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Sergio Stefanuto
Joined: 14 May 2009
Location: UK
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 Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 4:51 am Post subject: |
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| Zackback wrote: |
| wishfullthinkng wrote: |
one of the simple ideas that america was founded on was the separation of church and state.
however they can't even seem to do something as simple as that which really illuminates how everything else is run. |
A reason why America is in the decline it is. Lies like this.
The Declaration of Independence says our rights come from the Creator. It is a "self-evident" truth. |
No belief could be more insane and more irrational than that of belief in rights.
The proposition that one has "rights" which come from "the creator" is all the more risible.
All this balderdash about rights is nothing but a smoke sceen for the selfish parasitism of hoi polloi. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 5:07 am Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
This is how things have always been in this country.
The Cold War was an exception. Americans faced the threat of sudden nuclear annihilation and the result was a sense of shared sacrifice and commitment as well as civility of discourse. Vietnam destroyed that, but it would resume, and last well into the Clinton era.
But once SCOTUS descended and tampered with the election of 2000, everything started to go out of control. We've reached a status quo that was common during the 19th Century and early 20th Century. |
Kuros is (partly) right, as he often is. American politics have usually (maybe always) been highly contentious.
Adams was a British lackey ready to turn the country over to our former masters and Jefferson was a Jacobin ready to turn the country over to the Robespierre types. Same same. Correctly viewed, American politics should be viewed as perpetual civil war without guns and guillotines.
Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan brought to power governing coalitions that dominated for decades. Neither coalition completely stiffled dissent, but the majority was solid enough that dissent was blocked from power for the most part...until it wasn't.
The Great Depression ended the Gilded Age governance of pro-business only interests. I agree that Vietnam destroyed FDR's governing coaltion. Reagan put together Southern conservatives and business in a new governing coalition. It was probably destroyed by the Great Recession of 2008. What we see now is the hysteria of a coalition that came close to 'permanent' control seeing their hold on power slipping away.
In my view, we are in a pre-civil war phase, like the 1850's where the Slave Power came close to asserting final control of the federal government. Today we see the right-wing dream of handing over power to industry panicking because they may not be able to realize their dream of destroying the only other center of power--the federal government.
In any democratic society, the basic argument has to be between where the power will lie...in the moneyed class or the moderately comfortable class. (No one cares much about the class with no money.)
To answer the OP, what has happened to America? We are in between governing philosophies. Either we can hand power back to Lincoln's corporations which we have been doing for 30 years or we can shift back toward FDR's system of spreading the wealth around. The public has not decided. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 5:22 am Post subject: |
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A reason why America is in the decline it is. Lies like this.
The Declaration of Independence says our rights come from the Creator. It is a "self-evident" truth. |
Phooey! Nonsense! Fiddlesticks!
You have every right to believe in an invisible friend who lives up in the clouds. I don't care. But if you want to have a serious discussion, you need to have another reason for your assertion. Why? The invisible fairy that lives in an empty shoe box in the back of my closet and speaks only to me says something very different from you.
| Quote: |
| All this balderdash about rights is nothing but a smoke sceen for the selfish parasitism of hoi polloi. |
This is a Rovian attack. Corporatists are the epitome of selfish parasitism. You really should be honest. You are pushing the line that the hoi polloi should be serfs, serving their social masters, pulling their forelocks when our social superiors ride by. |
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johnnyenglishteacher2
Joined: 03 Dec 2010
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 5:51 am Post subject: |
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(I've only spent 2 weeks of my life in the States, so please take this with a pinch of salt.)
It appears to me that there is a massive cultural divide in the USA which roughly follows geographical lines - NW, NE and Californian liberals against a mainly conservative South and Central. Both sides really seem to hate each other with quite a passion.
So why not just get a divorce and go your separate ways? Would there be any popular support for this in the USA? I know that no major political movements advocate this, but how would your average American feel? |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 7:35 am Post subject: |
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| johnnyenglishteacher2 wrote: |
(I've only spent 2 weeks of my life in the States, so please take this with a pinch of salt.)
