Are You Better Off Now?

[StevenSeagal]

i feel better off when i don't try to think how i ever felt at any other time - actually just not feeling or thinking at all seems to be a very good piece of advice, if only i could get that whole 8-fold path thing worked out....

 

Truth is a pathless land.

 

 

man, if you are quoting krishnamurti, don't get me started....

 

 

***"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society"***

 

 

"perhaps one should follow the sensical conventions of society, when they keep one from impregnating a married woman, over and over again, leading to abortions etc etc."

 

“Hitler and Mussolini were only the primary spokesmen for the attitude of domination and craving for power that are in the heart of almost everyone. Until the source is cleared, there will always be confusion and hate, wars and class antagonisms.”

Edited February 29, 2008 by StevenSeagal

[KaskadskyjKozak]

and ]

But they've certainly been defange in terms of expansion into Eastern Europe and beyond.

 

 

I said above "Democracy in Russia is a joke". What part of that simple statement do you NOT understand? It is you who are the fucking moron. Learn to read English.

this is the biggest bullshit i have read this week. plain untrue and dangerously stupid.

 

you'd know bullshit well since you're so full of it. ditto for stupidity.

[tvashtarkatena]

We built this country on Rock and Roll

[glassgowkiss]

kozak- your depth of knowledge about central europe equals the "expertise" of Rice. pretty much you both know 2 things- jack and shit and jack left town

[KaskadskyjKozak]

your depth of knowledge about central europe equals the "expertise" of Rice. pretty much you both know 2 things- jack and shit and jack left town

 

gee, you're so convincing.

[StevenSeagal]

 

I think your view is cynical.

 

Yes, it is.

 

People are receptive to change, but a lot of it is in the way the message is presented. Calling people redneck, red-stater, bible-thumping, selfish, hicks who shit on the planet is not going to get anyone to listen to you. Also, changes of this magnitude will take time, and require patience. It took 40-50 years for us to go from the thrify, modest-living "greatest generation" to wasteful, over-the-top consumer-crazed people.

 

But there is some truth to what you say. I would like to see our politicians tell the American people more of what they NEED to hear rather than what they WANT to hear, more often. Even if it causes the politicians to be run out of office every time after one term. Remember Carter's malaise speech? Look at this part:

 

" I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel."

 

Indeed, it's really a lack of leadership to not take a controversial stand and ask the people to participate in things that require direct action and possibly some sacrifice for the greater good. Moreover, it's become popular to do the opposite of what your opponent advocates just to spite them.

 

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

 

Да, Боб, я абсолютно ничего не знаю о Росии и про ней ничего не понимаю. Я не знаю никого, кто там живет, жил, или, у которых есть семя, друзя там. Я не читаю газети, новости, стаття про Росию. Да ничего. А Вы, иммигрант, живучи в штатах - як долго - 20, 30 лет? -- Вы все знаете. Вы всезнайка.

 

 

 

 

[billcoe]

....I don't think the war in Iraq is the primary cause for our higher gas prices and cost of living - it's about the dynamics of the evolving world economoy, peaking of gas supplies/production, and shifting trade dynamics, and our lifestyle. How will we address these moving forward? By harping continually on the war in Iraq and Bush, and namecalling? Please.

 

 

I'm disagreeing big time here buddy. If you look up the amount spent on this foolhardy enterprise, it staggers and shocks even the supporters. It shocks no matter how you look at it, as a total $ amount, or per capita. That cost MUST be borne by all us, and it is what you are starting to see happen now. We may have been in a better position had other things lined up better. But we're not, and the bill is due. In fact, your kids may be paying on it too.

 

 

 

Ultimately, the truth is that most people are so self-centered and unconcerned about the collective part of society that they won't actually change anything about their lifestyle until they are forced to do so. And that isn't really a change effective on behalf of others, it's just a shift made again for self-centered rationale. This society is wealthy enough that even $4 a gallon gas by itself doesn't do it- a guy who can afford a $75K Hummer in the first place doesn't care that it costs $110 to fill up. But when the cost of everything else skyrockets, and wages stay flat, over time you may see people begin to change habits.

