by HMKGrey » Fri Apr 07, 2006 1:20 pm
I think DU is worthy of discussion here as it goes to the heart of much of what is wrong with the country, IMHO. <br><br>We need to understand these people if we're to make any progress at all. Newkid and I have gone back and forth at length about this elsewhere. <br><br>The gist from my POV is that there's a whole bunch of problems that DU both represents and is representatitive of. Chief aong them:<br><br>- People don't really talk about politics in this country "in polite company" so to speak. It's incredibly taboo compared to Europe where people talk about politics in much the way they talk about sports. ie. They talk about it largely from their own highly subjective angles. Here it's considered impolite to query somebody elses affiliations, in Europe people have a "So what do you think of that?" attitude which flushes this stuff out and means that public debate and discourse happens and views get shaped and changed over time. <br><br>- Patriotism is a cancer and it's metastacised in this country to an incredible degree leading to the "We're Number One!" mentality that is inculcated in to kindergarden kids and is unabaiting throughout adult life. As we know it's simply not true by a host of worthy and vital measures but it's reinforced in the most innocuous ways - sports particularly and then, ofcourse, over and over via the media. Even many diehard liberals still possess vestiges of this mentality and it leads them to believe in THE SYSTEM and the ridiculous notion that their government is essentially benign because it simply must be as it represents the will of themselves. <br><br>- Knowledge snobbery. Knowledge tends to be such a polarized resource in this country that those who believe they have it find it hard to believe that they can then be so very wrong about something. Worse still, they subscribe to a bunch of left leaning periodicals and thus believe themselves to be informed meaning that the very idea that someone (even a corrupt and evil government) could pull one over on them is a ridiculous and impossible concept. To many DU'ers 9/11 can't have been an inside job because they would never have fallen for it - right? They're too smart for that, right? <br><br>I'm very possibly wrong somewhere or not seeing it all but I do think I have some of it right. I live in San Francisco and I can tell you that this is no easy place to talk about LIHOP or MIHOP... I know a lot of liberals who, in Europe, would barely be that. <br><br>Also, there's possibly an important difference between liberals and radicals. The slide rule has moved in the last decade with the right moving further right and I would argue that a lot of fiscal conservatives/social liberals have slipped right without really wanting to admit it or even knowing it. <br><br>The crucial thing about DU though is that I think it really represents a big voice: the well intentioned, get out the vote, it's all benign really crowd that we have to convince. They're largely good people but they're scared. They haven't quite stepped through the doorway a lot of us here have and they probably don't want to. I mean, even election theft got short shrift over there 18 months ago and, to me atleast, that was both smell test and statistically an absolute certainty. <br><br>I'd draw our attention again to the firemen in NY who, when asked about potential government complicity in 9/11, said he didn't want to think about it because then he might <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>have to do something about it.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br>My bet would be that his particular viewpoint isn't so far away from a lot of DU'ers. <p></p><i></i>
