Thread: Sex & Violence
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Old 09-15-2007, 10:01 PM   #15
shadowfyr
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Join Date: Oct 2002
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shadowfyr will become famous soon enough
Re: Sex & Violence

Umm. Sorry, but for about 30-40 years things got more liberal in the US, then the far right got panicked and in the last 10-20 they have made a concerted effort to undermine our trust in science, paint everyone on the left as immoral and blame all the problems in the world on not having enough churches. Its bull****. Europe took the opposiote approach from the US, going ultra conservative for the first few hundred years (even mandating specific religions as the official state religion), and they ****have**** gone so liberal since then that they make the most liberal areas in the US look like strict authoritarian traditionalists. Only, to recognize that fact, you have to realize how screwed up our views of what "liberal" means are, when compared to nations that actually have true liberal parties.

Point of fact, there is, in the last 15-20 years, almost *no* difference between the right and the left politically, other than a few differences on where to waste money, and the fact that both sides paint the other side as filled with nothing but the most insane self-claimed members of the other side. Sure, there are cranks and freaks on both sides. But, as a rule, the *politicians*, who make policy for the right and left are both on right of center on virtually *everything*, when compared to Europe.

There was an article a while back that presented this fairly clearly. It showed nations in terms of two axis map of where views fell on individualism vs. traditionalism on one axis, and government control vs. freedom on the other. 90% of Europe was a blob in the "individualist + freedom" zone, with some cross over into "individualism + control". Other nations tended to fall all over the place, but Middle Eastern nations tended to all cluster in the "traditionalism + control" area. The US was a fracking blob in the middle, with one huge tendrel stuck into the middle of the ME cluster like a huge scar, just barely coming short of the most extreme versions of that view. The rest **failed** to be as pro-freedom, pro-individual, or pro-control as "anyone" else. We overlapped European countries only 50% into the "invidualism" category, and half of the blob that represented the US was on the wrong side of the line from Europe, with respect to government control.

The simple truth is, the left has done three things that are unbelievably stupid:

1. They have assumed that no one listens to liberal nuts. After all, they are nuts, and anyone with half a clue should be able to tell that they are nuts. Problem - Most people don't have half a clue how to program their VCR, let alone figure out that people like Deepockets Chopra are full of it.

2. They have assumed that most people understand issues well enough to trust someone telling them the truth, over someone lying to them. Problem - This only works if people are telling them the truth in the first place. Case in point, polls have shown that 80% of the US can't answer "basic" science questions and get the answers right, and that is **using multiple choice questions**.

3. Providing information in a way that isn't confrontational and which requires others to "look for it" is sufficient, since only the people that are well enough informed to look for the information are likely to be in a position to make critical decisions. Problem - This is just wrong. One of the basic principles of management is, "Unless you are careful, most people will tend to be promoted upward, until they reach a point at which they are completely incompetent at their jobs." This is called the Peter Principle. 90% of the people making decisions don't even know the information is available, and a lot of them have been told by an endless stream of flunkies and special interests that they "can't trust" the sources in the first place.

The bigger issue though, for all three mistakes, is that the cranks, especially religiously driven cranks, have no ethical qualms or moral issues with 1 - Insisting that the nuts on the left "are" the left. 2 - Doing everything they can to make sure that polls provide either a) no correct answer in the first place, or b) always include the one people are most familiar with, and thus likely to choose, even if wrong. 3 - The don't sit around going, "I have more important things to do than spend hours trying to convince people to believe me." The cranks have all the time in the world. They don't do reseach, they don't build anything, they don't create anything, they don't **do** anything, other than spend 90% of their time telling other people what, how and when to think things.


Until the last 5 years or so, the only thing anyone has *ever* heard from our side has been from politicians, who don't care any more about liberalism than the conservatives do, they just want to kiss the ass of the people that they think are going to elect them, and the nuts. The rest of us have kept quiet, ignored the loons, gone on with trying to change things slowly, all the while "sure" that the public would *eventually* wake up and figure out whose side they should be on. The result is a nations full of people that don't know something as basic as if a proton is bigger than an atom, think liberalism means a whole list of insane BS that it doesn't, actually think that the Democrats *qualify* as liberal, fail to understand that, on some levels, key aspects of the democratic and republican positions have *actually* flipped 180 degrees, making the Democrats weak, and the Republicans dangerously unstable, etc. We are a clueless, ignorant, self important, delusional, over weight nation, who once believed that, "what my neighbor believes doesn't hurt me.", but now thinks two entirely insane things:

1. We have a right to stop other people from annoying us, through censorship, declaring some ideas unamerican, or insisting that you can't be one, if you don't believe the right things.
2. The US is always right, about everything, and the entire rest of the world, when ever it manages to avoid the pitfalls, idiocies and social problems we have (while often doing 180 degrees the opposite of us, which BTW, usually means being ***more*** liberal than we are. How many cell networks in the US are dedicated to people actively finding people the sleep with, like the do in Japan, where STDs are like 20 times lower, as one example?) are all either a) lying about it, or b) are just some odd fluke, which doesn't count, because, well.... They're not Americans!

We are ripping apart because one side knows we can't *fix* problems by arbitrarilly mandating moral standards on people, which don't make sense, *especially* when there are numerous examples of it failing, and even more examples of other countries that have gone the opposite direction, with 10 times greater success, but *that* side is full of lots of people that have wacko ideas about how to really solve the problem which are, if anything, even less rational than the authoritarian stance of their opposite. On the other side, we have people that **actually** think that doing the same thing over and over again, for like... 1,000 years at least, possibly longer, and refusing to learn from their predicessors mistakes, is a sign of profound trust in moral literalism, (never mind how often you can use their own arguments to rip appart their logic), and not, as more commonly expressed, "a sign of insanity".

Its this conflict that is dragging the two sides that *need* to be working towards a common goal, of the betterment of the nation, instead into vocal opposition. The **problems** you talk about are a symptom not of liberalism, but one of the guards to the warehouse standing around a corner arguing about the meaning of "guard", while every fool, nut case, intentional thief or mobster walks in and out the front door, mostly unhindered. Bad neighborhoods get worse, because neither side wants to admit that its "partly" their fault. Neither side wants to call out the complete loons on their side, because they are all scared (probably rightly) that exposing the real dangerous nuts might open "them" to examination too. And, as a rule, the people trying to hold the whole thing together, instead of just taking advantage of all the cracks, or widdening them, are too busy to do anything else.

The ones that do? At least on the left, they get labelled "militant", "too aggressive", "as bad as the people they are challenging", and a whole list of other things, even in the worst cases, actually having prominent politicians say, "Such people shouldn't be Americans". Guess all those people that signed something called the Declaration of Independence, who tended to be **very** vocal, strident, militant and agressive about their views shouldn't have qualified either... No, according to a lot of people, the only way to "change" things is to kiss the ass of the enemy, like the "nobles" in Braveheart did, instead of, you know, being an overly loud, actively agressive, and uncompromising fool, like that William Wallace person. And you know what happened to him!

You want to impress me. Don't tell me that my side is the only one steering us into the fracking walls, and therefor its all our fault. It isn't. At best, both sides often overcorrect, slamming society, unintentionally into the opposite wall. Only problem is, both sides also have way to many backseat drivers, who think, "Ooooh! I liked the sound we made when we hit the wall, lets do it again!", which is why we are constantly overcorrecting in the first place.
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