn't as big a problem, so it keeps dripping because the money goes to your landlord.
This has a downward spiral effect. Fewer people having money to spend on services, so service providers have to shut down, creating more unemployed people, leading to fewer people having money to spend on services.
This little detour across the US economy should illustrate my next point: Our standard of living is in free fall. Our standard of living also included that we're able to hire people for certain jobs that we don't want to do or that we think we cannot do "perfectly". The job of the wedding planner comes to mind as a service that simply can only exist in a society that has an incredible surplus of resources. How many people can still afford that? Hell, how many can afford a "decent" wedding? Or funeral?
This, of course, leads to unrest. People are unhappy about that situation. And that is dangerous to those in power. Because to them, the situation is still beneficial.
This is pretty much all the US, or rather, those in power in the US, have to fear right now: Their own population. Or rather, individuals that might form a focal point as a leader of an uprising. Finding and eliminating those leaders is paramount now. Of course, elimination currently does not mean killing, at least not yet. Right now the weapon of choice is disinformation, slander and destroying credibility. I.e. the usual first line remedy against dissent. Right now, this usually still suffices.
But to do this, you have to be able to first of all FIND them, and find them early enough that they cannot form a group of people who support and follow them. The very last thing you need as a government is that your opposition can gain momentum. And for that, well, you have to be able to identify people who could be such focal point material early.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Fear sells. It isn't just the government that uses it. Spend an afternoon listening to Alex Jones or Talk Radio in general. Watch what people are watching on TV and the movies. Zombie and horror movies are big time right now. Look at what everyone is being told in church, "it's the End Times."
It's all just capitalism in action. If fear makes people part with their money, then someone is going to be dishing out the fear.
I don't know what the exact solution is, but in capitalism, when the market dries up, the sellers move on to different markets.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
I think that the fear at the top has come from the realisation that the way the US works is unsustainable in the long term. I am thinking primarily of the debt-based economy that is based on economic growth to function, the large dependence on oil and the effects of global warming becoming more apparent.
These are smart people. They understand that change from post-WWII model is inevitable and that this change may not come easy.
There is a large probability of future social unrest, riots and organised armed resistance against the ruling caste, so they do what they think is necessary for them to retain control of the country in the future. This is what I think is the real reason behind the de-democratisation of USA.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Obama has done more to destroy democracy in 5 years, than all the other presidents combined.
Lol Trust me Bush did more damage in one year than the whole of the current presidents will ever do.
President Bush had little effect on democracy in the US, and President Obama not much more (it was mainly his supporters in the IRS that engaged in political oppression). As to the rest of your post, it's like reading a left wing satire.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
If the wolf befriends you, he'll wait till you're good and dead before eating you, and will feel a little bad about doing it.
That fucking mini-panther will start gnawing on your as soon as it THINKS you can't stop it. You won't be dead before you're own cat will start eating your ass.
Evil creatures, people who own them really don't understand that the cat is the smartest animal in the home.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well we can take the partisanship out of it if you wish? All of the stuff Obama plays with could have been stopped at any time while he was president, and yet it still continues and he still voted for the extension of the Patriot Act when he was a senator, so I don't think politics has anything to do with the two political parties who are both statists and just want to control us as much as possible. Indeed, for myself, I call Bush Herr Bush and Obama Herr Obama because they are both fascists of different stripes that get off on telling others what they can and can not do. While bush liked to tell us that we have the right to get groped in airports and have a right to treat people like cattle in Guatanamo Bay, we have Obama busy telling us what we can and can not eat, what kinds of power we can use to generate electricity, and so on and so forth. Its seeming more and more like every politician is just trying to trump the previous idiot/dumbass and take away even more of our freedoms while the people shout out about how their political party is so much better....yea partisan politics has sure solved these issues well.
Of course, both political parties are just being fascists for "our own good" and so will tell us what we can eat, what healthcare we can have, and what we can say via the Patriot Act. There is no freedom party in this country because they are all after their own fascist little power trips and they all want to go to war for "our own good" while we the people get shafted with politicians who use our own money to shaft us and turn around and send our young men to die on their pointless little wars. Politics is dead in the US right now if you ask me, and fascism is alive and kicking with the NSA still recording our phone calls for our own protection. We still live in a free country (sort of) but that has sure changed in the last 15 years when we used to have so many more freedoms. I too wonder where this all ends.
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
Read it, think about it, and _then_ dare to call it "troll" again. It is very far from your simplistic views.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Equalized in terms of that all people are worth the same - Yes.
Equalized in terms of that all people gets the same amount of wealth - No.
Life is a long struggle, but making it so everyone have the same opportunities to start with is something we should strive for.
Two things in life that most people want and need.. Education and healthcare... Make those two free for everyone and the world would be come a much more interesting and safe place..
People like you are why the fucknuts get elected who go out of their way to pass crap like the Patriot Act, and to invade other countries for no reason.
Afghanistan was invaded for refusing to dismantle al Qaida and turn over the demanded leaders after al Qaida attacked the US on 9/11. NATO stood behind the US in its self-defense. It is the only time the self-defense provision of the NATO treaty has ever been used in war.
Iraq was invaded because Saddam had his government act as if it had WMD to fool the Iranians because he thought there was no way that the US and UN would act forcefully to his apparent defiance. He was mistaken.
Nobody went out of their way to pass the Patriot Act, it was a response to the genuine internal security threat posed by al Qaida. And just to be clear, it was passed by Congress. That is the same Congress that prior to that had busied itself with milk price supports, farm policy, taxes, labor law, government budgets, and every other issue it works on.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
European hypocrisy has hit new heights. The Europeans practically invented spying on allies and the British had pretty much developed it into an art form by the start of WW1. The British were known for an active foreign policy in which they manipulated their allies into actions that fit their policy goals. There is some thought that in the post WW1 period they maneuvered the international scene so as to break up the budding alliance between the US and the Japanese. This was done to because the combined navies would prove too much a challenge to British power at sea. The French are just as bad as they have a tendency to break into the hotel rooms of their allies diplomats and search them. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks.".
