Looks like maybe you been ironic so long it looks like sincere to you…

I’ve never been able to understand why outright hating on the wogs is somehow worse than this incessant desire to lift up the White Man’s burden.

And the ability to tell oneself that “the Democrats are different” is part and parcel of that total historical amnesia dAve pointed out earlier. They aren’t different. On this issue, they’re a milder version of the Republicans – which is about as comforting as a milder version of herpes.

We have four days

The diarist is saying he thinks next week the GOP noise machine will ramp up and start drumming for war with Iran. We are so fucked if we do.

What’s wrong with it? A country goes powermad and starts attacking everyone, and the rest of the world smacks them down. A better scenario than if that country won.

It’s true, Qetesh, that it makes no sense if you really consider it. I think it gets people on a sub-logical level. And, our culture over here tends not to reward logical thinking anyway. Somethin’ like that.

I dunno, I agree that Millitarism is well-embedded in our culture, I just think that to say that we in the USA are all hypnotised by Imperialism isn’t quite true. Some people are anti-Imperialism, and lots more don’t give a shit one way or another. The problem is sociological, but it’s also economic.

Would that be a better scenario?

I’m not liking that very much.

American exceptionalism is alive and well, and quite startling when looked at in context. Some of it is justified, but a lot of it isn’t, and that’s the part that gets very worrying.

When so many Americans can say without the slightest shred of self-awareness that America single-handedly won the second world war, that America single-handedly beat back the eevuls of communism by winning a staring contest, and that America has intervened in the world only to bring freedom and right wrongs, that’s worrying.

When there’s so much cultural glorification of the military, so much worship of force and war, which isn’t usually seen except in military regimes, that’s worrying.

When everyone the US goes to war against is ipso facto evil, and when everyone the US supports is ipso facto good, that’s worrying.

The notion that force of arms should be the first resort in any contretemps between nations is very, very worrying. It smacks of schoolyard politics, as does the constant reiteration by so many in and out of the mainstream that the US can’t afford to leave Iraq because it might look bad.

I mean, honestly, how do people in the world’s most heavily-armed nation come to believe that some ramshackle guerillas will be ‘emboldened’ if they get their entire fucking army out of someone else’s country? Do they really think that a bunch of guys hiding in caves and using old USSR guns will really think “Hey, they’re leaving, we must be winning: let’s attack them at home!”

It’s a psychological point that someone cleverer and more diligent than I has recorded in a book: that right-wingers hold their views because they see the world from an ‘authoritarian father’ viewpoint, in which things only happen because some authority figure makes them happen, and that authority figure is around to punish evil-doers. There’s a lot of fear in there: that without the big beard in the sky, or its deputy on earth, we’ll all go to hell in a handbasket.

Left-wingers, OTOH, tend to realise that people do things for a lot of other reasons besides coercion. One could extrapolate this dichotomy to laws, whereby righties make laws that punish people, while lefties make laws to try and make things fairer and/or take account of different situations/motivations/whatevers.

Clearly I’m less than sparklingly articulate today. Perhaps it’s a hairball. Excuse me while I hack for a moment.

Little anecdote from 1970: I was in high school in Vancouver, BC. A new kid my age moved into the neighborhood, from Oakland, Cal. The reason: his father had moved the whole family to Canada to keep his kids out of the draft and Vietnam.

Now Bob was a nice guy – totally cool, funny – but whenever talk turned to criticizing America-in-the-wider-world (which was rather a lot what with Nixon, Cambodia, Kent State, etc.) he would shout us down. The USA was not to be denigrated!

There he was in Canada telling Canadians that the country his dad had exiled him from was the greatest country in the world.

We were all pretty sure that wasn’t healthy.

One of the weirdest things about the mind-bogglingly huge Defense budget is that it’s apparently not enough to fight wars. As soon as we start one, it’s time to queue up the 2-a-year $50 billion supplemental bills, which don’t count against the budget (wheeeee!).

The militarism and exceptionalism is way too deeply ingrained in the American psyche to ever be conscientiously rethought.

All due respect, mikey, I don’t think it’s to do with “ingrained in the … psyche”, but rather with the [sigh] military-industrial-congressional complex. It’s ingrained in the coffers. The bloated military is now akin to a drug habit in Congress, and we don’t know how to kick it.

I remember that when the Cold War ended, I (along with my brother) envisioned a world that the U.S. could mold for the future. Basically we had the opportunity to prepare all our allies to start undertaking their own defense, and bringing all the troops home. We could disband NATO. We could give Israel a time limit. Of course in fact the era started with the preposterous-if-they-weren’t-so-destructive Gulf War and Somalia, and here we are. I don’t think I was very familiar with the implications of Eisenhower’s speech at the time.

Yeah, but that was in the sentence snarking about Allawi.