America: The Grim Truth by Fremdfirma

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

America: The Grim Truth

POSTED BY: FREMDFIRMA
UPDATED: Sunday, May 16, 2010 08:44
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Sunday, May 16, 2010 12:44 AM

I stumbled across this rather jaw dropping bit, since most folk keep dancing around what's staring us in the face, and soft-peddling it when they trip over it...

I warn ya though, it's a serious ballbuster.
America: The Grim Truth
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25166.htm
It's also too damn true for my liking.

Me, imma ride it out, if things do go to hell in a handbasket, maybe I can save one little piece of the world, or at least try to.

-Frem

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Sunday, May 16, 2010 2:40 AM

DREAMTROVE

Frem,

It's worse than that. As someone who travels a fair amount I see a lot of the competition. I was talking to a friend of mine from the Uk and I said, "it's really a lot like the third world" and he said "no, it's not. I've been to the third world, it's not as bad as America," I have to confess he has a point. I've been to the third world. The us is just more decrepit, more crime ridden, and more in debt.

The problem is that all the flag thumpers will flame this, but what they're really not accepting is that they are part okf the problem. People who assume they are the best have no reason to improve and so they bury us deeper into the squalor that we call the greatest nation on earth.

And if it really were the greatest nation on earth, do you *really* think that politicians would have to keep saying so? I'll bet the prime minister of Japan doesn't need to reiterate the phrase 1200 times just to get elected. There's probably relatively little of that coming from denmark and Finland as well,

People here mourn the incomes of those in the third world making $9 a day. News flash, those people can outright afford medical care and education, they do okay. I know a fair number of people in the us who earn over 100,000 on paper, but when you balance it out, they aren't making any more than $9 a day. And in the US that nine bucks will buy you a minute or two of boring lecture in a classroom, 30 seconds of nothing doing while waiting for a doctor, and the better part of lunch.

On the plus side, a lot of advantages to being a third world country,

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Sunday, May 16, 2010 2:48 AM

AURAPTOR

America loves a winner!

I'd like to see a bunch of quitters leave. It'd make traffic all the easier to deal with at rush hour.

I wasn't impressed w/ the article very much.

Bones: "Don't 'rawr' her!"
Booth: "What? she'rawred' me first."

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Sunday, May 16, 2010 2:58 AM

GEEZER

Keep the Shiny side up

Seems to me to be another example of the fact that if you go into something with an agenda already in place, can pick and choose only the information that suits your prejudices, and don't really care about exaggerating and bending the truth quite a bit, you can 'prove' most anything.

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Sunday, May 16, 2010 5:45 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...

I'm forced to agree with Geezer. The article is written from a specific point of view, and I don't think is wholly valid. To compare America to a third-world country is simply absurd. It may have been many years since I traveled to third-world countries, but it can't have changed THAT much. Hong Kong was so crowded it made me gasp, and the poverty was rampant. In Thailand they lived on and swam in the Klong, and disease and death were MUCH more common than here. India, Pakistan, Afghanistan were all consumed by poverty--even the disparity between rich and poor was far worse than here.

Admittedly both of the former have improved by far I'm sure, but from the film I see, not enough to have surpassed us...and how about Africa??

I reject the suggestion out of hand. I also traveled just a few years ago through Europe and even more recently England; granted THEY have probably surpassed us. And in Japan, they are worked to death much worse than we are, unless things have changed dramatically in just the past few years.

I didn't read it all. Once I got to that part of the article, I quit. The bias seemed so out of bounds that it wasn't worth reading further for me. I agree about the health crisis, definitely, but the death rate in MANY "developing" and "third world" countries is far above ours, as is the disease rate and in some cases the crime rate.

Yes, we have problems, big ones. And yes, it's getting worse. And absolutely yes, the vacation thing is incredible; I knew about that one decades ago and couldn't believe how much vacation/time off European countries and England got in comparison to us. It's definitely unhealthy, as is our lifestyle and our eating habits. There are lots of different efforts to change that; how successful they'll be, we'll see.