There is fear and paranoia in Europe, too.
In the US, we have this phobia of The Terrorists which is completely unfounded in the way the world actually works. But in Europe, it's GMO's and (in Germany) nuclear power.
as everyone else's- ignorance. Ignorance scares the crap out of me.
Seriously though, America is fascist, for the traditional European definition of fascism
America has never equaled or even been close to equaling the fascists of Europe despite the ambitions of progressives.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Feinstein is a politician. The only thing they're afraid of is not getting reelected.
I agree that the fascists of mid-C20 Europe did a better job of implementing fascism, though I'm not sure what you mean about "progressives". Here, a progressive person is someone who wants progress - is that used as newspeak in the US?
Well, looking at it from the other end of the marble, it's not that much different.
But I think the differences in the health system might even shed some light on the question. In Europe, like with you, we pay for health care with our taxes. And not a small portion of my paycheck goes to our health system every month. I certainly pay more than I will probably ever get out. That's ok, though. It not only gives me security, but it also gives me the good feeling that someone else who is less fortunate than me and riddled with some malady can get the treatment he needs despite not being able to afford it. And this is the general sentiment towards the whole deal here.
Despite everything that happened lately, the feeling of solidarity between the people, at least within a country, is still present. Even the support for other countries in the Union that need it right now is fairly high, especially if you consider that very few have anything to do with Greece. Interestingly, when people complain about it, it's not that they complain about us having to pay for the Greek unemployment or the Greek retirement (which we don't, btw, but it would be nice if we did!), the complaint is about propping up the failing banks of Greece.
And that's, IMO, the big difference. We do not see our neighbor as our competitor, we see them as our partner. We don't relish in his plight, we help him out of it. And in turn we do kinda expect him to do the same, within reason, of course, but also with some justification. I don't fear any unemployed guy who needs money to hit me over the head for the 20 bucks in my wallet. Not only because our social service keeps him afloat, fed and sheltered, but also because I know that he doesn't see me as the reason for his misery.
I've had a very different feeling in the US. Especially as soon as you leave the extremely rural areas, the distrust between people gets to a really unhealthy level.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm no fan of the PATRIOT Act nor of the Republican Party, but I do think it needs to be pointed out that the PATRIOT Act was passed 98-1 in the Senate (Senator Russ Feingold (D Wisconsin) was the only senator who voted against it). Every other Democrat in the Senate voted for the Act. In 2006 when the Act was up for renewal, little changed as it was renewed 89-10, albeit with 9 of the 10 nays being from Democrats. The yeas in the Senate reads like a who's-who of the Democrat Party: Harry Reid (D NV) and Hillary Clinton (D NY) voted in favor both times; Obama also voted Yea when he was in the Senate in 2006. It passed the House easily too, 357-66 (Nancy Pelosi was a Yea in 2001) and 280-138 in 2006. The opposition in the House was largely, but not entirely, from Democrats; however, D's voted for the bill more than 2-1. In 2011, Pres. Obama signed a reauthorization bill into law. That reauthorization bill passed the House 250-153 and the Senate 72-23, again with Democrats in the Senate voting nearly 2-1 in favor. It may be noteworthy that Rand Paul (R KY) was a No vote.
You may make the case, but you won't win it when you argue in front of people whose lives and family became "collateral damage" because of the leader's "honest mistake".
How many WMD's were in Iraq?
I completely disagree. It becomes obvious immediately when looking from the outside in: Religion corrupts mental ability and personal morality. And I do not even mean that in the sense that it leads you to do bad things. What it does is make you follow whatever the religion mandates instead of looking at things carefully by yourself and making an individual, independent decision. The effect is that as soon as your particular brand of religion turns evil, you go right along with it.
Of course, when you are corrupted in this fashion, it is very hard to see for yourself as one thing religion reliability corrupts is the ability to have a critical view about religion. Sorry, but if you are religious, then you have a mental problem. How large that problem is depends on how strongly your views of the world and of others is determined by religion. There are people that are mentally infected by religion, but are mostly immune to the mental corruption it causes. There are even quite a few people that manage to shake off the illness, usually later in life when they have seen things that made them think. Unfortunately many do not manage to do that.
Of course, for the purpose of this discussion, quasi-religious "world views" like communism, capitalism, national socialism, etc. qualify as religions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That is the title of an excellent BBC series from 2004, that addresses this topic. The contention is that fear has replaced promises of a better tomorrow as the leverage point politicians exploit to persuade the masses. It is available on Netflix, here: http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Power-of-Nightmares/70035190?strkid=2097735933_4_0&strackid=4c753cb9c81ba8d_4_srl&trkid=222336
I didn't make any claim to winning the argument - I only claimed that I could make a good argument. WMD's in Iraq? Just about zero. Not exactly zero, but so damned close to it that we can call it zero.
Let me state that I would have to presume Bush and Cheney to be quite stupid to make the case for their honesty. I don't really believe that they are all that honest, just that I could play Devil's Advocate for them. Given a fair amount of stupidity, a moderate dose of incompetence, and some liberty to play with facts, yeah, I can make a pretty damned good case on their behalf. In fact, a lot of partisan allies have done exactly that, and won a lot of "hearts and souls" in the arena of public opinion.
"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
We pity you and we're sorry about what you have become.
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Playing Internet psychologist to diagnose religious people as mentally ill will probably not help your cause.
Yes, religion often displaces logical thought, but so do lots of things.
Interestingly, you should showed the original poster where our fear comes from: Irrational sets of lies from cowards.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
But I do agree with you that all the extrem-isms from capitalism to communism are quasi-religious, and carry most of the same problems as theistic religions. The US is full of capitalist-philosophers who are almost indistinguishable from Christian preachers in their abuse of argument.
