@LaFeminista

Were you in the US at the time? It was like a drunken slobbering sports bar whose team had lost. The screams for war and killing. Anyone would do. Pick a nation and let's go kill them. Americans, to this day, think we are at war with Afghanistan. The lizard brain in action.

For me, Iraq was an afterthought. Meh. Clearly much, much worse would now be unleashed. All because of our thoughtless Afghanistan atrocity. It's our tar baby. We will never leave there until we destroy ourselves. Just like the Soviets before us, in their own idiotic war on terror.

That was, and is, a point-of-view that gets no traction at all. It won't make sense for centuries.

#1 own, usually fact free.

I remember the start of the Invasion of Afghanistan objecting to a stupid war and act of thoughtless vengeance that would suck us in for decades and create more terrorism, being called Un-American was the least of it and from both sides of the fictive political divide.

To: @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

This point you make really deserves a response:

Therefore you can't hypothesize that what's been going on in this country since the fall of representative government arises from the character of the American people, or anything else about the people--unless your entire argument is based on the idea that Americans are cowards for not rising up in revolution against their horrible system. But if that's a function of American culture or American character, how do you explain the fact that most subjects of tyranny put up with it for a very long time, sometimes even after their children are being taken away, tortured, killed?

I do not think Americans are cowardly at all (Hiroshima and Nagasaki notwithstanding). But they are better at slipping into denial than any people I have encountered anywhere in the world. That could be cultural, but it might be character. It's typical of behaviors that evolved to deal with certain stressors. You pivot with the question: "...how do you explain the fact that most subjects of tyranny put up with it for a very long time, sometimes even after their children are being taken away...."

That immediately reminded of the Declaration of Independence, which made that same point in the same way:

All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

The authors didn't know much about all mankind, but they knew plenty about the European variety, where that appears to be universal, regardless of geography.

I wasn't thinking about the lack of rebellion in my comment. I was thinking about sociopathy and libertarianism and a general hillbilly ethos — clannish self-worshipers — that in my view describes the American gestalt in relation to the cultures of the world. I was also thinking about the North Koreans and how isolation gave them the same characteristics — xenophobic, frightened, blustering... hillbillies. I was thinking how North Koreans and Americans both have governments they cannot control and how the people have to work hard to pay for all the weapons their governments want while denying themselves basic rights and a better life. The Geopolitical crowd regard Americans as the least informed population in the developed world. I would say that the North Koreans and the Americans suffer from the same extreme levels of government propaganda. And their isolation makes it stick.

In that sense, I don't blame today's Americans, as a whole, for what they are going through. But for those people who are actually awake and aware in a big picture way, I do blame them for not getting themselves and their children established in a better nation. It's astonishingly cruel, to me. On the other hand, they may have a better plan that I can't see. We are the authors of our own fate, in the US in particular, since it is still possible to leave.

#1 Your hypothesis is that something fundamental to American culture (the distance from other societies occasioned by our having a large ocean on each side) resides in the collective character of the people and manifests as barbarism as soon as a large enough number of Americans act together. It's a plausible argument, but I'm not sure how it can be extrapolated from a system where it's been proven the vast majority of people have no influence over what happens at all.

Now, there are certainly other bits of data that suggest to me that you're mostly right about (white, euro-extracted) American culture having tendencies toward anti-collectivism and barbarism. But the barbarism that's being waged overseas and here by the military, police, and private security forces has little if anything to do with the character of the American people. It has more to do with the character of tyranny, which seems to operate in a terrifyingly similar way across time and space.

If we understand and agree that the United States is neither a democracy nor a republic, that the average person, even the average upper-middle-class person, has little or no influence over what the government does, little or no influence over what the media does, little or no influence over how our children are educated, little or no influence over 90% of what constitutes "American" activity (I put it in quotation marks because it's American activity that is impermeable to the influence of the majority of Americans), then it's a failure of logic to attribute the kind of essential, character-based, indeed, geography-based, blame to the same people who have no influence and who, as far as we can tell, haven't had any influence for at least 16 years (I'm of the opinion it's more like 30 or possibly even more.)

We can't have it both ways. Either we have political representation and the policies of the nation arise from our collective decisions, which arise from our culture, our character as a people--or we have no political representation and the policies of the nation are being determined without reference to our desires, decisions, culture or character. I would like to say these policies are often determined, in spite of our desires, decisions, and characters. There is a fair amount of evidence that that is so. But I don't feel I've got conclusive proof of that. What has been proven is that the wealthy and powerful in this country, who constitute a fairly small percentage of the whole, control discourse and policy nearly absolutely--and without reference to any characteristic of the people, including their opinions and morals.

