... but I can't keep up the offense for very long as the rest of it is about right. Large numbers of Americans are simply tone deaf to irony that is the slighest bit dry, and our common heavy reliance on tone of voice to convey sarcasm has been causing havoc in the internets since the emergence of Usenet News.
And then there is a feedback relationship where people get in the habit of speaking very explicitly, like this very same fracken pedantic tome that this comment has become, and so people assume that there is not something there if it is not spelled out, repeated and underlined.
And so social conventions evolve and have been since before the dawn of time (or maybe 10:37am PEST 6,324BCE).
Eight of those reside in part in the country of the US, and the most insular (or two most insular), naturally enough, reside entirely entirely the boundaries of the US.
I think that this may have something to do with the way that the outside world vanishes from consideration in US media. The constant redefinition of America to create the myth of a single nation-state is also accompanied by a constant contest over which nation has what influence in that definition tends to squeeze out the consideration of the nation's profile in the world. As any conversation that does not have room to grow, it becomes dominated by crude caricature and unfounded myth.
At the same time this analytical device, as with any analytical device of this kind, is only partly true. The genuine diversity between regional cultures in North America loom largers due to the greater familiarity ... the better we know a neighbouring people, the easier it is to recognise differences that an onlooker might overlook or see only dimly. And the extraordinary parochialism of experience of most people in the US fosters a how much greater a range of diversity there really is among the peoples of the world.
The phenomena of an hour or more of local news, combined with half an hour in the evening for national and international network news programming ... boilding down to less than 24 minutes of programming ... with up t half of that coverage devoted to puff pieces, and the majority devoted to national coverage leads to an extraordinary realization.
Except for a small portion of news junkies, the citizenry electing the government which is the locus of power of a World Empire receive maybe 5 minutes of actual information about what is happening in the current world outside the United States.
And when there is an ongoing involvement of the World Empire in military action, the coverage of international affairs from outside that realm of conflict can boil down to 5 minutes a week.
This is, of course, not a conspiracy ... it is a system. It evolved because the various parts of the system support each other.
The keystone of the arch, however, is probably the development of a system whereby Americans could be inundated with data without the serious risk of becoming informed. This freed Eisenwhoer's MI complex from the natural ebb and flow of American imperial adventure, in which a defining national myth was mobilized for external aggression, and then the people were revulsed by the failure of the external world to conform to the myth and there was a countering move to demobilisation. After WWII, blinding the American public to what is happening in the outside world and replacing it with replays of the myth played out on the screen allowed the mobilization to continue.
Every system has its Achilles heel, and the Achilles heel of this system is the freedom that it grants the MI complex to engage in monumentally foolish external adventures. This is a system for the MI complex to explore to find out exactly how badly they have to screw up in order to re-spark American isolationism.
As we have seen in the last five years.
There is no uncertainty that this experience will cause a revulsion. The uncertainty is whether we can find any of the knots that are tying the blindfold on, or whether we will simply go blundering blindly off in a different direction. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Edge city, now, I hope will be a less enduring cultural exploration. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
... fosters a how much greater a range of diversity there really is among the peoples of the world.
should be
... fosters a myopia regarding how much greater a range of diversity there really is among the peoples of the world. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Half hour news program starts at 5:30. Besides 10 minutes of commercials, there will mostly be lots of local news. Some national news. Sports. then at 5:55 there will be this international news: "Yep, there's a world out there. Okay, after this commercial, we want to show some cute dog show clips"
Clearly I'm being snarky here...but not too far off (really!). The national news hours might give you a little more international news, mostly as these relate to the US...our wars, our efforts to help in natural disasters, natural disasters, etc. And so it goes...that's what an American hears, unless they are motivated to seek more info out elsewhere (like here at ET).
Am I inaccurate with this characterization? I don't think I'm too far off... "Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia
This wallpaper is the background radiation of daily life: news, music, celebrity, sport, corruption etc. It tempts the externalization of thought. It allows people to stop thinking by continuously amusing them. It also betlittles seriousness.
But the worst thing is that it creates an environment of soundbite jingoism that comes to replace discussion and debate. And that suppresses learning.
As John Cleese enthusiastically explained, as an earnest Blue Peter-type presenter "How to play the flute: you take a hollow stick with holes in it and blow through it while putting your fingers on some of the holes. Right. And next we'll be seeing how Fluffy the giraffe is getting on in his new home" Or words to that effect.
Too many of us are tourists in life, taking snapshots as evidence for our friends and family to prove that we have indeed visited interestng places - when in fact we have experienced nothing but the facile documenting.
I am not against the banality of life. I am actually rather fascinated by it. But it is the different banal experiences that are interesting. I don't need a photograph of my sitting outside a Rome cafe at 10am enjoying a perfect espresso. What I need is a conversation with baarista Vittorio about what goes into a perfect espresso - the coffee, the grind, the constant mechanical adjustments for outdoor temperature and humidity. Because I'd like to learn how to do such a banal thing perfectly myself, at home. You can't be me, I'm taken
First, the local news is a seperate show. Often two half hour shows back to back, with the second one being the traditional local nightly news, and the first one being a local "infotainment" show that calls itself a current affairs show.
On the main local news show is the local news, state news (regional news for some very small states), sports news, and weather. Its viewership, therefore, is much higher than the viewership of the national news.
