Hopelessness... The next generation will be pissed.
Freedom's Fool
Does anyone sincerely still have faith that science and technology will
save us from suffering and enslavement before an ignominious death?
The masses are fools and the rocket scientists and nuclear physicists
seem morally retarded. I know this isn't an original question, but
what is expected of the children being born into this world today? I
expect many of them will be enslaved, like so many before, but some of
them will be pissed. When the economy collapses and the dieoff.com
begins, what will that be like as we witness the first decline in the
human population since the black death swept through Europe? This time
there are more of us to die and we're packed together in a more
demanding world. And this all seems to be coming to a head
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4391835.stm). Our
consumption, our arrogance, our biological irrationality - these things
will, obviously, soon does us in. I don't even know how much I care
anymore but... I just thought I'd point out, once again, how seriously
fucked we are. CHEERIO ASSHOLES!
Roy. Just Roy.
I have.
> Does anyone sincerely still have faith that science and technology
will
save us from suffering and enslavement before an ignominious death?
Technology was never meant to save us from suffering. All that it does
is allow for the survival of more people. Their happiness is the realm
of religion.
> but
what is expected of the children being born into this world today?
To live, eek out a living, fuck as much as possible, and die without
costing the Medicare system too much.
> I just thought I'd point out, once again, how seriously
fucked we are.
When you're not the lead dog, the view never changes.
/Roy
Magnulus
We have ideologues and greedy thieves running the planet, not scientists.
Vendicar Decarian
"Magnulus" <magn...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:rEk3e.4759$UW6....@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
> The problem with science and technology- nobody pays any attention to
it.
> We have ideologues and greedy thieves running the planet, not scientists.
Who needs scientists when you have faith?
"In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the
White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen
Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the
White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I
didn't fully comprehend – but which I now believe gets to the very heart of
the Bush presidency.
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based
community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge
from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured
something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an
empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating
other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will
sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to
just study what we do.' - Suskind
Patrick
"Vendicar Decarian" <V...@Pyro.net> wrote in message
news:vM54e.10695$If1.2...@read2.cgocable.net...
Could you direct me to a link that has the article you wrote? Interesting
comments from the 'unnamed' senior advisor. I'm curious as to what your
thoughts were after hearing those remarks.
Patrick
"Freedom's Fool" <nothing...@perfectlyprivate.net> wrote in message
news:1112246671....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
I think you ought to just shoot yourself now and spare yourself the misery.
Try an ounce optimism, it'll go a long way. The world looks a lot brighter
and you will find life more enjoyable. You sound as if you've been
listening to the rhetoric of the democratic party too long.
Vendicar Decarian
"Patrick" <josem...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1112726902.c6bfbf9f20aea8730d6fad355a321fd8@teranews...
> I think you ought to just shoot yourself now and spare yourself the
misery.
> Try an ounce optimism, it'll go a long way. The world looks a lot
brighter
> and you will find life more enjoyable. You sound as if you've been
> listening to the rhetoric of the democratic party too long.
After the Empire by Emmanuel Todd
Review by Thom Hartmann
In 1976 -- long before American conservatives would claim that Ronald
Reagan's 1980s debt-driven massive military spending "bankrupted" the
Soviet Union -- French demographer and author Emmanuel Todd wrote a
best-selling book titled La Chute finale (The Final Fall), predicting
the
imminent fall of the USSR. He based his projection, in large part, on
a
careful study of the increase in infant mortality in that empire, one
of
the leading indicators of the health of a nation.
Time proved him right, and hindsight tells us that Reagan and Bush had
nothing whatever to do with the fall of the USSR, con claims
notwithstanding. It rotted from within, something that I witnessed in
the
1970s and 1980s visiting both the USSR and several of its captive
states,
and living a year in 1986-1987 within 30 miles of Soviet-dominated
East
Germany and Czechoslovakia. Any 70s or 80s visitor to the USSR or its
vassal sates, in fact, could have come to the conclusion that --
barring a
world war -- it was an empire about to expire, and the CIA and others
in
the American, European, Israeli, and Japanese intelligence services
had
been saying the same thing since, in some cases the 1960s.