The US is heading in 2 directions, a revolution of violence or a complete collapse coupled with fascism that will begin within the next 5 years.
It's been my opinion that the US is being dismantled, rights, culture, education, unity.
Massive injections of illegal aliens, multiple languages, central religion discredited, collapsed public school system, uneducated children with no culture (think about it what is your culture?) collapsed economy, continually putting the same kind of sociopathic people into the same positions of power.
I think the US is viewed as a problem to a unified one World government and so the termites were dispatched to our financial system, our media was corrupted and now America has no central culture (worth mentioning) and therefore no unity.
We are not "A people".
A public fractured and fighting against its self, economic collapse, well you get the picture.
If you look at history these violent revolutions create a lot of chaos, some things change but given enough time the new society will succumb to the same issues as the last one.
The only society that works long term is one in which all the participants are forever vigilant and active against the creep of stupidity.
That leaves the USA out.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The reason many US citizens follow orders is a belief or assumption that "The Natural Order is the Moral Order." That is the title of a view in which those who are already in power, and those who are physically strong, are perceived as having the moral authority over what is right and wrong. Those who believe this have a habit of thinking that person arrive in positions of power because they inherently deserved to arrive there. Subsequently, it is immoral to question their authority.
This mode of thinking is clearly explained in George Lakoff's book, Moral Politics, in which Lakoff clarifies the mistaken belief system of those who engage in it. His book is based upon, but does not cite, the theories from Scripts People Live and the related world-changing books on psychology.
In short, OP proposes that the average American citizen supports tyranny after making some conscious decision to assuage their own fear. This is mistaken. In fact, the average American supports tyranny after not realizing they alreay elected it last time, and otherwise without applying much thinking at all.
Finally, if there were an emotion I would attribute most of the lack of thinking to, that is not fear but hate. The same people who engage in the poor thinking described above are simply not fond of intelligent people, and would rather oppose them simply for the pleasure of thwarting any ideas thay are unable apprehend, which would be most new ideas.
Fear (the irrational type I believe this article is addressing) comes from your head, fear is mainly generated by ignorance, you don't understand what's going on so you're uncomfortable, the news exacerbates that feeling, so take a long hard look at modern media in the US.
I dream sometimes I can shut off ever TV and every movie, even stop the Internet, force people to deal with each other face to face.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
There are many rewards for feeding the starving poor. Norman Borlaug is probably the biggest winner in that respect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Monsanto catches a lot of crap nowadays, but is greatly interested in increasing agricultural production. Sadly most of the gains we've made recently in increasing crop production have gone to stupid things like ethanol production which would go away under capitalist circumstances, but I digress.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Yes but does this mean that in general people all over the World "don't have a grip" or is there something unique to the US.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The US is an anti-intellectual Hellmouth (if you've not read the Katz pieces, read them) full of brutal Superstitionist simpletons.
The simple are paranoid, and "fear of everything" feels like a wise precaution and feels like a Special Insight. Consider the folks who imagine chemtrails and other plots which supposedly seek to control them.
If you are worth controlling, you must have value! Fear of terror implies you are worth terrorising. Fear of Illuminati control implies you are worth controlling.
In NO popular fantasy (or religion, superstition works the same way) does the fantasist "not fucking matter" or is "safe from evil because Evil doesn't care to bother with trifles".
It is easy for the Right wing in the US to feed the egos of simpletons using fear, so they do. Bonus is the addiction to Scary News nets eyeballs and media profit. If you spend time chatting with Foxtards (Libtards also exist, I don't much respect anyone) they thrive on each delicious nugget of frightening news about the Negro Menace in the Oval Office, never mind that he is functionally Bush's Tan Sequel.
Superstition controls simpletons by making guilt (Alan Watts was correct) a virtue. The guilty don't just fear their Sky Fairy, but are conditioned to delicious guilty fear. That fear conditions them to lash out at perceived enemies so they didn't mind building a surveillance state to fend off Brown People. Now they perceive a Brown Person to control it (missing that a politician has no color) and they suddenly fear that too.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Diem was executed on Nov 2, 1963. Three weeks later, JFK was assassinated.
Everybody (outside the US) seemed to know about the US involvement in the coup and execution.
Why does this never come up in the endless theories about the JFK assassination?
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.
This partisanship has been bred into the system as a direct result of Gerrymandering. A large number of the House of Representatives have districts that have been so corrupted that a large majority of constituents vote one way or another. This makes their seats safe. But it also gives the politicians who win these seats a skewed view of what US voters want from their government and leads to extremism. A conservative politician in a wildly conservative district has no reason to negotiate with democrats. If he did, he would lose his seat. However, if the district was relatively random, there would be enough moderates that if the politician negotiated for a good cause, he would pick up the votes he lost on the conservative side from the moderates.
This will only be fixed when re-districting is fixed by randomizing the districts instead of allowing politicians to decide the boundaries.
In Europe, for example, facts and figures are checked and cross checked.
Right. That is why Greece was on its way to bankruptcy for about 30 years now and nobody noticed (publicly). At some point, Greece even fed the EU false numbers and nobody bothered to cross-check.
I suspect you have a very limited definition of 'Europe'.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Not everyone has or aspires to equal power.
You could also state that the pursuit of power corrupts.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well, people will sometimes say "A is bad, but not as bad as B" to defend their position.
Sometimes people reply to someone about something they didn't say, because they imagined that the person they are replying to didnt say what they meant, but somehow are sure they meant exactly what they imagined them to not have said.
The fact is that you arent grounded in reality. You are grounded in imagination influenced by dislike.
"His name was James Damore."
My hat off to you, sir! It is a very important thing to acknowledge that you enjoyed some benefits that other people lacked due to the mere reason of being born with less.
Evil creatures, people who own them really don't understand that the cat is the smartest animal in the home.
