"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness ... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” -- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , Feb 1996
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.” - Isaac Asimov, 1980
America is now a “shit-hole” country. We have a criminal, dictator-wannabe, addled president elect. A draft-dodger as commander-in-chief elect. A clown show legislature. A corrupt, biased Supreme Court. The corrupt rich & big business bought the election for their enrichment. Fanatics from every faction dictating policy. Flakes & wackos staffing the administration. A gullible, ignorant citizenry. America is now a comedy morphing into a tragedy.
This has been a long time coming and now it has the mass to create itself as the most deplorable fusion of mass ignorance and obscene demonic wealth hell-bent on global servitude and, of course, oblivion. To compete spiritually with the Big Bang.
I have a different theory about eggs. It's not that Americans can't buy $3 eggs for themselves. It's that they go to the grocery store and see organic, free range, cage-free, brown eggs for $6 and they become enraged that their neighbors are buying them. It's not the idea that people are suffering that offends, it's the idea that someone somewhere might be having fun.
Thanks James (or do you prefer Jim?) for articulating where I land on assessing the wreckage of the latest election. Rather than many well-meaning dems forming the circular firing squad, I think it's important to do a sober assessment of what a significant portion of the American public is devolving into. No amount of coddling on the cost of groceries is going to flip votes.
Moreover if you look at the percentage difference between Trump and Harris, it was only 1.5%, although they leveraged it well for a solid electoral college win. Not advisable to radically remake the dem party, instead go to full-throated opposition, and let the chips fall where they may as all the GOP show how unable they are at governance.
Exactly right. The Democrats desperately need the kind of muscular leadership found in FDR, Truman and LBJ (and Republican TR). We are witnessing the takeover of the country by reactionary billionaires who are turning into a banana republic for their own selfish gains. It's unbelievable. - Jim
Just view all of the photos out there with Timothy Cardinal Michael Dolan sitting in Trump’s lap. And the hermetically-sealed silence from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, owned by Leonard Leo and Tim Busch. Appalling is insufficient to describe the state we are in. The incoming pro-choice Catholic vice-president, a convert from something, is locked in the Dominicans’ basement in Washington, DC - Griftervania USA.
It took quite a few years, actually. Afterall, the KGB* didn’t recommence (after a 35-year hiatus) waging Sun Tzu-like disinformation, “active measures,” and strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us until late 1961 and early 1962. That was when General Gribanov sent GRU Colonel Dmitry Polyakov and KGB* Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA, respectively, to the FBI’s NYC field office to volunteer to spy for it at the U.N. Six months later, Gribanov sent false defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB* Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible penetrations (IMHO, Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy and George Kisevalter at the CIA) of our intelligence services and those of our NATO allies. *Today’s SVR and FSB
The voted for Trump because he performs "toughness", and they wanted a "tough" leader who is mean and cruel (that's the point) to their enemies, foreign and domestic.
This is not new, there has been no "collapse". There's been a failure to improve. There was a slow moral degradation through the Iraq War that will be generations healing.
The 2024 election was a moral repeat of the 2004 election. I remember how confident liberals were, then, too - Bush had been clearly shown to be as big a liar as Trump, with the WMD claims; he'd shocked the world with Guantanamo, with rendition-to-torture in Syria for an innocent Canadian software engineer; and the photographs from Abu Ghraib came out six months earlier. How could anybody vote for that?!?!
And yet, Bush, too, won with a majority of all votes cast, the first GOP president to do so in decades. We found out the American people were actually in favour of torture, which Obama didn't dare prosecute; the political backlash would have cost him Obamacare, so he let the crimes stand. America had wanted a "tough" response to 9/11, and it didn't really matter which Arabs died, as long as a whole lot did.
America was happy with that, torture never came up again.
"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness ... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance” -- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark , Feb 1996
Carl Sagan was a prophet. Isaac Asimov’s saying about ignorance is also relevant here.
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.” - Isaac Asimov, 1980
That was the quotation I had in mind.
America is now a “shit-hole” country. We have a criminal, dictator-wannabe, addled president elect. A draft-dodger as commander-in-chief elect. A clown show legislature. A corrupt, biased Supreme Court. The corrupt rich & big business bought the election for their enrichment. Fanatics from every faction dictating policy. Flakes & wackos staffing the administration. A gullible, ignorant citizenry. America is now a comedy morphing into a tragedy.
