Don't Be An Asshole
I'll start since I have a bi-cultural (Far)East-West perspective.
Underlying assumptions.
The superiority of the Western (European) civilization. This assertion does not stand up under scrutiny. Name me any Western civilization that has continuously existed as long as China.
The doctrine of individualism over communalism.
That human beings are inherently evil, greedy, and selfish.
My homepage link points to my Paradigm Shift blog that is mostly about the Eastern view.
Now, I eagerly await what 2cents has to say.
I'm being thoughtless.
I wish to thank you guys for all you do and for opening this forum, especially for asking this question.
Thanks.
Like Matt, I too was thrown by 2cents comments, and such gave my initial response on said thread.
I have a European anti-war perspective. But having given more thought to what 2cents posted, and with the benefit of Matt's initial thoughts by way of this sub-blog, I would like to take some words from YD's blog of yesterday.
“Right now, two groups of Americans are keeping the war in Iraq from collapsing under the weight of its own inherent contradictions: voters, mostly supporters of President Bush, who refuse to question what U.S. soldiers are doing in Iraq, and the soldiers themselves.”
When I read that, I thought there was a two more groups to add to that....., people who don't vote and couldn't give a flying fuck about goes on outside of America's borders.......... and sadly, there are millions of them, and the second group..... democrats who oppose the war purely on political grounds, not on moral grounds.
Maybe 2cents was referring to the latter?
Here is my take.In any large country such as the US there are prevailing attitudes that prevent change.
1.APATHY and 2.Fuck you Jack I´m alright.
most people will never do anything who have never suffered serious loss or suffering themselves.
The mainstream media is also the best dumber down machine ever invented.It prevents people forming their own opinions.
People are for the most part gregarious in thought and deed,,,follow the crowd dumb fucks.
People have to wake up.NO EASY TASK.
we are waking somnambulists.
I am Brazilian. I have a friend whose father was one of the richest men in town but had an obsessive fear of getting poor. He owned, among other things, several buildings, one of which was expropriated by the city administration at some point to make way for a street duplication. When that happened, the man went into a frenzy. He would talk about nothing else, he became introspective and sad, he acquired a manic thriftness and lost all capacity for joy over his life or his family. Soon afterwards he died of a heart attack. I honestly believe he died of fear.
Why am I telling you this? Because I think it illustrates somehow the prevaling mood in the US. Unreasonable fear, selfishness, greed, alienation. Americans have always been peculiar people - I know, I've lived there for some time - but there was always the warmth, the earnestness to make up for the weirdness. At some point in the last decades the collective American mind took a wrong turn.
I think deep down what most foreigners are wondering is, what else could they possibly want? This is a country that attained immense wealth, immense power, absolute freedom - things we'd all love to have ourselves - and yet its citizens are goign around like scared rabbits and seem to have lost all capacity for joy, humour or empathy. Dealing with an American nowadays is dealing with a walking cost-benefit spreadsheet.
I believe the problem is not Bush or the war with Iraq. The problem lies on a specific mindset that allows catastrophes such as those to happen. The US has bred a strange civilization that only knows how to define itself through its enemies, and thus needs enemies like a junkie needs his fix. People have ceased to expect anyting good from Americans; we can only hope that we are left alone to live our lifes peacefully. In our powerlessness we, on the sidelines, can only hold our collective breaths and hope we're not the next enemy.
Pedro, welcome to Iraq.
Considering 2cent was talking about a British company (instead of an Iraqi company) manufacturing Iraqi currencies by the order of the US government, I think he might be thinking more along the line of the economical foundations of the US empire (I hope he will show up in this discussion and correct me if I'm wrong).
The economical wheel of the US is run by expansionism and consumptions, not by production and availability. It needs constantly to sell products and make people buy and consume in order to make money. So they need to expand their markets and have an urgent fear of losing the US's dominance in the global market to other nations. And oil is the most important natural resource to the industry now & maybe for next 50 years or so, so controlling oil market is controlling the most important consumption, and production in the world for the former half of the 21st century.
And the US as an industrial entity is not losing money, but making lots of money by doing wars & evoking fears into people even though its government is using up tax dollars because military & defense industry in the US is making great profits now. By getting most of the reconstruction projects in Iraq, other US companies will also make great money. There is nothing like a war that destroys and consumes everything so much & so short a time. It is a great way to accelerate the industry and expand the market.
LotusFawkes wrote:
The doctrine of individualism over communalism
I think that's a strain of right-of-centre American thought rather than bedrock American assumption. It only looks like the latter because of the eliminationist thread in American life going back to and before Joe McCarthy, that suppresses the left and causes the right to look normal.
That human beings are inherently evil, greedy, and selfish.
See above
The superiority of the Western (European) civilization
Now we're getting somewhere. It's more even than that, it's the superiority of American civilzation to others, including Western European.