It appears to me that there is a massive cultural divide in the USA which roughly follows geographical lines - NW, NE and Californian liberals against a mainly conservative South and Central. Both sides really seem to hate each other with quite a passion.
So why not just get a divorce and go your separate ways? Would there be any popular support for this in the USA? I know that no major political movements advocate this, but how would your average American feel? |
This is a temporary thing. We always argue, but eventually we arrive at a settlement (that lasts 50 years or so), then we start back in again.
Divorce, separate ways? That was tried in 1861 and led to the deaths of 600,000 people. Not an attractive solution, but may happen again. (I think it might.)
The first civil war had a regional basis that the next one won't have. If we do it again, it will be ideological without a regional component. The blood will be knee deep everywhere. Think Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Either way, you may want to brush up on your Chinese characters. |
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Zackback
Joined: 05 Nov 2010
Location: Kyungbuk
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:10 pm Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| Quote: |
A reason why America is in the decline it is. Lies like this.
The Declaration of Independence says our rights come from the Creator. It is a "self-evident" truth. |
Phooey! Nonsense! Fiddlesticks!
You have every right to believe in an invisible friend who lives up in the clouds. I don't care. But if you want to have a serious discussion, you need to have another reason for your assertion. Why? The invisible fairy that lives in an empty shoe box in the back of my closet and speaks only to me says something very different from you.
| Quote: |
| All this balderdash about rights is nothing but a smoke sceen for the selfish parasitism of hoi polloi. |
This is a Rovian attack. Corporatists are the epitome of selfish parasitism. You really should be honest. You are pushing the line that the hoi polloi should be serfs, serving their social masters, pulling their forelocks when our social superiors ride by. |
I am citing the Declaration of Independence. Rights don't come from the government or anyone/anything else. The first Americans ("Americans" are the subject of this thread) knew they came from the Creator. |
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Adventurer
Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 5:16 pm Post subject: |
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| visitorq wrote: |
| Adventurer wrote: |
| It has been like this in America to some degree for a long time. It's not unusual, but it has gotten worse. There have been fluctuations in American history. Don't forget that Roosevelt was called a Jew and a socialist, and Abraham Lincoln was accused of being a Catholic. However, for a while there was more uniformity in America and an acceptance of the New Deal, and not this horrible backlash by religious extremists. The cultural extremists are older, and they are going to go out of fashion. That's my hope. |
Roosevelt was a cultural extremist. He was Stalin in the White House. Lincoln (the big railroad lawyer) was the first fascist/corporatist president. Some of the presidents we are taught to most revere were often the worst. |
How was Roosevelt a cultural extremist, and the New Deal helped create a large middle class that did not exist. He was labeled as a traitor to his class. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:04 pm Post subject: |
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I believe one of the things wrong with America is that the talking heads in the media are committed to discussing unreal, irrelevant issues and to increasingly bizarre and wearisome debating techniques. This is not an accident, nor is it because, as many believe, that that is what the public wants.
The effect of a sick media is to confuse people, anger them, and get them enormously frustrated because they are not getting information, there are real and ever-more urgent problems, and there is never a full and frank discussion of solutions.
It's no accident that the media is the way it is. It's become the way it is in America by an evolution in response to constant pressure to conform to a certain outlook, pressure that comes not from the ratings as is commonly supposed, but both from the owners of the media itself and the corporate owners who advertise on it. That is, the market to which the media responds is not the public but the corporate advertisers, since they are the ones buying the audiences that are its product.
True, media talking heads come from the grassroots culture, but there is a filtering process that ensures only the right type of people get to the top. They have to know how to appeal to their audiences as well as conform to the demands of advertisers, but, within a relatively short period of time, the media, as a producer of culture, can change the expectations of audiences and, pretty soon, the culture itself. What doesn't change are the underlying reasons for the existence of the media in the first place, which are twofold: as a public forum for entertainment and as a public forum for the dissemination of information and debate. The latter has become almost a total farce, leaving our needs for information and real debate unmet.