Perhaps, but I wish I had a dime for every time my dumbass has smacked herself in the face with her tail.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
No, progressive is used in the same way in the US, for pretty much the same political spectrum. The missing piece of the puzzle for you is that fascism was once understood as a progressive movement until political and practical considerations forced a demarcation.
You may find these items interesting even if much of the discussion is framed in an American context.
What Is a Progressive
A Nicer Form of Tyranny
Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Their arrogance...
...Gladstone wrote:
"We look forward to the time when the Power of Love
will replace the Love of Power.
"Then will our world know the blessings of peace."
Still the unachieved aspiration, because the geedy will always be with us. Our only salvation as a country, in my view, is to use the tax code to limit the ratio between the income of the poor, and the income of the rich. Getting rich is a reward for delivering value. It is not, however, a sanction to behave badly toward your fellow man. Only a society that lives by the maxim that those who gain the most, owe the most, can ever experience freedom for all.
Post the Great Depression, the USA has had a pretty good run as far as a high standard of living for its residents. That's true even with the numerous recessions that have occurred over the decades. Everybody in the middle class has two cars, color TV's and big houses. America is the land of plenty.
I think all this economic prosperity has given Americans the luxury to sit around and dream up things to be afraid of. The populace isn't concerned with thoughts of their next meal or hyperinflation. Instead they deal with their boredom by manufacturing fears. Some of these topics are legitimately worth being concerned about (though likely not to the degree we've obsessed over them as a nation). Others were simply paranoia:
1950's = Communists
1960's = hippies
1970's = industrial toxins in environment give us cancer
1980's = Communists again under Regan
1990's = crack epidemic / drug wars
2000's = terrorists
Hard work has little, if anything, to do with it.
I agree with part of your statement, and there are definitely those who more or less have money dropped into their lap by heredity or circumstance, but I do believe hard work is a major contributor to wealth in many if not most cases. The trick is to know where to apply that effort - there are people that break their back for their employer, but almost no one gets rich working for someone else. I suppose that falls under "doing the right thing at the right time", but I personally know two millionaires that started out as average Joes, and without the ridiculous amount of effort both put into their businesses, they'd still be writing code for someone else.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Indeed. The interesting thing is that here in Europe it took me far longer to see that, due to the absence of any kind of preacher, at least publicly visible ones. (There are some obvious crackpots, but that is basically it.)
As to my cause: I am not trying to convince people. Those without extreme believe conditions I do not need to convince, the others I cannot reach anyways. I have gotten confirmation from some US people that went from strongly religious to not so anymore (one said she now was "confused" ;-) that strong religion has the characteristics of a mental condition that creates some kind of mental "fog" and makes it hard to think about things. When you come out of the fog, a lot things are far less clear.
Incidentally, this is not my diagnosis either, it is the current state-of-the art in psychology. This may be one of the reasons more extremely religious factions are moving away from science. (There is a movement of neo-feminism away from science in Germany, because science says some things they do not want to hear. They even go so far as to claim Mathematics is a male construct, which cannot really be topped in stupidity-level...)
It has to be said though that there is no known cure for this condition except the individual itself "waking up". All cures that have been tried are worse than the disease and often only try to replace one dogma by a different one. That is of course completely unacceptable. The only thing that may be acceptable is to keep extremists out of public office, but that will be hard to do fairly, so attempting it may again make the issue worse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Present-day capitalism (the Anglo-Saxon model) is about short-term profits while the longest lasting nations and companies were run for long-term profit.
Profits made on for example high-frequency trading are not benefiting the economy and society, rather the contrary.
I prefer the long-term view.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And some people don't like the miniature panthers inside the house because the damn things are reservoirs for toxoplasmosis, which in humans causes severe birth defects and has been associated with high risk and criminal behaviors.
Keep the cats outside, where they belong. Especially if there is anyone living with you who might someday get pregnant.
Will
It's as simple as that, and I am an American myself. I sure as hell wasn't one of the masses crying for "protection" and for the government to infiltrate every aspect of every citizen's lives back when 9/11 happened. My exact thoughts at the time were something along the lines of, "shit happens. People will get over it." Only, apparently I was wrong about people "getting over" it; if they really did, we wouldn't have the dragnet of mass surveillance placed upon us by the federal government as we do now and find ourselves forced to figure out how to reclaim our 4th-Amendment rights (and others).
All 9/11 did was make the whole horde of pussies come out in droves and produce legislation to help drive the government into the ground and weaken its people. The worthless yellow journalism that is the mainstream news sure as hell didn't help much. If that is what the terrorists wanted (to erode the U.S. into a rogue, fascist government with powerless citizens), the Americans didn't put up much of a fight, because that is exactly what they got and with no trouble at all.
The way I see it, the real "terrorists" are my own government. Its citizens need to grow a pair and quit going apeshit over "terrorist attacks" and stand up for their rights and freedoms. It's ironic the way people sharply and strongly react to even just the word "terrorists"; why no talk of all the *wars* going on? Why does no one give a fuck about those, some of which the U.S. is directly a part of? How did people get such a strong hatred of terrorists that kill, and not their own government that does the same fucking thing *on their own behalf*? Looks like another win by the mainstream news corporations, which no doubt have their own political agendas.
This is a good question. I'm a progressive.
I get my news from: The Economist, RT, the BBC, The Guardian, Slashdot(stop laughing!), The Young Turks (They're usually a day late on flashy news, I mostly watch them for their opinions), The Daily Show, and from listening to NPR and my awesome local radio station. Oh, and several local newsrags that actually have decent local reporting.
Note that none of those is a major TV network. Fuck MSNBC and all the other acronyms I can't remember. None of them provide CONTEXT to the news. "Guy A said this, and Guy B said that." Fine. But it's kind of nice to say also that "95% of the population agrees with Guy A, and Guy B is a raving lunatic"... but they don't do that.