Yet it was Emmanuel Todd who captured Europe's attention by explicitly
saying that the Soviet Emperor had no clothes - and doing so in a way
that
was widely discussed across Europe. Thus, when my best friend and
former
business partner Jerry Schneiderman and I found ourselves in Budapest
in
early November, 1989, the week before the Berlin Wall fell, as East
German
refugees were streaming into the country and the Soviets seemed
helpless
to stop it, we discovered that the reaction of the Hungarian
shopkeepers
and bartenders we talked with was a resigned shrug: "We knew it was
coming. Everybody knew it was coming." Other than, of course, the
average
American.
Now comes Emmanuel Todd to predict the fall of another empire:
America.
In Après l' empire ("After The Empire"), a runaway bestseller across
Europe and in Japan, Todd points out that many of the same demographic
and
historic indicators that led him to boldly predict the looming
collapse of
the Soviet system can now -- with some variations that are even more
alarming -- be applied to the United States.
Every American should read this book. First, we must read it to
understand
how Europe, Russia, China, and Japan (among others) view us. Second,
we
must read it because its logic, facts, statistics, and conclusions are
unassailable.
The main thesis of Todd's book is that America is posturing, playing
the
role of the leader of the "free world" and head of the new American
Empire, when, in fact, we are militarily, economically, and morally
bankrupt -- and the rest of the world knows it. In fact, he suggests,
much
of the posturing is for the consumption of the domestic American
audience,
as the rest of the world (with the exception of a few dependent Third
World nations) knows we're already in decline and perhaps even ready
to
implode.
Economically, twenty-five years of conservative Reaganomics -- "free
trade" elevated to a virtual religion (including complicity by Clinton
in
signing GATT/WTO and NAFTA) -- and the massive budget and trade
deficits
that have resulted from this, have turned the United States from an
independent manufacturing powerhouse and the world's leading creditor
into
a bankrupt nation with little manufacturing capacity left, dependent
on
other nations for the imports that maintain our unsustainable standard
of
living. The result is that the US "has become the center of a system
in
which its number one job is to consume rather than produce."
"If the United States has greatly declined in relative terms as an
economic power," writes Todd, "it has nevertheless succeed in
massively
increasing its ability to siphon off wealth from the world economy.
Objectively speaking, America has become a predator; ... [and] is
going to
have to fight politically and militarily in order to sustain the
hegemony
that has become indispensable for maintaining its standard of living."
In his concluding chapter, Todd writes, "The United States is unable
to
live on its own economic activity and must be subsidized to maintain
its
level of consumption -- at its present cruising speed that subsidy
amounts
to 1.4 billion dollars per day."
Referring to the "bizarre behavior" of the Bush administration's
America,
Todd asks the question -- in italics for emphasis -- "How does one
deal
with a superpower that is economically dependent but also politically
useless?"
In "The Fragility of Tribute" chapter, Todd suggests the world
won't -- or
can't -- long continue to support our "parasitic" lifestyle by loaning
us
money to sell us goods, while we export our manufacturing industries
and
hollow out our internal productivity. "The most likely scenario" he
sees
as a result of this "is a stock market crash larger than any we have
experienced thus far that will be followed by a meltdown of the
dollar --
a one-two punch that will put an end to any further delusions of
'empire'
when it comes to the US economy."
Our moral bankruptcy, Todd suggests, is the result of these same
economic
and political policies emanating from the radical right (neoliberals)
in
America, and are rapidly morphing our nation from a democracy into an
oligarchy.
Without irony, he notes, "It is a surprising return to the world of
Aristotle in which oligarchy may succeed democracy." As "American
society
is changing into a fundamentally unegalitarian system of
domination..." he
notes that this turnaround of increasing rule by the rich in America
and a
wiping out of our middle class "explains the strained relations
between
the United States and the rest of the world. The progress of democracy
around the world is masking the weakening of democracy in its
birthplace
[America]." The result? "...the United states is beginning to lose its
democratic characteristics..."
Because America has become a "parasitical" nation of importers of oil
and
goods from around the world, paying with debt, Todd says, "From now on
the
fundamental strategic objective of the United States will be political
control of the world's resources."
Thus we have had to invent a "myth of global terrorism" so we can
convince
ourselves that our projection of power into oil-rich regions of the
world
is to "save" both America and the world from "terrorists." Because our
military power is insufficient to take on any serious foes, we rattle
sabers, proclaim "Axis of evils," and attack essentially defenseless
nations, while proclaiming our efforts great military victories
comparable
to the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II.