So if Americans have become embittered and polarized these may be some of the reasons why: frustration with not getting solutions to real problems, frustration with the media, and reflection of the twisted, polarized, unreal debates in the media itself.
Why have Americans become so angry? There's a whole industry devoted to making them angry! |
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Steelrails
Joined: 12 Mar 2009
Location: Earth, Solar System
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Ya-ta Boy wrote: |
| johnnyenglishteacher2 wrote: |
(I've only spent 2 weeks of my life in the States, so please take this with a pinch of salt.)
It appears to me that there is a massive cultural divide in the USA which roughly follows geographical lines - NW, NE and Californian liberals against a mainly conservative South and Central. Both sides really seem to hate each other with quite a passion.
So why not just get a divorce and go your separate ways? Would there be any popular support for this in the USA? I know that no major political movements advocate this, but how would your average American feel? |
This is a temporary thing. We always argue, but eventually we arrive at a settlement (that lasts 50 years or so), then we start back in again.
Divorce, separate ways? That was tried in 1861 and led to the deaths of 600,000 people. Not an attractive solution, but may happen again. (I think it might.)
The first civil war had a regional basis that the next one won't have. If we do it again, it will be ideological without a regional component. The blood will be knee deep everywhere. Think Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. Either way, you may want to brush up on your Chinese characters. |
I've always tried to picture what a 21st century American civil war would look like. The closest thing I could imagine would be something akin to Afghanistan/Iraq/Somalia, maybe tamer. The corporate-political faction would try and keep a national framework in place while non-state actors fight out a low-intensity conflict.
The only way there would be a serious fracture is if some states decided to adopt a separate currency. Even then there still might be some sort of overarching corporate-political national interest surrounding everything.
Budweiser and McDonald's will still sell to everyone, no matter what happens. |
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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 6:55 pm Post subject: |
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| Adventurer wrote: |
| visitorq wrote: |
| Adventurer wrote: |
| It has been like this in America to some degree for a long time. It's not unusual, but it has gotten worse. There have been fluctuations in American history. Don't forget that Roosevelt was called a Jew and a socialist, and Abraham Lincoln was accused of being a Catholic. However, for a while there was more uniformity in America and an acceptance of the New Deal, and not this horrible backlash by religious extremists. The cultural extremists are older, and they are going to go out of fashion. That's my hope. |
Roosevelt was a cultural extremist. He was Stalin in the White House. Lincoln (the big railroad lawyer) was the first fascist/corporatist president. Some of the presidents we are taught to most revere were often the worst. |
How was Roosevelt a cultural extremist, and the New Deal helped create a large middle class that did not exist. He was labeled as a traitor to his class. |
The New Deal (communist central planning, compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership) extended the Depression for a decade before he took us to war. This is a historical fact - one need only google the dates.
Moreover, the middle class existed well before the New Deal (which harmed millions of poor people, raising billions of dollars by imposing an excise tax, and destroying millions of jobs with additional taxes). FDR transformed America, more than any other president (along with Wilson) from a nation of individualism to welfare-warfare state, and by the time he died in 1945 he had made the American empire more supreme than any other in history (which is why even conservatives like Reagan loved him).
As for being "a traitor to his class", don't make me laugh. |
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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 7:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Privateer wrote: |
| Why have Americans become so angry? There's a whole industry devoted to making them angry! |
True, but Americans should be angry. Very angry. But that anger needs to be directed at the right places and at the people who are ruining the country (namely Wall Street and both political parties). The talking heads serve to distract people from the real issues. It is also divide and conquer, since big government can get away with anything so long as so-called left and right (the old phony paradigm) are fighting amongst themselves. |
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Privateer
Joined: 31 Aug 2005
Location: Easy Street.