 

Thanks SS, (we should be climbing together BTW) these are nearly my very thoughts. I will add as well, that I feel bad for the lower end of the society who are about to be shat on by the unavoidable pincer movement from above, which will be exasperated and exaggerated by the current administrations policies. Poor folks pay the same $ for milk and bread as the rich, but the percentage hit that this change reflects is a huge, painful difference for them.

 

I repeat: "United we stand, divided we will fall" . Our country is a precious and nearly unique thing, a significant point that I hope we all can always remember, and use as a basis and a background for these discussions.

[ivan]

Да, Боб, я абсолютно ничего не знаю о Росии и про ней ничего не понимаю. Я не знаю никого, кто там живет, жил, или, у которых есть семя, друзя там. Я не читаю газети, новости, стаття про Росию. Да ничего. А Вы, иммигрант, живучи в штатах - як долго - 20, 30 лет? -- Вы все знаете. Вы всезнайка.

 

 

 

hey, i can actually read some of that!

[KaskadskyjKozak]

I'm disagreeing big time here buddy. If you look up the amount spent on this foolhardy enterprise, it staggers and shocks even the supporters. It shocks no matter how you look at it, as a total $ amount, or per capita. That cost MUST be borne by all us, and it is what you are starting to see happen now.

 

Yeah, that's it. So simple.

 

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

People are changing already

[TREETOAD]

People are changing already

 

Dirt cheap.

 

$1.12/litre here and that is in C$ That would make gasoline nearly $4.75/us gallon and we have the stuff practically pouring out of the ground.

[JosephH]

 

"This war" did not divide our country. Our country has been divided for 30 years.

 

Agree

 

Roughly, our country was deliberately and quite successfully divided by the republicans. This was a wildly successful part of a deliberate political strategy which included winning the south over from the democrats. It had its roots in the 80's, but really picking up steam in throughout the 90's with the ascendency of Ralph Reed and the "Abramoff-Norquist-Reed triumvirate" (with no other than our own Karl Rove riding as the fourth horseman of the [current] apocalypse).

 

In the process the old GOP sold it soul to the devil. And while some still cling to the illusion of a Disney / PG version of GOP ideology - it no really longer exists. Hell, even the memory of an honorable GOP in the Eisenhower mold no longer exists. Today's GOP is hypocritical in the extreme if you look at the actions and personal histories (family values - now there is a real joke) of the overwhelming majority of the key players. Their collective behavior, in fact, borders on being indistinguishable from organized crime. Further, if Eisenhower is cognizant at all he is roiling in anquish in his grave.

 

So the polarization of America isn't just that some happened to move left and some right. America was polarized by the deliberate and skillful use of race, religion, and fear to remake the politics of vast tracts of the US in a mythical, far right makeover of the GOP worthy of the special effects of a hollywood blockbuster. The 'old' GOP is not real or represented in action, belief, or deed on the part of those who put it over on America. Sadly, they killed what was the 'GOP' for at least several generations in the process.

[Fairweather]

"The vast right-wing conspiracy." Do you realize how you sound? Is it just possible that Democrat-party social(ist) leanings and programs (along with being apologists for communist regimes around the globe in the 1980's and early 90's) during their 30+ year reign of congress up to 1994 created a backlash?

Edited February 29, 2008 by Fairweather

[KaskadskyjKozak]

"The vast right-wing conspiracy." Do you realize how you sound? Is it just possible that Democrat-party social(ist) leanings and programs (along with being apologists for communist regimes around the globe in the 1980's and early 90's) during their 30+ year reign of congress up to 1994 created a backlash?

 

I have heard nothing but divisive, hateful, alienating, disrespectful rhetoric from the left since my early childhood memories in the 1970's. To blame the R's exclusively for the divisions in our nation is utter bullshit. The D's have been using divisive rhetoric both for their own political ends and just out of hatred and spite at least as much as the R's, if not more.

 

[Fairweather]

Anyone who disagrees with a liberal is usually tagged as 'divisive'. "Can't we all just get along...on my terms?"

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Anyone who disagrees with a liberal is usually tagged as 'divisive'. "Can't we all just get along...on my terms?"

 

And the accusations of divisiveness are usually accompanied by a tirade of divisive rhetoric. Oh the irony.

[TREETOAD]

it has seemed as if the country is united in name only since the the beginning really, but especially since the Vietnam debacle.

There is so little difference between the 2 political parties, it is really a fight between which corporate entity runs the show.