Other really bedrock American assumptions:
"We're the good guys"
and
"We're universally agreed to be the good guys, so anyone opposing us must know themselves to be the bad guys"
Neither of those are necessarily true; that is, the people opposing America don't necessarily do it because they're consciously on the side of the bad, sometimes they're just another bunch of good guys who disagree. And sometimes America is consciously on the side of the bad.
These two assumptions lie beneath the thinking of most Americans both left and right. The few with the self-discipline to break out of it occasionally are vilified by the rest as "America haters".
I do not believe the average joe blow in the US street is evil no no like I say unawareness is the cause of many problems,,the US leaders however most definetly are a most unpleasant bunch.
Click on HOMEPAGE if you wanna puke.Good ol Rudolph Giuliani
http://www.giulianipartners.com/
I believe the story of Scrooge* gets to some real bedrock issues. It is the story of losing one's soul, the very core of our humanitiy. At least Scrooge was not actively evil in a Hitler, Stalin, or Bushco kind of way. But the indifference, the utter disregard for others is the same.
This clash in the mind of Dickens is borne from the industrial period in England. It was industrialism that has brought on the far greater scale of evil we have today. Though perhaps the ancient Assyrians belie this, though they too were quite industrial for their time.
However, for more contemporary references, Mather's "City on a Hill" speech aboard the Arabella in 1629 does form the first of American's intellectual history. We've been trying to prove our "manifest destiny" it ever since.
What an interesting question. Too bad its rarely broached in public.
I think there is only one underlying assumption holding up Operation Iraqi Freedom: basic selfish greed manifested as a core belief that nobody else's matters.
America's self image is the classic solipsistic fallacy that only American matters matter.
This is tarted up in a variety of ways to rationalize otherwise unacceptable behavior and beliefs. Chief among them these days is that the Americans constitute a divenly mandated elite entitled to live above international law and beyond the World Court.
Been two books lately:
The Myth of Moral Justice by Thane Rosenbaum and No Contest by Alfie Kohn.
Oddly, both these men are Jewish and yet they have identified a fundamental problem in American culture.
1) Morality is utterlty lacking in the American legal system (I won't call it a justice system). Justice should be about re-balancing moral fairness, ackowledging moral responsibility, making apology, correcting bad behavior, AND repairing relationships. Rather, it is adversarial requiring a winner and a loser.
2) Even more fundamental is the inculcation that competition is the way of nature and of human beings. Alfie Kohn blows this whole notion to smithereens. The way of nature, and subsequently, the more natural way of humans, is cooperation. In fact, the case is made that it is not tool-making that is the hallmark of early humans, but their capacity of cooperation, especially since it is cooperation that is required for survival. Hobbes was a fool and a product of his t
Hobbes was fool and product of his time.
3) Embedded in Alfie Kohn's works is an attack on profit, or material reward, as a motivator of anything good. Profit is certainly a motivator for cheating, lying, stealing, etc, but not for caring, sharing, and helping others.
BTW, Happy New Year.
I dont know if anyone still reads this thread - but here goes...
2cents point is clear to me as an outsider looking in to the US. It was even seen by one of your founding fathers (cant remember the exact quote) - the greed that the US was founded on was bound to lead to the perversion of the constitution for the narrow benefit of big business. The US is a greedy and lazy society that consumes more than it produces stole most of its assets and expects things to remain that way. Look at how the native Americans were and still are treated. Is there any talk of reparations for their losses?
How about returning California to Mexico?
The point is there is something rotten about the American politics and economy that keeps the Bushes and Iraq wars of this world coming and coming again. 2cents may be a bit over cynical by implying that there is no point to YD's blog - but he has a valid thing to say. Unless you break this cycle of American politics what is to stop another 'Bush' comi
...
of American politics what is to stop another 'Bush' coming ten years down the road causing another castrophe?
What derek said.
America is always right. Specifically America has the absolute right to kill as many non-Americans as it likes. Non-Americans who resist being murdered are terrorists. Non-Americans who fail to kiss the ground Americans walk on after having their family slaughtered are "ungrateful". Anyone who entertains for one second that American soldiers are not angels is "anti-American".
In short the American psyche is psychotic narcissism.
I myself am becoming more and more puzzled as to what Americans think constitutes Americanism. There are a number of assumptions, pretty much unexamined it seems, about what "we" are like. One of them is that we are brave. Another particularly invidious assumption is that America's actions are underwritten by "common sense".
What I also wonder about is where do people who disagree with one another actually have to face each other and try to talk about their disagreements? That just does not seem to happen. The proliferation of so-called talk shows and talk radio, the inclusion of commentary within ostensible news programs, such as Fox & Friends and Crossfire, seem to me to make a point of encouraging antagonism and polarization -- in the name of audience loyalty, more than anything else, I have to think.
Few seem interested in hearing what the other's opinion might be. In fact, more and more, it seems to me that everyone already thinks they know what the arguments are
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