posted by libramoon » Sat Dec 11, 2010 3:54 pm
note: i didn't want this fine dissertation to stay forever buried on the rant board, so i want to quote excerpts here (with the author's permission?-- well, hopefully ....)
It wasn't Afghans who did the 9/11 acts. They were just jumped on because they were being oppressed by the Taliban, unleashed on them as an antidote to Soviet invasion. Kind of in the same vein that we promoted Saddam Hussein to help fight the Iranians. The enemy of our enemy is our friend, until they are of no more use as a friend and more useful as an enemy. Meanwhile we destroy people's lands/homes/lives to make some kind of erroneous point.
Those quietly moving and shaking behind the scenes are the plutocrats pushing an oligarchic agenda. They have the best that modern psychology can offer to pick off those below with lies and fantasies. People become so conditioned, they just move along in line. It is all very sad. We have no idea what we are doing, not only to ourselves but to the environment on which we depend, in our mad drive toward profit.
well-regarded alternatives to big medical business are portrayed as quacks, scams, not allowed . . . As near as I can tell, they want to get us hooked on their products, then hooked on more of their products to counteract the "side" effects of the products they have already hooked us on and so on and so on -- fabulous business model until we're all sucked dry. People don't generally seem to understand that "side effects" are just as much effects of the substance on your body as, not merely incidental to, the desired effects.
The #1 problem in this country right now is angry cross-talk which keeps everyone at arms' length bickering rather than coming together to reasonably work out how to live together successfully . . . there is no possible way of saving ourselves out of the deficit. The only way out is up: growing the economy. If we want to survive this insanity we need policies that will encourage growth, like much more realistic education and encouragement of small businesses.
Get rid of all these unwanted foreign adventures, wars and rumours of wars and pushing around sovereign nations, and all those unfortunate weapons that mostly don't deliver as promised. Get rid of corporate welfare. Do real due diligence on making sure government agencies are administrated efficiently, including getting rid of overlaps. Spend to prime the pump, to encourage true government/private partnership in upgrading skills, promoting useful projects and providing sound infrastructure . . . Kowtowing to big corp is exactly the wrong way to improve our economy. Many of those "regulations" businesses complain keep them from operating effectively are imposed by big business interests who buy themselves politicians to kill off competition. For a thriving economy we need small, local businesses providing for the needs and desires of customers in return for fair compensation, and so on . . .
Don't cut programs that benefit people. But how do we know what is beneficial, what is merely politically expedient? Why not have a project: there must be Congressional oversight committees. Go through the budgets, piece by piece, not with an eye to cutting but an eye to efficiently administering programs to meet real goals . . .
government has no place in the free market. Free market forces, the invisible hand, if left to themselves will give everybody the shot they deserve . . . A major problem with this mindset, taken as an argument, is that we have never had a truly free market in the US. At this point the advantages to the advantaged are so intricately woven into the fabric that the only way to mitigate it is a radical realignment. People get so tightly wound into their ideologue fantasies they fail to actually look at the real situation and how their preconceived ideas don't fit it. However, there is nothing wrong with postulating philosophies as an exercise in discovering possibilities.
Ignorance and prejudice are not religiously based -- anyone can play . . . What religion is is not about morality or rights. It is about a common understanding of the meaning of life . . . Faith, spirituality, these are different from religion. Religion, way back in tribal society, was a "yoke" of underlying tribal knowledge orally transmitted. As societies grew and took over further lands, ritual, ceremony, gathering for more formal teachings of collective knowledge became more and more formalized into what we now call "religion". Morality, spirituality, these are more individual relationships to what is beyond the individual . . . Unfortunately, there are a great many seriously disturbed folks out there proclaiming Christianity as their cause. They harass people mercilessly for not believing exactly as they believe their God commands . . . There are a great many people who proclaim their love for their God and treat his Creation like a cesspool, and their brethren like mortal foes . . . Of course, there are a great many Christians (probably the vast majority) who are lovely people, living exemplary lives as their God commands, caring for those in their community no matter what the other states as belief because they understand in their hearts that the "One God" loves all of Creation.