The national news is half an hour, at most 22 minute of programming, starting with whatever the 24 hours news networks and the major newspapers have decided is the "breaking" story of the night. That can be followed by one or two follow up stories on that breaking news, espcially if it involves a missing little blond white girl or a big winter storm that will disrupt business travellors lives, and the less there is to say the more likely they are to have additional pieces.
Then comes a sound bite apiece from a republican and a democrat on something, then a magazine piece that shows that they care about the issues that matter in your everyday lives, then coverage from overseas if there is a war on or an American politician is visiting a place where they have stringers, then a piece in a human interest series, and then the dead donkey and its a wrap.
I would satirise it, as series of Australian comedy sketch shows satirised their nightly news, but American nightly news is self-satirising. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Methinks superposed on the Nine/Ten Nations of North America, there is a US-countrywide trend of uniformity. This trend is the moving-around, the high mobility of the US population. This trend is not new, but it was greatly facilitated by the government-encouraged construction of the suburban-spread-plus-cars settlement structure. The underlyíing architectural, city-structural uniformity made a much stronger cultural uniformisation possible than the EU's basic right of free movement across borders will ever do. Thus both the regional and ancestral identities are hollowed out, its remains often 'worn' in a fetishistic way, in the sense redstar wrote about. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
What all the free movement of persons is doing in the UK is fostering the appearence of hundreds of expatriate businesses, like Polish bakeries distributing Polish bread to the whole of England, or Lithuanian corner stores, or Turkish convenience stores with signs announcing "we have Czech/Polish/Slovak food" in the respective language, or carrying Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish [yummy childhood flavours!], Danish products without announcing them.
We'll see whether the free movement of services [such as construction] and the participation of expatriates in local elections will have an impact on local development of housing and infrastructure. I doubt it, so the various EU member states (and regions within them) are likely to preserve their distinctive flavour, and the American "no-place" [for if, as in suburbia, every place looks like every place else, there are no separate places to speak of] won't happen. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
The American frontier economy was based on settlement in newly taken land, building up the economic value of the settlement by establishing a local export-based economy, and then the next generation moving on to the next zone of newly taken land.
After the frontier closed around 1900, America eventually settled on the highway system as a way to engineer new frontiers to engage in the same process.
Even as dimly as I see a European model, and as briefly as I sketch that above, it is easier to see how it becomes a sustainable steady state system by providing for a regular outmigration from the urban centre to the hinterland (which may be smaller centre in the hinterland).
Making a frontier expansion model sustainable is tougher, and I am sure some would argue it is impossible. My outer-suburban retrofit ideas diaried in the Daily Kos involves using an interegional public transport line as the infrastructure subsidy for a process of frontier settlement of low density outer suburbs with a network of higher density outer suburban villages.
However, on its own it is only a transitional system. The hope is that it is a transition in the direction of sustainability, rather than another transition trying to avoid sustainability.
{NB. I try to speak very carefully here of A pattern IN Europe as opposed to THE pattern OF Europe. "Singular and comprehensive" pattern is not assumed.} I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
In addition to neo-colonialism, of course. Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides
The EU in that regards is, in other words, far more like the US of 1800, when most people thought of themselves as a State citizen first, and a US citizen as well.
Of course, if there is a tendency among USofAmericans to equate Real_World=USA, there is also a tendency in Europe to equate Real_World=Europe.
What makes the Nine Nations thesis so useful for analysing events in the US is the very strength of the myth of a common national identity. That is what makes the understanding of the main regional identities so important in understanding social and political events in the US.
However, it must be recognised that if the myth was firmly establish that the US is a confederation of Eight (or more likely Nine) Regional Nations, using a state federal system as the arena to decide upon cooperative confederation-wide actions, it would be equally necessary to point out how the common impacts of those common actions makes for very real threads of common identify contained within the national boundaries.
An attempt to understand current social, political and economic events WRT the Nine Nations thesis alone would not stand up, not without substantial further political evolution. It would be incoherent to pretend there are no coherent differences that line up on the US-Canadian border that runs through New England, Foundry, Breadbasket, Empty Quarter and Pacific Northwest, and the Mexican-American border that runs through Mexamerica. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Yes, people in the EU are more likely to encounter a broader range of diversity than people in the US, but there are fewer people in the EU who imagine themselves to be Europeans first and foremost, and French and Pole and Slovak and Spanish and Scottish after.
How many MEPs does Newropeans reckon to obtain in the European elections of 2009? Newropeans reckons to obtain between 5% and 10% of the votes in the European elections of 2009 and therefore between 50 and 75 MEPs. This would immediately turn Newropeans into a key political actor in the European Parliament: the only one with a European group from the same political movement, and the only one to have a direct relationship with European citizens from all over the continent. That will allow us to implement the programme, and to attract MEPs and other movements represented in the European Parliament. In function of such a result, Newropeans would hope to obtain over 150 seats in 2014.
Newropeans reckons to obtain between 5% and 10% of the votes in the European elections of 2009 and therefore between 50 and 75 MEPs. This would immediately turn Newropeans into a key political actor in the European Parliament: the only one with a European group from the same political movement, and the only one to have a direct relationship with European citizens from all over the continent. That will allow us to implement the programme, and to attract MEPs and other movements represented in the European Parliament. In function of such a result, Newropeans would hope to obtain over 150 seats in 2014.
Of course, maximum entropy estimates are admissions of ignorance, and therefore an inducement to fill in the blanks with knowledge. I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