It seems to me that that the military industry has been in power for a while now. Maybe it is time to let Hollywood have a go again

[ivan]

edward gibbon, replacing "legions" with "democrats" and "guards" with "republicans" and "emperors" with "presidents":

 

"the democrats imitated the example of the republicans, and defended their prerogative of licentiousness with the same furious obstinacy...but when the last enclosure of the constitution was beaten down...with bloody hands, savage manners, and desperate resolutions, they sometimes guarded, but oftener subverted, the throne of the presidents"

 

 

[JayB]

Hey - a member of the citizenry who knows who Gibbon was, much less one who incorporates quotes into contemporary political discussions. Woohoo.

James Madison must be smiling contentedly from his grave.

 

Speaking of Gibbon, though, it's amusing to me to see this level of angst and despair about how rising commodity prices are crimping the lifestyles of people who live amidst a material and technological extravagance that would flabbergast every last Roman emperor and leave them in a state of eye-popping, mouth-agape disbelief when they pondered the lot of the average American.

 

As far as conservation is concerned, I'm personally happy that there is not - at least at this point - a central authority that can impose a collective discipline on how people choose to spend their money. The same agent of the "popular will" that could forcibly compel the redneck to eschew his F350 in favor of a soy-powered golf-cart could just as easily manifest itself in a popular hostility to lifestyle choices made by groups that are smaller, more vulnerable to coercion, and further outside the mainstream. In fact, minority groups are quite a bit more likely to suffer from unrestrained collective action than they are to benefit from it, which should give anyone pause before yanking that particular genie out of the bottle.

 

The fact of the matter is that the percentage of people who are wealthy enough to crank up the thermostats or A/C, do laps around the state in their F350s, etc without feeling the pinch is so small that the aggregate effect of their excess consumption over whatever arbitrary standard the "collective judgment" might deem necessary and acceptable is next to nothing. When prices rise, 98% of the people in the country will respond by reducing consumption by any number of different mechanisms. They may not do so in response to anything more high-minded than basic self-interest, but change they will. In the end, so long as there's enough wealth in the country to generate effective demand for more efficiency, and the laws are structured to that those with capital to dedicate to the task are willing and able to deploy it, the net long-term effect of higher commodity prices on our collective lifestyles or well-being will also be next to zero.

 

Now turn off your computers and go read some Gibbon.

 

One of my favorites:

 

"His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation."

 

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

 

[ivan]

One of my favorites:

 

"His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation."

 

 

funny - just read and highlighted that quote a couple hours before reading this - of course it took an army of africans to kill so virile a fellow!

[JosephH]

Clearly then at least some of you guys were too young to even be cognizant of the the work of the Reagan younglings once they graduated or how the country came to be the way it is today.

 

The sixties and the Vietnam war merely gave a voice to the reality that not everyone in the country agreed with the unbridled and overwhelmingly predominant white, male, christian, coporate, monied interests which were running the country through the 50's and early 60's. However, near the end of the Vietnam war, 60% of the population thought it was a mistake and given that made it two losses in a row it set up a conversation dynamic which was not based solely on the infallibility of the aforementioned power elite, but one that demanded a less autocratic form of government.

 

The conversations you heard in the seventies as a child was one of people expressing "we won't be fooled again" (despite the fact they just have been). No, the divisions you see today are not at all natural extension of those times, but rather engineered ones set in motion by men whose youth was spent in Reagan's employ and who went to great lengths to not only recapture their youth, but also to rekindle the drive of they saw as uncompleted by Reagan and especially Bush Sr. to reestablish the US as the dominant and preeminant superpower answering to, and beholden to no other nation. These folks were and are the core of the neocon cadre.

 

They knew that could only happen with expanded Executive power, removing the US from all treaties, and finding a venue to display US military might. The result of this pursuit of the lost youth of a handful white males? Disaster. After a brilliant fifteen year drive to power in which they hijacked the GOP, harnessed and exploited religion and race, rewrote the politics of the South, and secured all three branches of government - what happened? The blew it big.

 

And they blew it almost precisely like many alpine climbers do - on the descent. After this enormous climb to the summit of power the neocons thought the rest was a cakewalk - go it alone, push over a dominos, hey - everything will be a stroll from here on out. Well, the results have been predictably savage and for all practical purposes has left the descent littered with neocon and republican bodies with few able to claim they will be making back to their cars unscathed.

