@dkmich Agreed.

#13

The good thing about this place is that we are all tolerant of other's right to their opinion and know we can often all be right.

@Pluto's Republic @Pluto's Republic @Pluto's Republic Americans are the predators of the world — endlessly roaming the globe, swooping in to kill. Other nations don't do that. Evolutionary dead-enders can be found in other cultures, but we are a nation filled with them.

This statement is, oddly enough, peculiarly American. I don't know whether you're American or not, but the assumption that everything is about fixed moral character and that history derives primarily from the basis of what kind of fixed moral character people have (in this case, "predators" "evolutionary dead-enders") is very American indeed. It's such a deep assumption that almost nobody in this country questions it.

Ascribing the origins of that fixed moral character to culture is better than ascribing them to biology (though your use of the words "predators" and "evolutionary dead-enders" metaphorically suggest the exact opposite--logically, one can't be an "evolutionary dead-ender" on the basis of anything but the interactions of genetics and the physical environment). But overall, this perspective seems like a way of applying religious thinking to political matters and historical events, and a fairly reductive kind of religious thinking as well ("sheep" vs "goats," "sinners" vs "saved," "Americans" vs "other nations"). While I'm not an absolutist about this--obviously the morality of human beings plays a role in the formation of world events--I find this explanation of world events ("Americans belong to a bad culture and are bad killer predatory evolutionary dead-enders") reductive and inadequate. It contains no analysis of power beyond the fact that America has and has had power over other nations, or that the European colonists/invaders had power over the indigenous population and the African slaves they imported. It also doesn't deal with money except as a by-product of American culture. These are two huge problems.

Further, using nationalism as the foundation for an analysis of world events seems weirdly out-of-date. The forces that control the world enjoy privileged status in some nations more than others, and there's no denying the fact that America is their foremost arsenal (literally; we are where they keep their weapons.) But the forces that control the world are obviously neither national nor nationalistic. That's been one of the foremost characteristics of the 21st century--the international nature of what I guess I could only call rulership has become so obvious even ordinary people can see it. Colonization has come home, because to the forces of colonial capitalism, there's no such thing as home. The more financialized and corporate colonial capitalism has become, the more this has become true.

Your point of view seems to be that if America and all Americans could be wiped off the face of the globe without destroying the rest of the peoples of the earth, the rest of the world would immediately get on with ending the petrochemical economy, ending the endless wars, establishing a global living wage, or, better, a universal basic income, ending for-profit medical care, etc. In other words, the problem of the 1% would disappear if America disappeared, and people could begin to base policy decisions on mass human survival and well-being rather than on maximizing profit for the rulers.

A much more fruitful way of looking at it would be to examine the cultures of England, Scotland, and Holland in the 16th and 17th centuries, and seeing what characteristics made those cultures more vulnerable to the infection that is modern capitalism, and perhaps tracking that forward into the future. Weber wrote a famous book about that, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I haven't read it, I've only read about it. But it's possible that an early twentieth-century text could be expanded upon. In that context, we could rag on those cultures--and potentially the cultures of France, Spain, and Portugal as well, seeing as how they were also big colonizers--all we wanted. We could also, of course, rag on the United States and its culture, since the U.S. essentially inherited Britain's role when two world wars had rendered Britain economically incapable of continuing. But it makes little sense to analyze capitalism in a primarily nationalistic way, because it's not fundamentally a nationalistic enterprise, and the relationship between capitalism and nationalism is complicated and often vexed and dishonest.

#23

…polite or otherwise, when you're standing on the blood-soaked soil of continent-wide racial genocide. We have yet to get past that one because we refuse to redress it. All our other issues will just have to take a number and wait in line.

America's most self-destructive problems emanate from that original sin. Racial hate? Gun obsessed? Paranoid about being attacked? Driven to invade the lands of other and steal their valuables? The urge to kill non-whites? Righteous producers of permanent environmental damage? Disregard for the future humans?

Americans are the predators of the world — endlessly roaming the globe, swooping in to kill. Other nations don't do that. Evolutionary dead-enders can be found in other cultures, but we are a nation filled with them.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Apparently the upper Midwest (IL, WI, IA) and northern New England (ME, NH, RI) still believe in this "democracy." MD is massively influenced by DC, so there's no surprise there; I'm merely surprised that NOVA wasn't enough to put VA into the Blue category instead of the Not Voting category. Apparently there's too much of Virginia not yet describable as a suburb of DC.

I assume Colorado was stoned. That must have been some good shit.

#24 Out of curiosity, what comment were you responding to?

And I agree with you about voting, but so do lots of Americans:

The question of what the turnout actually was, and whether it should be considered high or low, seems to be a vexed one (I get the feeling the establishment is petulant about the narrative that Americans simply rejected both of the choices on the menu, and wants to trivialize or discredit it as fast as possible). In November, December, and January, sources like the Guardian were saying that it was a low turnout; then Nate Silver and others came rushing in in March to say "No, no, actually that's not true; it was a HIGH turnout!") I've seen numbers ranging from 55% to 60% of eligible voters. Now, of course, that leaves out the question of the unregistered. This is from Pew:

In the U.S., by contrast, registration is mainly an individual responsibility. And registered voters represent a much smaller share of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country. Only about 64% of the U.S. voting-age population (and 70% of voting-age citizens) was registered in 2016, according to the new census report, compared with 91% in Canada (2015) and the UK (2016), 96% in Sweden (2014), and nearly 99% in Japan (2014).

We came in behind Estonia.

The 55.7% VAP (voting age population) turnout in last year’s election puts the U.S. behind most of its peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, most of whose members are highly developed, democratic states. Looking at the most recent nationwide election in each of the 35 OECD member nations, the U.S. placed 28th.

There appears to be some hanky-panky going on with people suddenly using eligible voters rather than voting-age-population as the basis for their stats about the 2016 election. While there's an argument to be made for using eligible voters as a basis instead, the shift and subsequent "debunking" of the original stats on the election smells to me of the establishment trying to shut down the narrative that a large portion of the US population doesn't want to play this game anymore.

Trump Panic is the cart the establishment brought in when somebody called Code Blue on popular buy-in to the illusion of democracy. It remains to be seen whether that dying heart can be brought to beat again.

Clear!