This has been a long time coming and now it has the mass to create itself as the most deplorable fusion of mass ignorance and obscene demonic wealth hell-bent on global servitude and, of course, oblivion. To compete spiritually with the Big Bang.
I have a different theory about eggs. It's not that Americans can't buy $3 eggs for themselves. It's that they go to the grocery store and see organic, free range, cage-free, brown eggs for $6 and they become enraged that their neighbors are buying them. It's not the idea that people are suffering that offends, it's the idea that someone somewhere might be having fun.
Thanks James (or do you prefer Jim?) for articulating where I land on assessing the wreckage of the latest election. Rather than many well-meaning dems forming the circular firing squad, I think it's important to do a sober assessment of what a significant portion of the American public is devolving into. No amount of coddling on the cost of groceries is going to flip votes.
Moreover if you look at the percentage difference between Trump and Harris, it was only 1.5%, although they leveraged it well for a solid electoral college win. Not advisable to radically remake the dem party, instead go to full-throated opposition, and let the chips fall where they may as all the GOP show how unable they are at governance.
Exactly right. The Democrats desperately need the kind of muscular leadership found in FDR, Truman and LBJ (and Republican TR). We are witnessing the takeover of the country by reactionary billionaires who are turning into a banana republic for their own selfish gains. It's unbelievable. - Jim
Thanks. Along the lines of this discussion, I submit this piece on the media environment we find ourselves in.
https://www.damemagazine.com/2025/01/02/americas-right-wing-propaganda-problem-might-be-terminal/
Thanks very much for sending me this. I’ll share this and other spot-on articles by Karl Bode on this platform and others.
Just view all of the photos out there with Timothy Cardinal Michael Dolan sitting in Trump’s lap. And the hermetically-sealed silence from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, owned by Leonard Leo and Tim Busch. Appalling is insufficient to describe the state we are in. The incoming pro-choice Catholic vice-president, a convert from something, is locked in the Dominicans’ basement in Washington, DC - Griftervania USA.
My next piece will be on "obeying in advance." Very disturbing what's happening.
And next we have AI arriving just in time to save us from ourselves. Just stocked up at Costco on wine, TP and Crème Brûlée!!
It took quite a few years, actually. Afterall, the KGB* didn’t recommence (after a 35-year hiatus) waging Sun Tzu-like disinformation, “active measures,” and strategic deception counterintelligence operations against us until late 1961 and early 1962. That was when General Gribanov sent GRU Colonel Dmitry Polyakov and KGB* Major Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover’s shielded-from-CIA FEDORA, respectively, to the FBI’s NYC field office to volunteer to spy for it at the U.N. Six months later, Gribanov sent false defector-in-place Yuri Nosenko to the CIA in Geneva to discredit what a recent true defector, KGB* Major Anatoliy Golitsyn, was telling James Angleton about possible penetrations (IMHO, Bruce Solie, Leonard V. McCoy and George Kisevalter at the CIA) of our intelligence services and those of our NATO allies. *Today’s SVR and FSB
It's not just an American problem. It's a well financed and organised international attack on democracy and progress of western societies.
https://substack.com/@justeflamme/note/p-155853559?r=4ajpnz
No lies detected. Both the innocent and guilty will suffer.
Maybe .oral collapse of a group of people. Time for a divorce civl or not so morality can continue.
The moral collapse of the Republican Party!
The voted for Trump because he performs "toughness", and they wanted a "tough" leader who is mean and cruel (that's the point) to their enemies, foreign and domestic.
This is not new, there has been no "collapse". There's been a failure to improve. There was a slow moral degradation through the Iraq War that will be generations healing.
The 2024 election was a moral repeat of the 2004 election. I remember how confident liberals were, then, too - Bush had been clearly shown to be as big a liar as Trump, with the WMD claims; he'd shocked the world with Guantanamo, with rendition-to-torture in Syria for an innocent Canadian software engineer; and the photographs from Abu Ghraib came out six months earlier. How could anybody vote for that?!?!
And yet, Bush, too, won with a majority of all votes cast, the first GOP president to do so in decades. We found out the American people were actually in favour of torture, which Obama didn't dare prosecute; the political backlash would have cost him Obamacare, so he let the crimes stand. America had wanted a "tough" response to 9/11, and it didn't really matter which Arabs died, as long as a whole lot did.
America was happy with that, torture never came up again.
"Collapse" indeed. Try "Continuance".
Unfortunately, this is true.