 

Again, what you see was carefully and deliberatly designed, engineered, and executed by a handful of very smart republican's. That's how they got all three branches of government - it wasn't an accident or happenstance. For god's sake, learn a little bit about the pride of you own party - the four horsemen delivered the goods - it's the team leaders that screwed the pooch by believing the neocon fantasy was a self-fulfilling prophocey that required little or no cogent management or follow-through on their part.

[Fairweather]

Clearly you guys were too young then to even be cognizant of the the work of the Reagan younglings once they graduated or how the country came to be the way it is today.

 

The sixties and the Vietnam war merely gave a voice to the reality that not everyone in the country agreed with the unbridled and overwhelmingly predominant white, male, christian, coporate, monied interests which were running the country through the 50's and early 60's. However, near the end of the Vietnam war, 60% of the population thought it was a mistake and given that made it two losses in a row it set up a conversation dynamic which was not based solely on the infallibility of the aforementioned power elite, but one that demanded a less autocratic form of government.

 

The conversations you heard in the seventies as a child was one of people expressing "we won't be fooled again" (despite the fact they just have been). No, the divisions you see today are not at all natural extension of those times, but rather engineered ones set in motion by men whose youth was spent in Reagan's employ and who have gone to great lengths to not only recapture their youth, but also to rekindle the drive of they saw as incomplete to reestablish the US as the dominant and preeminant superpower answering to, and beholden to no other nation. These folks were and are the core of the neocon cadre.

 

They knew that could only happen with expanded Executive power, removing the US from all treaties, and finding a venue to display US military might. The result of this pursuit of the lost youth of a handful white males? Disaster. After a brilliant fifteen year drive to power in which they hijacked the GOP, harnessed and exploited religion and race, rewrote the politics of the South, and secured all three branches of government - what happened? The blew it big.

 

And they blew it almost precisely like many alpine climbers do - on the descent. After this enormous climb to the summit of power the neocons thought the rest was a cakewalk - go it alone, push over a dominos, hey - everything will be a stroll from here on out. Well, the results have been predictably savage and for all practical purposes has left the descent littered with neocon and republican bodies with few able to claim they will be making back to their cars unscathed.

 

Again, what you see was carefully and deliberatly designed, engineered, and executed by a handful of very smart republican's. That's how they got all three branches of government - it wasn't an accident or happenstance. For god's sake, learn a little bit about the pride of you own party - the four horsemen delivered the goods - it's the team leaders that screwed the pooch by believing the neocon fantasy was a self-fulfilling prophocey that required little or no cogent management or follow-through on their part.

 

Come on Joe, you don't really believe that spew do you? The white, monied, capitalist, corporate, protestant interests of which you speak have been moving thigs forward--yes, forward--since Jamestown. It's almost as if your view of American history doesn't begin until 1968. If you want to read about real Republican corruption, try looking at a period in American history called "The Guilded Age" - approximately U.S. Grant in 1869 to Teddy Roosevelt in 1901 who brought the corruption to a screeching halt. You might also consider some of Lincoln's transgressions regarding individual liberty--specifically The closing of newspapers, the imprisonment without trial of perhaps 1500 American (Yes, Union) citizens for political expedience, and, of course his use of federal troops to quell draft riots in New York resulting in over 1000 deaths. They make your phantom menace look like flowers and butterflies. See also John Adams' Alien and Sedition Acts around 1798 and Woodrow Wilson's Sedition Act of 1918. Did you know that Americans who spoke out against the war in europe then were jailed? How about FDR's attempt to stack the supreme court and create a virtual dictatorship for himself. You have every right to spew your nonsense about the current state of affairs or your conspiratorial rants, but spare yourself the embarrassment that MattP enjoys by looking at the real and complete political history of the United States. Right or wrong, the road we are on today is the same road we've always been on.

[ivan]

saying we've always been wrong so therefore we should just keep being wrong is not logical

 

woodrow wilson was an asshole, as many historians have said

 

it seems odd that so many people begin their counter-diatribes w/ "you don't really believe that" - why in the fuck would they write such lengthy responses if they didn't? it's not like they're running for president and therefore NEED to lie.