I don't know what other progressives watch. I try to be informed. My opinions are rather formed at this point though. I want things to get better. I want social equality. I want the government to tax us and use that money to provide basic infrastructure. I want my government to not be corrupt. I want a leash on corporate practices.... go make money, but lets not do anything Stupid, OK? I want strong (and simple, I'm a small business owner!) regulations. I want to feel like my representatives actually represent me in Congress. I want an end to stupid fucking wars and I want my tax dollars to not be wasted. I want simple and solid infrastructure that I can use to grow my business, that EVERYONE can use to grow themselves and their endeavors.
Oops, off on a tangent. Anyway. I'm progressive. I don't depend on MSNBC for news at all. Don't even watch it.
This article is a gigantic mess of exaggerated, distorted BS.
Among its very many flaws, is that it makes the mistake of equating actions of the government with the "will of the people"... suggesting that government is acting as a reflection of citizen fear. When in reality, the opposite is true: the government has been trying to rule the populace through fear, using the largely manufactured bugaboo of terrorism.
The article was obviously written by someone who (A) doesn't know much about America, or (B) doesn't like it. Or both.
As just one simple element of proof, consider: most Americans don't like much of what their government is doing, and are trying to stop it.
Read an interesting article last year that said a lot of the 'fear' was a direct consequence of the rise of ratings-driven for-profit cable news. The news channels needed to fill their airtime with something and fear-driven programming kept eyeballs on the TV sets. Fear of terrorists, fear of child abductors - Fear, fear, fear.
"funtioning democracy, multiple political parties"
If only America could be more like Italy!
"longer lifespans"
When I look at life expectancy tables I see plenty of European countries below the US.
"lower death at birth rates"
Ditto.
"happier people"
According to the World Happiness Report (http://unsdsn.org/files/2013/09/WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf) the U.S. beats out most European countries.
"decent mass public transportation"
A function of population density. Plenty of cities do mass transportation right in the US. I'd take the NYC subway system over any that I rode in Europe.
"none of them have started two wars in the last 20 years"
Weird, arbitrary date.
Back in the days when General Electric and General Motors were the dominant influence in Washington, fear was bad. Fear might keep Americans from buying a new car or a washing machine. So fear was a bad thing for politicians to use as a hammer. Now that the dominant influence in Washington is the military-industrial complex, fear is good. Fear keeps the public monies flowing to Halliburon and Raytheon and Lockheed. So fear is a good thing for politicians to run out.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
When i lived in Calgary (AB) I went to some small city in Montana and was asked about living in an igloo, and about our brutally cold winters. Since we drove and it was only a few hours i was always curious where this extra "cold" came from.
It sure wasn't warm in Montana, just like it freezing cold back in Calgary at the time.
Because I, like so many, understand, speak or even write German, English, French or Spanish and Italian and all these countries have their own free on air channels and websites I am much more likely to have a grasp of what is really happening.
Hell, every day I watch CNN, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg!
Opposition parties in European countries are different to the incumbent parties, nothing like the two half's of the same US political spectrum.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I keep seeing the same old pointless 2nd amendment arguments debated over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Enough already, OK? I'm not a gun owner and my politics are anything but conservative, but geez, "the right to bear arms" seems pretty damn clear to me. America is a country where citizens are allowed to have guns, always has been and always will be. I just wish liberals would recognize this truth and drop the issue for good. Gun control is the single most alienating issue I know of on the Left, it does nothing but make enemies of good folk who might otherwise be natural allies. Liberals need to just walk away from the whole arms thing and pretend it never existed. For whatever reason and regardless of the justification, guns in America are here to stay. Deal with it. And yes, I will say it plainly, the sad fact is that occasionally a Columbine or a Sandy Hook is bound to happen, this is the true price we pay for being an armed society of imperfect human beings. Too bad I've never once heard a politician from either side of the aisle get up and admit that or anything remotely like it. It's the truth, though, we should accept it and move on.
For the record, I thought hard about posting this as an AC, but in the end chose not to. Truth is nothing to be ashamed of.
Despotism != Dictatorship. All democracies fall into despotism, Ben Franklin was right.
1) Prosperous people have more to lose; therefore, more to fear. (not boredom) The wealthy fear any changes to the status quo despite their relatively high security; it's a historic trend which characterizes them. A middle class could be expected inherit a tiny bit of those traits. A proper Buddhist for example, is largely free from such fears for good reason (one could argue that the fears help motivate the accumulation of wealth.)
2) Post WW2 was the biggest rise in propaganda in history, social engineering was proven highly effective as the techniques from WW1 were so brilliantly demonstrated and refined before and during WW2. Commercialization of the science made it into an industry (it renamed itself "P.R.".) Fundamental concept tracing all the way (formally) back to Freud is the appeal to "base emotions" - FEAR being a huge one.
3) Culture of fear: Government, Industry... P.R. exploited FEAR for it's powerful influence over rational thought like never before on multiple fronts post WW2. This founded a culture of fear; and the benefactors having every motivation to promote and continue that state of fear to maintain their power/influence. Politically, this meant a never ending supply of ghosts but economically, it ALSO was employed with arguably greater negative impacts on society. Economics is a good one; our witch doctors (economists) shouldn't be upset and we can't address problems because it might destroy all the prosperity etc. (even if it has logical and historical backing, don't upset the "gods" continue to sacrifice virgins to the volcano.)
4) Ignorance breeds fear. Overconfidence breeds ignorance. Americans are embarrassingly overconfident and there are plenty of studies...
