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It hasn't happened.
It isn't happening.
It will never happen.
It isn't that you're a "fool" (you write much more intelligently about the subject than I could).
It's that governments are insane.
It isn't even so much that they are insane, it is just that those that actually run governments run them to advance what they perceive to be their own interests. Those interests do not at all match the interests of the people who do not run the governments, or with the general interest of the nations being governed. Their perceptions with regard to their own interests may even be incorrect, but that is a different issue from insanity.
The biggest problem is that governments tend to be run by men in their fifties or older, who know that they are going to be in power for only a few years (and alive for only a few years beyond that, at best). They thus have an extremely short-term focus. Crises that unfold slowly over decades with long term consequences that could last for centuries or forever and that require long-term mediation efforts simply don't make it on to their radar screen.
It is a difficult problem, and I'm not sure that a really good solution exists for it. Philosopher kings, anyone?
Governments are either insane or have a logic that is not apparent to us "common folk".
Our entire culture is insane.
More likely our society is inebriated with cheap and easy power. Perhaps sanity will return when this "drug" supply runs out.
Of course, it won't be fun going "cold turkey".
Well is the government of Norway insane? Switzerland? Germany?
I think a government generally works pretty well to advance the interests of the predominant powers. So I wouldn't let "the people" off the hook so easily. GWB was elected at least one time after he had already been president for a full term.
In short, the "government" is part of our society and just reflects what the people are really about as an aggregate. Pretty sour lemon but there it is.
Personally I think this is too pesemistic a view. I don't think the government is particularly representative of the people at all. Rather Bush and his friends really represent the classs interests of about 1% of the population, well let's be generous and call it 5%. The fabulously weatlhy and powerful elite that controls well over 50% of the wealth of the United States.
These people also own, in a literal sense, the mass media. So their particulur view of the world, almost automatically becomes our view of the world.
For the last twenty odd years a "class-war" has been raging in the United States, where the rich grab more and more from almost everyone else and remove themselves increasingly from the sphere where most Americans live and work. Once borrowing becomes more difficult and the debt bubble bursts, the true extent of the massive re-distribution of wealth to the rich, will become startlingly apparent to all but the most obtuse.
It amuses me to do so, but I can hold these two views in my mind at the same time; they don't seem all that opposed to each other. In fact, I believe there are major differences between nations in how they approach these issues (or, whether they acknowledge them at all, in the case of the US), and these differences reflect what one might call a "nation's culture." Do the people of the US have steeper discount rates than those of Sweden? Because they're sure acting like it.
If they push it too far they may need more then just Blackwater.
I would very strongly dispute this.
The US is the large problem child but the people of the US have been under constant planned attack for decades now. It is unfair to blame it just on the people, especially when ignorance is rampant due to a education system that teaches more social engineering then any other kind.
The insanity is to have a system that for all practical purposes is a single party under the same ownership and with no social responsibility whatsoever. The demand side of this social responsibility has been destroyed by the planned influx of minorities and undue favoritism for some sectors of the welfare establishment with the deliberate intent to create friction.
You end up with factions that will never work together, just like Palestine or Iraq, and the small minority at the top that owns all the politicians laughs all the way to the bank.
I understand that many people here are far more educated then me, but the view from corporate penthouses and gated communities isn't the same as from street level.
The problems are leveraged on the street, it will not take all that much for things to get out of hand.
All the technical ideas are interesting and pursuable, but they are not going to work without a systemic change that evens the playing field or at least is perceived as evening of the playing field.
Comparing the US with Europe other then perhaps the UK in 2007 is like comparing apples and oranges.
Good point. Currently, one of Germany's major unions is planning strikes, because they feel that company profits belong to the workers in at least equal measure to managers/shareholders. (That the union demands are as extreme as the corporate counter-offer is standard horse trading.)
200,000 workers participated yesterday, apparently, in what was merely a 'warn strike.'
There seems to be a certain awareness that if you don't stand up for yourself as a worker, no one else will. And an awareness that the people actually doing the work are the workers, not the managers and shareholders.
The same applies to many aspects of life in Europe - and when it is described in the U.S. press, this idea that people standing up for their rights becomes an object of ridicule or scorn (not that critical judgment shouldn't be used - but that is often notably lacking). Or is just ignored.
No, it really isn't possible to compare the U.S., where apparently 40% of Americans believe they will end up in the richest 1% of the population, with Europe.
I may add, another difference is that Europeans tend to be a lot less binary in their thinking than Americans. When describing how Germany, for example, is attempting to handle challenges which are clearly facing the world in the future, it is often assumed that Germany is either a paradise or a hell. Instead, it is a complex interplay, a truth which Germans see as commonplace.
That was one tactic of the plantation owners in Hawai`i. (They resisted statehood for as long as they could, because they didn't want to be subject to U.S. labor laws.) They brought in indentured laborers from many different countries: China, Japan, Portugal, Korea, etc. They housed them separately and gave some ethnic groups preferential treatment. (The Portuguese got to be supervisors, since they were kinda sorta almost white.) They didn't want them to be able to communicate and thus unionize.