Jubbergun wrote:
Which Totals: 221,502,179 or 90,089,738 fewer people than the US based on the census number I found that was smaller than your own 315 million. It's not that my perception is distorted so much as it is that you can't do word problems, which probably has more to do with your reading comprehension than your general knowledge or math skills.
Why exclude the rest of the EU just because they didn't make the shootings list? Or hell, even Japan?
Jubbergun wrote:
I don't argue that there are serious problems with our system, but those problems aren't the result of a free market (which we don't have, and honestly never will in the purist way some conservatives/libertarians discuss the mattter), they're the result of cronyism. The issue isn't that there is a choice between a moral society or an economic one. Human society has always had some basis in both, sometimes with the moral tied to the economic or vice-versa (the Code of Hammurabi contained sections on the wages of workers).
What you refuse to grasp is that cronyism, in the most general sense, is inevitable. People
won't approach life as individuals. They will always organize for mutual gain. The rich have organized because they have the means to do so easily, and anti-liberalism exists because they want to hold onto their advantage.
Jubbergun wrote:
Liberalism fails to bridge that gap, and, like most other political/social philosophies, only pays lip service to the idea of people as anything other than cogs in the wheel.
What's your basis for this jaded contention?
Jubbergun wrote:
Even when liberalism does 'take a stand' for a certain group, it usually does so, whether its proponents realize it or not, at the expense of some other group. Which is why 'downtrodden' women are granted special status and preferential treatment at the expense of men in our society. The burden of caring for the family/community (by way various support mechanisms built into family law and our tax system) still falls on men, but the incentives for carrying that burden have been chipped away or completely stripped. Making that problem worse is that while one of liberalism's modern fixtures, feminism, has removed the various obligations associated with 'patriarchy' from women, it insists that the obligations men were held to under the system they alleged despise remain in place. This modern conundrum of expectation and obligation without recompense is one of the key reasons men are dropping out, taking mundane jobs and playing XBox all day...or snapping and role playing their favorite bits of
Falling Down when they finally realize the overwhelming bullshit of it all.
In short, liberalism in general, and feminism in particular, has destroyed the mechanisms of morality and interpersonal interaction that once allowed society to properly function. The system of cronyism between our government and favored parties in industry is a direct result of the moral decay this has engendered.
Feminism isn't any more representative of liberalism than white supremacist movements, which exist for the same reason: the propensity of capitalism to treat people as economic units and the consistent patter of the rich to use differences to divide-and-conquer the poor.
The 'free market' came first - feminism came later.
Feminism represented an effort (however flawed and disingenuous) to engage the simple reality that women are physically weaker, less STEM-inclined, and less aggressive than men and are burdened by children. All those things only became the basis of a political movement AFTER traditional values had vacillated, and people were looking for new answers.
Feminism, and its role in the here and now, is something that came and will go, but like every other evil movement in history, it exists for definite historical reasons. You can't just say "we should just get rid of the feminists" any more than it could have been said "we should just get rid of the Maoists, Nazis, or KKK". Those movements may have been maladaptive, but they existed for definite reasons - because, in each time and place, reactionaries were too stubborn to accept that their world view wasn't practical.
Jubbergun wrote:
Um...you might want to look at a map. Despite the "narrowness of my knowledge and the intensity of American media distorting my perception," I know enough to know that Azerbaijan isn't in Central Asia. It's most eastern border is on the Caspian Sea, and it borders Ukraine, Albania, and Georgia. It's pretty much where Eastern Europe meets the Middle East.
That region is Central Asia. The eastern gate to Europe has traditionally been Constantinople. That is why the Byzantine Empire was so historically significant: it was the "defender of Europe", standing between the ruins of Rome and the hapless Western Christians on one side and the forces of Islam and the Mongols on the other.
The countries along Eastern Europe's eastern frontier are Belarus and Ukraine - Orthodox Christian cultures that speak Cyrillic languages descended from Greek. The Middle East is further south - dominated by Semitic and Persian cultures speaking Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Aramaic.
Azerbaijan's cultural definition came from Turkish and Mongol traders and raiders that were capable of traversing the vast expanses of Central Asia, a region that spans from the eastern frontier of Anatolia to Tibet, from Russia in the north to the borders of Iran and Iraq in the south. Most cultures in that broad, mostly empty area are Muslim in religion and Mongol or Turkish in ethnicity.
The same geographic facts that have defined Azerbaijan's cultural development still apply. The Caspian Sea has no ocean access, meaning it can't be used for shipping.
If you were an entrepreneur, how would you ship goods to and from Azerbaijan?
Jubbergun wrote:
According to a
joint International Labor Organization-Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development study prepared for the G20, the official unemployment rate is 5.5 percent in Azerbaijan. The rate is lower than the global rate of unemployment, which the ILO predicted to be 6.1 percent, or 203.3 million in 2011. If it weren't for capitalism coming in and buying up oil, the place might actually be more of a shit-hole. Then again, like I said, I never made it as far as Azerbaijan. The place could be fucking great and we'd never know it, because, you know, "the American media is distorting our perception."
You are seeing things from the standpoint of the modernist - you equate "great" with economic and material factors such as unemployment and GDP.
What you do not grasp is that traditional societies - all traditional societies - see the world in moral terms. GDP and unemployment are irrelevant because they do not see themselves as individuals, and they do not define their lives in material terms.
The family is the basis of traditional society. It does not matter if half the population is "unemployed" so long as extended families can care for all members, and the tribe can support those families that can't. This of course also means that the standard of living for a traditional society is quite low.
Hence my point that you fail to grasp that the antithesis of "traditionalist" is "modern", and you fail to recognize your own biases that make the latter invisible to you.
"Liberalism" is an effort to capture the best of both worlds - the efficiency and progress of modern life, and the sense of calm, community and moral purpose of traditional life. That those efforts are flawed no more condemns such efforts than the rough early days of the industrial revolution or dot-bombs condemn the industrial and informational revolution.
And it's very possible this is why shootings are rare in France. For all the malign heaped on them, the French are extraordinary at striking this balance. Few cultures (the Swiss and Dutch are others) have such a knack for balancing human values with technological progress. This is also why the French are very liberal, and why they make amazing cheese.