5) Distractions... again appeal to "base emotions" but also combined with the promotion selfishness (also a result of a socially engineered consumer society.) This greatly increases willful ignorance. Also, it adds to a feeling of powerlessness due to the lack of participation and observation. All that combined with the never ending list of pleasant escapes from reality.... One doesn't even need to try to make things unpleasant to get people to tune out; but they DO often resort to making issues unpleasant and more so today as things get worse to keep people retreating back to their escapes (which is a huge industry in itself, which doesn't have to advertize misery; that is free... and luckily for them it is a relative perspective for the human brain.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Europe is full of nationalist fiefdoms that can barely keep their shit together and are always on the verge of total warfare. I would hardly look there for 'enlightenment'. It is the threat of an overwhelming force from the outside that has kept the peace so far on that continent.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Ironically, Fdr delegitimized democracy with his extra-constitutional actions during the Depression and, especially, WWII.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Only recently they became a united nation, depending how you look at it in 1870 or even only after the end of WWI.
A lot of Italians thought the splintered nature of their country could only be united by a strong leader, a Duce.
The previous one, Fascist Mussolini, was at the end of WWII strung up by his own Italian partisans, not the Allies.
The most recent Duce Berlusconi found a lot of support throughout the country, both in the economically strong North and in the suffering south.
Not that his supporters didn't see or even like his ties with the Mafia but they felt that after the tumultuous 60's and 70's the country needed a unifying power and that's what he gave them.
Regretfully Berlusconi kept his ties with the Mafia and because he was afraid of the independent Italian Judiciary he had his parliament approve of Lex Berlusconi, laws primarily made to protect him and his corrupt friends.
Luckily Italy has an independent Judiciary and they have, against great odds, been able to stop his megalomaniac clinging to power.
Now we have to see if Italy can muster a new coalition government that's supported by the people and works for the people. Time has gone by, the Italians start to appreciate what good government has done to places in Northern Europe and they are still one of the large economies.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
They fear what is coming. Resources are running out. Within the next 100 years you are going to see upheaval the world has never seen, due to the size of the world population and it's reliance on oil. As that runs out, food production will be disrupted and with that comes a desperate populace and that is dangerous. Along with Climate Change, you will see nations go to war over what is left and it's inevitable it will eventually go nuclear. The people at the top see this, know this and in their misguided attempts, are trying to setup a control apparatus to protect themselves and hope they can contain things to enjoy the level of comfort they have achieved for themselves. Be glad you're living now, because the next 100 years are going to be bleak and dark. Of course if we ever get the fusion thing to work, we may be able to avert this, but with what we've done to the environment and how the oceans are quickly becoming dead zones, I think the future shown in the movie "Soylent Green" is going to more of guide(referring to environment not really the eating of people) than a work of fiction.
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
While there is no obvious personality cult, i would argue based on legislative actions of usa (and usa actions outside domestic and international law) that usa already lives in a functional dictatorship
After fully reading the article, I do not think it is fear that motivates the current Administration.
It is Power that seems to motivate them. The NSA does what it does because it can. The administration supports, funds, and uses all the surveillance knowledge, even if not for anything else other than economic espionage and advantage, because it can. It isn't fear as a motivator, it's maniacal surveillance power.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Read "Bin Laden - The Man Who Declared War on America. This was published in 1999, before 9/11, and as a result is a reasonably hype-free biography. It quotes bin Laden during the years he was building up his organization.
I'm doing this from memory, but one of the key points bin Laden made to his followers was that, to defeat the United States, it had to be weakened first. He was writing this in the 1990s. (Situation in the 1990s: USSR was history, previous US war was four days of total victory over Iraq in Kuwait, balanced budget in US, US economically dominant in world, most of world wanted to be more like US.) He discusses how to weaken the US. Bin Laden specifically discusses how to make the US paranoid and more heavy-handed, and thus a less competent opponent and a less desirable alternative to Islam. That was the goal of his terror campaign.
Mission accomplished.
Agreed.
More likely: takes a lot of financing to build and maintain a constant global police-state surveillance system that monitors everyone, all the time, with apparent impunity.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
"PolitiFact is a project of the Tampa Bay Times to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters and editors from the Times fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups and rate them on our Truth-O-Meter"
http://www.politifact.com/
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
YOU ARE STANDING on a narrow ledge facing a smooth cliff. It's a long way down. You slide your left foot along the ledge and set your weight onto it.
But your heel rocks ever so slightly. There was a tiny ridge next to it, a feature not visible to the eye, and your heel has slipped off of it. The angle of your foot has changed in such a way that if you stood upright you'd be leaning away from the cliff.
Thoughts of the abyss are ever present and a dull wordless roar of panic is rising -- but your mind turns away from the roar and you allow yourself to become analytical. A surging notion flows towards your heel which needs to stretch and move (which way?? Is this the right way??) and it is done.
A moment of tenseness as the heel has settled and stiffened into its new angle. Your thoughts brush past the leg which trembles as if its muscles are being instructed to move also (no! The heel is enough!), eye and inner ear are waiting for confirmation that you are all right. The world is silent and still.
You are waiting for the simple and instinctive confirmation of balance. In a moment you will sense it, your mind will roll completely over in relief and grasp lofty topics, how far to go, is that a bird's nest, time to glance at the view.
But not at this moment.
You are still waiting for balance.
What if that moment does not arrive?
Woke up. Got out of bed. We arrive every day whether or not we travel. Sleep is nature's way of restoring and preserving mental balance. It is a journey of chemically induced stupor as mental pathways of context valley are visited and revisited, erosion becomes memory becomes self. Things that interest us, worry us, concern us or beg us to action arise during sleep; they may appear as vividly as if awake or deeply veiled in symbolism. Even boredom and a yearning for excitement has its turn as the sleeping mind free-associates in ways that may seem fantastic or absurd, they move in eccentric yet stable orbits bound by the gravitational center of self. There are many ways we recover balance during sleep that are too easily dismissed by the waking mind. You may be impulsive and decisive while awake, come to some reluctant but firm conclusion. If you have glossed over something important, unpleasant, it will return to you while asleep. Like the reality of the cliff, trapped within sleep there is no way to avoid it. So in sleep we face our fears and live through them to the end. Be it resolve to action, acceptance or curiosity in new directions -- sleep is necessary to meld impulsive actions into convictions.