If all the "complainers" left, it wouldn't improve much. We'd populate right up again; our love of oil, our overconsumption, "planned obscolescence", etc., are killing us AND the rest of the world; those and other things need to change.

But the article is, in my opinion, far overblown in what I read, and saying third-world countries are better off is all I needed to read to understand that. I have no problem recognizing our problems and that they are severe, but someone with an agenda doesn't convince me. The article isn't "fact" and doesn't "prove" it's contentions; it's editorial opinion, to which he is definitely entitled. Doesn't mean I have to believe or agree with it.

"I'm just right. Kinda like the sun rising in the east and the world being round...its not a need its just the way it is." The Delusional "Hero", 3/1/10

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Sunday, May 16, 2010 8:41 AM

FREMDFIRMA

Pfftth, of course it's "biased", it's not fulla america-america number one, hoorah!

Ok, yeah, I am being sarcastic - but really, it does call into question a lot of the elephants in the room everyone is dancing delicately around pretending not to see, and I find the reflexive, knee-jerk, out of hand rejection most telling.

Not that I would leave or agree with his conclusions of what to do about it, but the problems mentioned are pretty damn valid causes for concern, and there's plenty that aren't mentioned also.

Hell, for example, one of americas greatest assets has always been our cleverness, our inventiveness, but we destroyed it with copyright law which makes innovation all but illegal and an education system that encourages folk to sit down shut up and obey instead of to explore, question and think.

Of course, the solution to the problem is as simple as it is intuitive, at least in knowing the WHAT, it's the HOW that's the bitch, always is.

When facing an opponent (in this case, the powers that be) that can clean your clock toe-to-toe on the field of battle, then you don't meet them there - you run them about in little circles and cut off their supplies, yes ?

So you cut of their supply of ready-made useful idiots and fanatic shock troops, and you cut off the damn money.

But to deny these problems have run us into the ground, to deny the average american in fact "owns" nothing but a pile of debts to the bankers, that's a fools gambit, a willfull blindness to the fact that they don't "own" those toys at all, they're just the carrot dangled in front of an idiot mule to get them to pull the plow, yanno ?

Now, while I've never been that much of a nationalist, I do, and always have, believed in the spirit of america, the idea, even if we have mostly fucked it up from the very start, and I do believe that even as low as we are right now (and historically, we've been lower and pulled it out) we *can* turn it around, but only if we're not going to snort, scoff, and turn our heads away pretending it's not that bad or that these problems are not a direct and imminent threat.

-Frem

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Sunday, May 16, 2010 8:44 AM

DREAMTROVE

Geezer,

Sure, everyone does that, but vie become inured, which si hoe I can read fox news,

the measuring stick here was worse off than other first world countries. That seems to me to be objectively true. It's not
Patriotic or
Popular to say, but if we want to improve the American standard of living, we need to recognize the problem.

Problems I see right off the bat:

1. Americans are slaves. Nowhere else ive been outside of china has the level of servitiude that Americans accept as their due. People need to be unplugged from the matrix, so they can use their energy in a more productive manner. Everyone has read dilbert but how often does It sink in that if 90% of the time american office workers are doing thing which do not actually need to be done that ergo, the collective productivity of the us must suffer for the wasted effort?

2. Were uneducated. Education is just too expensive and inefficient. Sure, it's better than haiti, but that'd not the question. Is it better than Korea or Norway?

3. We have a top heavy healthcare system. I can't get tests let alone treatments, but if I'm not paying for it, the taxpayer is. I kong for a system where I can go into the healthitarium
and make my selection, pay for it and walk out. If I don't know what I want, there can be a doctor who's advice I csn grt by paying him for his opinion. Think about it as you would a mechanic... That would be free market. I don't know why people are whining about socialized medicine, the system we have is socialist enough.

America is overconfident, and needs a little humility. Maybe then things will improve.

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