Re:Australia outlaws warrant canaries
by anigbrowl on Friday March 27, 2015 @04:18PM
(#9278739)
You're assuming that if everyone did notice, they would just naturally agree with you, but too many of them are 'sheeple' - lured into passivity by entertainment, economic conditions and so on.
I'm sorry, but this is a delusion on the part of many people on the left - the idea that people act against their interests because they just don't understand, and if only they could be brought to see the truth, they'd vote/protest/whatever. The reality is that many people understand the left position just fine, they just don't agree with it. There is a large contingent of people (maybe 30% in the US; hard to gauge in other countries, but you have surely noticed the rise o reactionary political parties in many countries in recent years) who are entirely comfortable with the proposition that people of other races and social classes are inferior and should be institutionally discriminated against, who do not believe in the rehabilitation of criminals, who think pillage is a superior policy to stewardship, and who generally have a completely zero-sum outlook on life.
In some cases they simply believe the strong are entitled to subjugate the weak, and that if we run out of resources in home countries that sooner or later (their notion of) common sense will prevail and the world will return to a colonial model with the strong nations just taking over the territories of weaker ones and putting the people there back in their place. In some cases, they're religiously motivated, believing that the world was ordered a certain way by their God and that they should thus be in charge of things, and/or they consider the world itself a transient distraction from some greater spiritual truth, so any signs of long-term unsustainability are treated as validation of apocalyptic views. This is why very conservative Christians in the US are intensely interested in the Middle East, for example; for them it's not just another geopolitical theater with a complex strategic and resource calculus, but the site of Armaggeddon, the final battle between good and evil.
For example, the rise of the 'Islamic State' over the last year was greeted with considerable enthusiasm in US conservative circles - not approval, but very enthusiastic disapproval - because it seemed like the emergence of a clear ideological opponent who fits in neatly with western eschatology, and the extremist positions of the Islamic State itself evidence a similarly ideological consciousness.
I'm sorry, but this is a delusion on the part of many people on the left - the idea that people act against their interests because they just don't understand, and if only they could be brought to see the truth, they'd vote/protest/whatever. The reality is that many people understand the left position just fine, they just don't agree with it. There is a large contingent of people (maybe 30% in the US; hard to gauge in other countries, but you have surely noticed the rise o reactionary political parties in many countries in recent years) who are entirely comfortable with the proposition that people of other races and social classes are inferior and should be institutionally discriminated against, who do not believe in the rehabilitation of criminals, who think pillage is a superior policy to stewardship, and who generally have a completely zero-sum outlook on life.
In some cases they simply believe the strong are entitled to subjugate the weak, and that if we run out of resources in home countries that sooner or later (their notion of) common sense will prevail and the world will return to a colonial model with the strong nations just taking over the territories of weaker ones and putting the people there back in their place. In some cases, they're religiously motivated, believing that the world was ordered a certain way by their God and that they should thus be in charge of things, and/or they consider the world itself a transient distraction from some greater spiritual truth, so any signs of long-term unsustainability are treated as validation of apocalyptic views. This is why very conservative Christians in the US are intensely interested in the Middle East, for example; for them it's not just another geopolitical theater with a complex strategic and resource calculus, but the site of Armaggeddon, the final battle between good and evil.
For example, the rise of the 'Islamic State' over the last year was greeted with considerable enthusiasm in US conservative circles - not approval, but very enthusiastic disapproval - because it seemed like the emergence of a clear ideological opponent who fits in neatly with western eschatology, and the extremist positions of the Islamic State itself evidence a similarly ideological consciousness.