Therefore you can't hypothesize that what's been going on in this country since the fall of representative government arises from the character of the American people, or anything else about the people--unless your entire argument is based on the idea that Americans are cowards for not rising up in revolution against their horrible system. But if that's a function of American culture or American character, how do you explain the fact that most subjects of tyranny put up with it for a very long time, sometimes even after their children are being taken away, tortured, killed? There's nothing distinctly American about being afraid to fight an asymmetric war.

You could certainly make such an argument about choices made when the people actually had meaningful choices. There's been a lot of debate over when this was, if ever (it's a very popular viewpoint to say the people never did have meaningful choices). I, personally, think that the people had influence over the political structure, of a kind, up till the mid-nineties, though the fall began around 1978, accelerated horribly in the mid-eighties, and arguably had not entirely finished the transformation into tyranny until 2001/2. But in 1994, the Clintons had taken over the Democratic Party and Newt Gingrich had taken over the Republican party. The Clintons headed the Democratic Party towards corporatism and corruption, while Gingrich and his faction started heading the Republicans toward la-la-land. In 1996, the Telecommunications Act passed. From that point on, both politics and journalism (or as it came to be called, "the media") were impermeable to any Americans who were not rich and well-connected.

The only thing the last twenty years says definitively about the character of the American people is that we are reluctant to rise up in revolution. That could mean a lot of things, but I'd start with the idea that most people don't want to die or be thrown in prison.

@native Well said.

#7

of the Kennedy brothers and MLK that the term "conspiracy theory" became widely used as a pejorative. All research that contradicted the official version of these events was labeled "conspiracy theory", and was then either ridiculed or largely ignored by the msm. To even suggest that American officialdom might have been involved in these heinous crimes, was akin to heresy. It was considered to be quite literally unthinkable.

And so when the WTC collapsed mysteriously into its own footprints thirty years later, the US public had already been well-conditioned to accept an official explanation (no matter how improbable) of why and how it happened. The convenient, and much reviled category of "conspiracy theory" had already been established, in which to place any and all contradictory information and evidence about it.

The parallels and similarities between the assassinations of 1968 and the attacks 2001, in regard to the subsequent official cover-ups in both cases, and the very unfortunate after-effects of both, seem obvious to me. That they both involved high-level, and officially sanctioned conspiracies of one kind or another is I think, not so much a "theory" but rather more of a highly probable hypothesis, approaching a certainty.

@native .

that the triple homicides of 1968 and the 9/11 atrocity are intimately related. There is a great deal of evidence, both circumstantial and physical, that points to this conclusion -- though much if not most of it has been suppressed. Out of sight out of mind, as they say.

#7

of the Kennedy brothers and MLK that the term "conspiracy theory" became widely used as a pejorative. All research that contradicted the official version of these events was labeled "conspiracy theory", and was then either ridiculed or largely ignored by the msm. To even suggest that American officialdom might have been involved in these heinous crimes, was akin to heresy. It was considered to be quite literally unthinkable.

And so when the WTC collapsed mysteriously into its own footprints thirty years later, the US public had already been well-conditioned to accept an official explanation (no matter how improbable) of why and how it happened. The convenient, and much reviled category of "conspiracy theory" had already been established, in which to place any and all contradictory information and evidence about it.

The parallels and similarities between the assassinations of 1968 and the attacks 2001, in regard to the subsequent official cover-ups in both cases, and the very unfortunate after-effects of both, seem obvious to me. That they both involved high-level, and officially sanctioned conspiracies of one kind or another is I think, not so much a "theory" but rather more of a highly probable hypothesis, approaching a certainty.

@Ellen North The 2016 Presidential Election (definition):

the mutual repulsion displayed between the Clintons and the more aware American voters resulting in 'lesser evil' (The Trump of Potentially Survivable Doom VS The Mad Bomber Promising Donors To Get MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction Globally) voting by those permitted no real electoral choice.

#9

Hey, like the polluting industries who perfected such tactics and fund/reward them, corporate politicians and their collaborators never waste a PR cover excuse. The same victim(s) 'multitasks' again and again in such propaganda.

Although I'm seeing an embarrassment of riches in the number of victims variously chosen by the Clinton contingent to bear the blame for the mutual repulsion displayed between the Clintons and the more aware American voters resulting in 'lesser evil' (The Trump of Potentially Survivable Doom VS The Mad Bomber Promising Donors To Get MAD - Mutual Assured Destruction Globally) voting by those permitted no real electoral choice.