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| Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 7:39 pm Post subject: |
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| visitorq wrote: |
| Privateer wrote: |
| Why have Americans become so angry? There's a whole industry devoted to making them angry! |
True, but Americans should be angry. Very angry. But that anger needs to be directed at the right places and at the people who are ruining the country (namely Wall Street and both political parties). The talking heads serve to distract people from the real issues. It is also divide and conquer, since big government can get away with anything so long as so-called left and right (the old phony paradigm) are fighting amongst themselves. |
I find it disturbing how much I agree with you when I consider you a nut. 
Perhaps we mostly agree on the problems, but not on the solutions. |
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weso1
Joined: 26 Aug 2010
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| Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:09 am Post subject: |
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visitorq you never "say" anything. All you do is get on your soap box and call everyone names. You rant on and on about how the whole system is garbage, but you never explain why the system is like it is, and more importantly, you never offer real alternatives. I stress real because the only answer I've seen you offer is to repeal the income tax. That is not a serious proposal. Therefor anyone who supports it shouldn't be taken seriously.
Now wait for it, he's going to fly off the handle and get over emotional and say how I'm a corporatist liberal marxist neo-con and say I feed on the scum, or better, I actually am scum of the Earth. He'll name call but won't offer an intelligent, fact based alternative to anything. |
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visitorq
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
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| Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 12:20 am Post subject: |
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| weso1 wrote: |
| visitorq you never "say" anything. All you do is get on your soap box and call everyone names. You rant on and on about how the whole system is garbage, but you never explain why the system is like it is, and more importantly, you never offer real alternatives. I stress real because the only answer I've seen you offer is to repeal the income tax. That is not a serious proposal. Therefor anyone who supports it shouldn't be taken seriously. |
Pretty much all I do (when I'm not wasting time replying to stupidity and straw man arguments hurled my way) is explain why the system is the way it is and offer alternatives. If you're too lazy (or dumb, whichever the case may be) to read into it, then too bad for you. I doubt you have actually even read any of my posts.
I'm also glad to see that irony isn't lost on you: chiming in to accuse me of "never saying anything" in a post where you yourself blubber on about precisely nothing.  That's some really great work, please don't strain yourself...
| Quote: |
| Now wait for it, he's going to fly off the handle and get over emotional and say how I'm a corporatist liberal marxist neo-con and say I feed on the scum, or better, I actually am scum of the Earth. He'll name call but won't offer an intelligent, fact based alternative to anything. |
You have made no point or offered any insight into anything. What am I supposed to reply to? Your straw man? Or your childish attempt at provocation? |
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weso1
Joined: 26 Aug 2010
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| Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 1:31 am Post subject: |
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| visitorq wrote: |
| weso1 wrote: |
| visitorq you never "say" anything. All you do is get on your soap box and call everyone names. You rant on and on about how the whole system is garbage, but you never explain why the system is like it is, and more importantly, you never offer real alternatives. I stress real because the only answer I've seen you offer is to repeal the income tax. That is not a serious proposal. Therefor anyone who supports it shouldn't be taken seriously. |
Pretty much all I do (when I'm not wasting time replying to stupidity and straw man arguments hurled my way) is explain why the system is the way it is and offer alternatives. If you're too lazy (or dumb, whichever the case may be) to read into it, then too bad for you. I doubt you have actually even read any of my posts.
I'm also glad to see that irony isn't lost on you: chiming in to accuse me of "never saying anything" in a post where you yourself blubber on about precisely nothing. That's some really great work, please don't strain yourself...
| Quote: |
| Now wait for it, he's going to fly off the handle and get over emotional and say how I'm a corporatist liberal marxist neo-con and say I feed on the scum, or better, I actually am scum of the Earth. He'll name call but won't offer an intelligent, fact based alternative to anything. |
You have made no point or offered any insight into anything. What am I supposed to reply to? Your straw man? Or your childish attempt at provocation? |
Do you even understand what "straw man" means? Obviously not. |
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