Zachary Amaranth said:
Therumancer said:
In so far as this discussion goes, yes. There is a lot of leeway for massive disagreement within the general support of America, however when your dealing with arguements that lead to the reduction in power and primacy of your own nation that is the opposite of patriotism... which is exactly the point. Right now it's "hip" to be un-patriotic.
That's silly. right now it's "hip" to want government to stop propping up toxic corporations. It's "hip" to want some accountability from Wall Street. Man, do you really think that accountability is unamerican?
I mean, we're supposed to be "of the people, by the people, and for the people."
Or is that last quote unamerican?
The way it's done, yes, it pretty much defines hipster/hippie politics.
The central issue we're facing right now in the US is that we are a capitalist system, where people have the freedom to own their own property, compete, and do business, with success or failure being based on your relative capabilities.
The problem largely being that we've gotten to the point where we have a few greedy arseholes ruining it for everyone, and using their success to load the deck so other people can't even get into a position to compete with them.
The issue is of course how one goes about regulating this kind of thing, without totally destroying the freedom that goes along with it. Right now the people protesting, either have no idea what to do for a new system, or want to impose some form of socialism which would bring it's own problems, probably greatly in excess of what we have now. Not to mention the simple fact that the USA's capitalist system props up a lot of the world, whether people want to accept that or not.
There are also international aspects to the entire thing, that largely come down to the US forgetting the old maxim "Free Trade means he with the biggest guns trades freely" we've become too pre-occupied with our morality and a desire for peace to actually enforce our own interests. One major example of this is the issue with China's "robber economy" where China knocks off things invested in and owned by businesses here in the US (and to be fair, also from all over the world) and then sells them at cut rates due to producing the products in sweatshops, and not having to make up the initial investment. In order to maintain peace the US has largely borrowed money from China, which was a combination of paid tribute, and to maintain the peace because the US at least could argue it was getting it's share of the money (similar to what it would have been getting from taxing those products and otherwise taking it's cut), where China was also making money to pump up it's standard of living. Needless to say as things change this relationship isn't working well anymore, with people taking those "loans" seriously due to China's increasing strength, and of course business interests getting increasingly pissed because the US has been snubbing them. After all when the US goverment let's another nation steal from you, while the UN and World Court try and prevent the issue from ever being resolved officially, it doesn't exactly garnet positive relations. The fact that China is rapidly becoming too powerful to guarantee a victory if we were to attack (compared to when we could have done it easily) also hasn't gone unnoticed.... and this is just one issue among many. One of the reasons why the goverment hasn't been all that effective in dealing with business interests is that it has little or no credability with them. It can be argued that US neglect internationally was part of what caused a lot of these problems (though by no means all of them), after all it only makes sense that a company that produces a product, and has another nation steal and undercut it, is going to run into some problems (and as I said this is only part of it). Our reluctance to go to war for our own interests and make people stop doing things, or respect our properties and interests have caused a lot of problems.
The overall point here is that there is a lot of Anti-American sentiment in the US (ie we are not majorly Patriotic internally), and a lot of that sentiment DOES come from Hipsters and left wingers over exactly this kind of issue, with such people ultimatly campaigning against the system in general without a clue of what to change (someone else will have to figure it out) or for some variation on socialism... if not some naive take on what anarchy would turn out like.