Is America getting enough sleep?
Do we completely awaken?
Dragged a comb across my head. A greasy comb dipped in Wild Root Cream Oil. Muscle cars and cheap oil, Route 66, returned veterans, Crusader Rabbit, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Engelbert Humperdinck, the Stones, Iron Butterfly. Culture an ever changing whirlwind spanning yesterday and tomorrow; but the day after tomorrow is strange to those born last week. A great many of us carry memories of times so different from those of younger generations, an incredible divide has formed. Opinions may differ but stories matter also, and it is through stories we communicate. Despite the great many options available to connect with one another there is scarcely time these days for storytelling and story-listening. The young seek their fortunes and seek places, returning only for shared meals and brief small-talk. As the learning process has become cyclical and seasonal so has our interaction with those younger and older: as necessary, when necessary. Many today exist in a between-time where survival is of great importance and the here and now is a lonely place to be, distanced from family and friends of our youth. Our eldest vaguely recall a time when more stars were visible and there was leisure in the evening hours for big-talk. Some day they,
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Don't be such a fool. Everybody knows that no one ever does anything for any other reason than the money.
In my opinion, it already is an Orwellian police-state, as exposed by the whistle-blower(s).
In 50yrs or so, perhaps supporting facts will be declassified, or FOIA access-able, but more likely as history has taught: any evidence of wrongdoing will likely be destroyed.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Now I have no idea about the quality of facts of Fox vs. MSNBC
A very simple test:
Fox news lies: 82000 hits.
MSNBC lies: 25000 hits.
CNN lies: 58000 hits.
Fox must have improved as I did that test a few years back and there was a 10x ratio. Or the shills are fighting back.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The writer of the article seems more afraid than most Americans. I understand people's desire to delegitimize American democracy. It makes it hard to scare your own people if the Big Bad is a democracy run by reasonable people. No the Devil needs to be crazy, paranoid, ignorant, and corrupt. They need Americans to be oppressed, afraid, and waiting for Europe to save them.
because it imagines USA has democracy to begin with. You can define anything you want to be democracy, but it's best defined as Proportional Representation. Most people in the USA don't even know what that is. Plato : The penalty for not being involved in politics is to be ruled by your inferiors.
work in progress
[quote]"whereas the liberal biased media sources are so common..."[/quote]
Yeah. I suppose that's because reality has a "liberal bias"....
From what I can tell, nakedness drives American fear.
TV and ignorance. Ignorance allows people to be easily manipulated, because they don't know or don't question, and TV / mass media is the manipulator that encourages ignorance and sells fear. Turn on the tube and count the instances of violence in 4 hours, on a major channel. Count the number of shootings, explosions, bullets fired. Count the number of violent "others". Informed people who are not subject to a daily barrage of scare tactics are not easily led, so best to keep them dumb and scared, and they will vote against their own interests every time.
Republican leadership = Idiocracy
They may have been scared, but they helped defeat two separate enemy countries, at great cost in loss of life. Now they're running from a group that would fit into a small office building.
Where are the people like my Uncle Ken, who stood up to a continent full of enemies? Who climbed cliffs under fire at Pointe du Hoc to do so?
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Depends. When it comes to budget negotiations it is always a laugh, one side arguing we can save money by spending more, and the other that we will get better service and products by buying cheaper junk and firing the service personal. Usually though, they are in the same realm of reality just with different degrees of ideology induced reality distortion. American politicians and pundits does not as much seem to have different ideology and economic theories as much as they seem to live on different planets with different rules of reality than everybody else,
Still blaming Bush I see.
How did you get that from that post?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
With the exception of the waiters in Paris, you mean.
I live in Paris... the waiters are fine. The tourists are a pain in the ass.
I was a tourist in Paris. "Hello" / "bonjour", "please" / "sil vous plait" and "thank you" / "merci" was about all the french I needed. Waiters, clerks, cashiers, etc. were all friendly. Being courteous enough to start by saying hello in the local language and let them be the first to speak english seems to work exceptionally well across Europe, Paris included.
But it's still true that you'll be best rewarded for the most cunning investments - assuming you have any money to invest.
I don't think that anybody can invest money more cleverly than anybody else. John Bogle, the guy who started the Vanguard mutual fund, said that nobody can beat the market, or a market basket, and he had some pretty convincing arguments.
It's the old "10 starving dogs in a cage with enough food for 5" thing, though - one will take half the food, 2 will eat reasonably, a couple more will win a few scraps, and the other 5 will starve.
Several years ago, I looked up the distribution of family income in the Statistical Abstract of the United States, by fifths. It was roughly like this:
First fifth: $100,000/yr
Second fifth: $50,000/yr
Third fifth: $25,000/yr
Fourth fifth: $12,500/yr
Bottom fifth: $6,000/yr
Get it? The families in the top fifth earned as much income as everybody else below them, and so do the families in each fifth, until you reach the bottom.
That was about 1985. The inequality has gotten greater since. And the distribution of wealth is much more unequal.
Afghanistan was invaded because it was a trap.
Iraq was invaded because Saddam bit the hand that fed him.
There were other reasons, of course. The above are still true.
As for the Patriot Act, I'll agree it was a response - the wrong one. How many in Congress even read what they voted on?
Where is the U.S. heading?
Downward, of course. It is the only way one may go when being at the top. And it is a good reason to fear anything.
Note that this is not such a big deal, as going downward does not means collapsing, it just means leaving the first rank to another else.
"Faux news." As you type that I bet you have no idea that it's not even clever when spoken aloud. I'm guessing you don't even know how the word "faux" is pronounced....
I'm sure many consider FOX News to be "the foe".