The world, Todd notes, isn't buying it. And they're getting tired of
our
constant hectoring about "democracy" even as we cut back on civil
liberties and economic opportunity at home, support "strategic"
dictators
abroad, and are increasingly ruled by oligarchic families.
Which brings us to his third conclusion -- that we have become
militarily
impotent. Todd notes that, "In the childlike universe of Donald
Rumsfeld,
for example, only physical force matters." Thus, we stir up problems
in
the militarily weak (but oil rich) Arab world, destabilizing the
entire
planet. This is not a situation European and Asian powers take
lightly.
Europe, Todd notes, "cannot accept indefinitely the continuous
disorder in
the Arab world sponsored by the United States..."
The result is clear, he says. "But make no mistake, all the
ingredients
are there for a serious conflict between Europe and the United States
in
the near future." Such a conflict could be devastating to the US.
Dissecting -- and dismissing -- numerous American "strategic" books
like
Zbigniew Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," Todd notes that our
leaders
in the post-Carter world have always taken the lazy way out, rather
than
building the strategic alliances and offering the moral leadership
that
would have been necessary to maintain America as the moral, economic,
and
political international leader we were before Reagan began the
destruction
of the traditional American way of life.
In part, this has been the result of the capture of our political
system
by oligarchs, powerful rich interests including multinational
corporations
with little allegiance to America (or any nation). "This is why," he
notes, "the United States' export of its specific model of unregulated
capitalism [necessary to sustain oligarchy] constitutes a danger for
European societies, as well as for Japan...."
The result of our export of privatization, deregulation, and
unrestrained
oligarchic capitalism (called "the liberal model" in Europe) is that
"the
constant attempts to foist the liberal model onto the strongly rooted
and
state-centered societies of the Old World is in the process of blowing
them apart -- a phenomenon that can be observed nowadays in the
regular
gains of the far right in a number of recent elections. Denmark, the
Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria have all
been affected."
Rush Limbaugh/Newt Gingrich politics have led to the rise of a
neofascist
right in America, and our export of these ideas are inspiring the
return
of right-wing politics in Europe, threatening to tear apart the social
fabric of that continent.
Todd notes that Portugal and Spain are the least affected by these
ideas,
because of their recent experience with Franco's fascism.
But our increasing moral bankruptcy (detention without trials, phony
war
on terror), economic bankruptcy (living on debt borrowed from Europe,
China, and Japan, along with the dramatic oligarchic trends in America
toward richer rich, poorer poor, and the loss of the middle class),
and
military impotence (leading us to loudly attack relatively defenseless
countries to create "show victories" and a "bloody vaudeville show" in
Iraq) are causing many in Europe to reevaluate their relationship
with --
and support of -- America.
If they decide to throw their lot in with Russia and Iran instead of
the
US -- and Todd suggests this is a growing probability -- then the
result
is "easy to predict."
"The United States," he says, "will then have to live like other
nations,
notably by reigning in its huge trade deficit, a constraint that would
imply a 15 to 20 percent drop in the standard of living of the
population."
And this, he suggests, may be a good thing, long term. "What the world
needs is not that America disappear but that it return to its true
self --
democratic, liberal, and productive."
One can only hope that America will return to the ideals we held prior
to
Reagan, and do so with a minimum of damage to our working class.
Reading
Emmanuel Todd's book "After The Empire" will help crystallize in your
mind
so many of these issues, and help provide a roadmap for Americans to a
return to domestic and international political sanity, hopefully as
soon
as the 2006 elections...
Vendicar Decarian
> Could you direct me to a link that has the article you wrote? Interesting
> comments from the 'unnamed' senior advisor. I'm curious as to what your
> thoughts were after hearing those remarks.
The quote was not attributed to myself. The entire article can be found
here...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html?ei=5090&en=890a96189e
162076&ex=1255665600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&adxnnlx=1113192796-MCwjAFw
6mbjU4vMH7prxZw
My thought was primarily that his remarks were identical to those I hear
from other religious zealots who know the way by way of faith rather than
reason and secondly that historically people who justify corruption and and
self deception as a result of thier ideological faith are destined for
oblivion..
So long suckers...