silveradept | Mmph.

Today was a slow day at work, and yet, today was an interesting day at work - I got to sort cable for a good portion of it. That was, well, less than optimally interesting, especially since I needed to separate the cable types from each other. The workspace got a bit cluttered, shall we say. And it kept needing more room (kind of like a certain operating system that I know about). And I get to do more of it on Thursday, I suspect.

But that's not important, really. What is important? Laser Tag, of course. This is a Do-It-Yourself thing, but if you've ever wanted to live out your FPS fantasies... this may be as close as you'll get. Unless you outsource, that is. That, however, could be more expensive than you think.

Apparently, even in Congress they're drawing some parallels between the Administration and the Third Reich. Some people think they're right. If they really do plan on turning the nation into a dictatorship, will someone give me enough advance warning so I can fortify myself against it?

So much to do, so little time. So tomorrow, I'll try to get it all done in time. Plus there’s thesis revision to be done - I got back a commented paper and looked it over. Hopefully this part's not the hardest of them all.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Shariq Ansari - Mario Kart 64 - Party in the Snowland

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

the-entity.livejournal.com

"If they really do plan on turning the nation into a dictatorship, will someone give me enough advance warning so I can fortify myself against it?"

There'll be advance warning when critics of Bush & co, like the fellow whose article you link, start mysteriously disappearing or meeting with unfortunate accidents. In sufficient numbers to constitute more than a statistical blip, that is - your great nation is producing so many angry political rantings these days it's only a matter of time before 3 or 4 political writers or bloggers coincidentally die within a few weeks of each other in car crashes or something, and all their blogger co-ideologists get worked up into a foaming, paranoid fury.

The article you linked makes a somewhat spurious argument, anyhow. Decreasing the minority party's ability to obstruct legislation or appointments they find harmful or inconvenient is a very different thing to getting rid of democracy altogether. The whole thing looks like a cheerfully brazen FUD to me.

(I've wound up reading a lot of US-political blogging in recent months. It's quite fascinating. It's also made me slightly more cynical than I used to be.)

Good luck on the essay, also.

From:

silveradept

Thank you about the essay.

I wonder whether the media will cover up the disappearances of dissenters, especially if the government, ah, "requests" it. Ah, well. I can only wait and see if there's something resembling a Rapture, but of all the people who are supposed to go to hell instead of heaven.

I know not what FUD is. Is it, perhaps, F'd Up Democracy? Even so, the ability of the Shadow Government, as a minority, is supposed to be able to put checks on the dominant party ramming things through. Since here in Amerika, the two "opposing" parties really don't differ that much, there may not be such an ability here. But if the minority is restricted sufficiently, it would then open the door to allow the democratic rule to be dissolved. I don't know how the people would react to it, but it would be possible.

(Cynicism is the U.S.'s second-biggest export, right behind hypocrisy.)

From:

the-entity.livejournal.com

The media probably wouldn't take much notice of it, but the relevant blogs would. I've seen the dKos (http://www.dailykos.com) commenters muttering darkly about some democratic party strategists whose plane crashed in 2003 or something, they think this was the "repugs" trying to take out people dangerous to them. It'd only take two liberal bloggers/journalists dying within weeks of each other to set them off, and there's no way they could be kept quiet if Bush's opponents were disappearing by the dozens. Getting worked up about suspicious deaths could theoretically happen to the right-wingers as well, but right-wing paranoia tends to be about leftist distortion and deceit rather than (premeditated) violence.

FUD mens "fear, uncertainty, distrust" - scaremongering, basically; an FUD campaign is something businesses sometimes run against rival products, like against the 80's atari (?) computer which was designed not to need a fan. Rival companies encouraged scare talk of the computer overheating, catching fire or melting, which eventually caused atari to attach a completely pointless fan to the machine to reassure customers. I use the term as the article's comparisons with fascism are really overblown, and putting forward Robert Byrd as a brave beacon of hope and reason is either deceptive or just plain dumb. Byrd's threatened to use rules-changes to overcome filibusters in the past, and changed rules to make filibusters easier to break (link (http://www.villainouscompany.com/vcblog/archives/2005/03/more_fulminatio.html) to an interesting overview of Byrd's love-hate relationship with the filibuster).

I seriously dislike the whole "Bush=Hitler" thing because it strikes me as either a cynical scare tactic or a massive intellectual cop-out. Instead of arguing with Republican words and deeds as if you're up against human beings with comprehensible motivations (a dangerous view to take; almost all human beings talk sense on occasion, and you might find up Republicans have good points to make on some issues, and then where'll you be? Half-way towards goose-stepping down the street to the stirring crescendoes of a Wagner symphony, that's where!), opponents of Bush take a series of insufficiently examined generalisations about how evil & bigoted republicans and the religious right are, and form a constricted but logically consistent worldview in which opposing them is necessary and understanding them isn't and whatever they say is propaganda anyway. Now, because they're evil bigots whose mouths spew lies, there's no real need to be sympathetic to them, and because their worldview's been more-or-less written off there's no need to be fair to it, and you get a nice vacuum of critical thinking into which the most extreme and overblown criticisms of Bush can be poured, and the result is a Bushitler scarememe backed up by increasing amounts of apologetic literature and a pool of Democrat activists acting as a meme support staff. And then you've got a feedback loop of rage and paranoia raging unchecked among a large block of people who ideally would be coming up with new policy ideas and offering reasoned, intelligent critiques of the ruling party, and this makes for increasing polarisation of the political environment (especially when combined with right-wingers' depressing tendencies to avoid thought by careless use of terms like "traitor" and "america-hater", but that's a whole 'nother can of worms...).

From:

silveradept

Ah, thanks for clearing up the acronym. FUD seems to be the way of both parties these days. Bush = Hitler is probably a careless association, one perhaps on par with Dissenting voice = America-hating terrorist.

Both sides are distoring their worldviews to fit their prejudices. How do we start getting them back on topic instead of trying to scare the most people?

From:

the-entity.livejournal.com

Well now. That's an answer beyond my ken - my own politics are so flexible I have enough of a problem avoiding getting infected with partisan rage from whatever my reading matter is on any particular week. I really need to develop more critical thinking skills myself, obviously.

There's always the obvious of setting an example, being the change you want to see in the world etc, and trying as much as possible to treat one's opponents with respect and find common ground and places to work together - like with the emerging bipartisan grassroots coalition (http://politology.us/archives/2005/03/bankruptcy_prot.php) against the bankruptcy law measures coming up before the US Congress, which seems to be pretty much a loan-shark protection bill.