But yeah, it's more of a visual pun than an audible one, so it requires an audience that reads and doesn't sneer with disdain (a supposedly rather French thing to do, by the way) at the mere thought of being familiar with a few of the more common French words and phrases.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
American ex-pat here, quite happy that his daughter is growing up in Oz rather than the US, on account of most of the factors you've named or alluded to.
She was born by Caesarian, BTW. Would've bankrupted us in the US, as my publisher had just gone under, leaving me with about $75K in unpaid invoices/contracts... and no health insurance. Good times.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The destruction of effective (read: well-funded) primary education. It is far easier to lead the majority of people by their noses when they have been intentionally deprived of critical thinking skills.
No, the version I am talking about is you probably can't afford to live here.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Doubt it, but I'm not exactly destitute.
Serious question: how close is your nearest slum?
okay in V1 we have of Xk fish say 40% of them going belly up in transit THIS IS A BAD THING
in V2 we have 4% of them going belly up and say 1.2% of them being Crab Food THIS IS A LOT BETTER
Now the trick is if the total of dead fish and eaten fish is less than the former dead fish total you might want a crab in the tanks
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Latin America style, the slums are mixed in to the "high class" areas. They end up being our maids and security guards, gardeners, waiters and mechanics. Seriously, a $20 chicken breast for lunch is the norm at a restaurant - that's just for the main course. Does not include drinks or 13% tax, nor 10% gratuity. $50 if you want steak. A pizza from Pizza Hut will cost you $26, delivered. A 2 litre bottle of Coke will cost you $3 at the supermarket, more at the convenience store. A Honda Accord will set you back $50k. Land prices are crazy even in the suburbs, and people are now building vertically to offset the cost. There are 10 and 20 storey buildings everywhere when before the tallest building in the country was 12 floors.
We have all the name brands, all the big chains. I moved here 30 years ago and there was nothing. If you wanted something, you had to import it yourself. Now, I only use Amazon and order stuff from the states because I'm too lazy to go shop for stuff, but I can find anything I want. I have to pay 50% tax on everything I import - but then again so does everyone else.
Yeah, the growth has been unbelievable, and it's not cheap to live here anymore. 20 years ago I could go into one of the few "good" restaurants and have a nice steak and a beer for about 8 hours' worth of local minimum wage (maybe $5, just over an hour of minimum wage in the US at the time). Now the same meal will cost me 35 hours' of the local minimum wage - about 7 hours' minimum wage ($50) in the US. But there are restaurants everywhere.
Certainly not the foundation of an economic thesis, but I'm not joking when I say Latin America has boomed, and it's now expensive to live here.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
That's third world style boom: little enclaves of western style affluence. And the prices would be familiar (or cheap!) to anyone living in the south-east of England.
"If you wish to keep slaves, you must have all kinds of guards. The cheapest way to have guards is to have the slaves pay taxes to finance their own guards. To fool the slaves, you tell them that they are not slaves and that they have Freedom. You tell them they need Law and Order to protect them against bad slaves. Then you tell them to elect a Government. Give them Freedom to vote and they will vote for their own guards and pay their salary. They will then believe they are Free persons. Then give them money to earn, count and spend and they will be too busy to notice the slavery they are in." --Alexander Warbucks
Casteism
First, there's the "if we stop now, and they find out we were doing it, won't it look like we realized we were wrong and hurt our ability to start again?"
Second, there's the "we have to look like we're doing things to stop terrorists, even when we're not".
Third, there's the "We make a living at this, so if we stop, we're out of a job".
Fourth, there's the "politicians find it expedient for us to continue.
Fifth, there's the "every other country is doing it".
Shall I continue?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
In all honesty, the "taxes-vs.-deficit spending debate" has been going on since at least the 1980 election, with both parties changing sides several times (sometimes more than once in the same year). It's just gotten nastier with the introduction of the Teabaggers.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I'm not saying that the sides actually managed to agree, or that people weren't arguing the point. What I'm saying is that ordinary people really couldn't give two shits about it. The late 90s boom ended it, and it didn't really come to the fore until Boehnor won the Speakership in 2010. Deficits vs. taxes was one of those things pinheads in DC argue about, not something that directly affected their lives.
That's what happens in most of NATO to most issues. The Head of Government proposes something, it goes to the Legislature, there's a debate people pay attention to, and there's a vote in the Legislature. 99% of the time the government wins and everyone outside the capital goes back to ignoring the debate. 1% of the time the government loses, and the debate becomes a central issue in an election campaign that lasts a couple months.
If European parties had the exact same debate every day for four years they'd probably talk about their basic factual disagreements a lot more. At some point both sides run out of other arguments, so your choices are a) shut up and b) question the other guy's facts.
But that means no longer being "the best" and that would be so sad when you believe you are the best. Let's refer that as the american dream.
Time to wake up. The reality is that about 6.5billion people don't see the US as the best for some time now.
Like you say. You can have a very good life without being the best.
Privacy is terrorism.
They're from Lake Wobegon.
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
The piece missing is where the radical conservatives in this country have tried to alter the meaning of the understanding of fascism to mean progressive or leftist. Fascism is a marriage of business and the government at the expense of the populace, usually done with fervent nationalism or religious asides, with a very strong dose of populism thrown in.... think the current GOP/Tea Party in the US. Socialism, the actual "left," is the elimination of private ownership, business, production, and resource extraction, with all those resources being "for the group;" think Jesus and his disciples (who Marx drew his "from each to their ability, to each their need" concept).
For the past few decades US conservatives have been trying to make both ends of the spectrum out to be solely the "left," so they don't have to come to grips with what the radical right really is. They've used the word "socialism" so often, and so inaccurately, than now they need a new derogatory name calling, hence why you now see conservative "sources" try to associate fascism with the left.
A simple run down of the traits of fascism shows where it lies in today's politics, and who is exhibiting those traits; and you don't need propaganda trying to re-write reality to conform to your precious world view to do that.... just a little intellectual honesty.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's