redtreviso said:
who brought children into this thread anyway??
http://youtu.be/BXRjmyJFzrU
Yep, and it's only gonna get worse under the current regime, with the public education system the way it is and the obscurantism and backwardness that reigns supreme over the provincial hell of rural, redneck, Bible Belt, Wall Mart-shoppin America.
Thus Africa isn't the only continent were a primitive way of life exists, but at least theirs is a natural primitivism of the type found in the savanna, whereas the primitivism of our so called progressive world was ruthlessly constructed by liberal capitalism under the aegis of government and, as such, is depravity personified. It is the result of no less than a state sponsored
and orchestrated program to dismantle social well-being and collective awareness, in the name of an anti-revolutionary cause, in all things but the country's hyper-materialism. And it has led to the appalling underdeveloped and cretinous, if not outright cromagnon, mental existence of such people, who are quite numerous and have dragged the stunning economic performance over the century down into the mire.
Kinda reminds me of a David Foster Wallace novel wrapped-up in the
Darwin Awards.
It also demonstrates that a well being that is exclusively conceptualized within the capitalist framework that says if everyone is simply given greater access to buy more things at the market, then a better world is inevitably achieved, when all that really takes place is the middle and lower class becoming further debased and craven. Some believe that the quantitative gains the US model has fostered over the past century, the result of a rapacious industrial expansion overseas and a technological revolution at home, has merely resulted in a precipitous decline in the qualitative state of the citizenry as far as democracy goes. Unfortunately it is happening to a degree throughout the entire Western World.
That there is just more crapola on the commercial market to stuff and feed an increasingly bloated, less well instructed and underpaid population on is naturally scandalous, never mind how that consumer market and developing economy was actually built at home through the credit enslavement of the working class, or overseas through wars, the financing of dictators and contras militants to support US interests. All of which means that conservatives like Scott haven't learned a damn thing from the lessons of the past century, because it is a history only properly told, if we aren't to be hypocritical, through the eyes of the weak and exploited that is in no way congenial to his triumphalist unfettered business enterprise rhetoric. For him it is the only salvation, perhaps of the few, but it has meant the repression and further impoverishment (both materially and spiritually) of much more of humanity than it has benefited.
Economic growth is not the answer to the problems of our world, it is the problem. Education, culture, social awareness, the magnanimity of the privileged, and at least a modicum of reasonable collectivism, and not the savage individualism that prevails, will be much more useful to the future of humanity than the folly and madness of eternal growth at the markets. Rich markets can't eternally grow if poor ones don't eternally exist in their misery. Adams already stated as much 200 years or so ago. Making the markets we have run more ethically and with more principle is the way to go and in some cases actually decreasing them.
But the world in control is addicted to this state of affairs and probably can't live without it. Like the recidivism of the drug addict.
PS: In America under the sway of neo-liberalism and conservatism, there is no larger good than your own good and happiness. Kids are even taught this, that the most important thing is what you want, what's most important are your desires and that the job in life is to gratify them. This is an ideology there that's perpetrated by television advertisement and entertainment. The economy thrives on it. This is what is meant by liberty and freedom, but it is in reality enslaving the nation and, by proxy basis, all who come under its globalizing influence. Revolutionary socialism may have not succeeded, thought what has replaced it is far worse.
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