The United States of America needs to fall
 

I think it's the only way to fix it at this point. Hundreds of protests, promises of increased military presence in the Pacific, shit economical practices, and faux democracy that is controlled by the media.

Yes, it's still pretty good to live in, as long as you don't try to exercise too much freedom. I'm glad to have food and water and shelter and an education and being allowed to say "and" this many times in a sentence, but I do not approve of the way the government handles internal and external affairs, and I doubt many would say we're heading towards better times.

[example]

In New York city, police barricaded streets, and only allowed those with corporate ID's and those who "looked good", ie, suit/tie or elderly. Clearly, the intent was to keep protestors from blocking the street, but they police weren't allowing the press or even a man looking to catch the subway through.

[/example]

I don't like throwing around strong terms like "police state", but America is quickly fitting into a loose definition of that term.

Thoughts? Especially from those of you living outside of the US.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Yeah, it will be great if it falls, wheelbarrows of money worth nothing, even more strife and violence, tinpots taking control, people starving to death (at a worse than current scale), quality of life going down the drain.

All the "students" and left wing Ideologists will soon forget about what they were protesting about when theres nothing left, having "Freedom" wont matter to anybody, when you're free to die in the gutter with nothing to eat.

All these "Occupy" protestors in America and UK/Europe, most of them, bloody student or far left types and "Public Sector" workers, with the odd guinine bloke there, all claiming they're out for the "workers".

I grew up and am working class, did an apprenticeship, work in a factory, every penny counts, supposidly these arseholes reckon they speak for me, but they ain't got a clue, in the real world, we're still doing our jobs, getting food on our tables, after all is said and done, they all slink off back to their middle class surburbia, after "fighting the cause" that they can afford to fight as they have no real responsabilities and always have their family and comfortable lifestyle to go back too.

Half of them are a result of the privilidge and dont even know it and they come to me and they try to tell ME what its all about, Me, after working rock solid, breaking me back for far less than what their mum and dad buys for them. Half of the "Socialist" types also root for the "side" which is against their own people and country anyway, they dont really care about the "working man", they care about getting minions to join their dream of their "world order".

"Protests" have just become a "trend" for all the far left wing types, just as "Marches" have become the "trend" for the far right wing types.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

I suppose I should redefine what I mean by "fall". I mean fall, and be rebuilt better than it was before. It will happen, it happens to large countries every few hundred years. Someone described such happenings as "the manure" of society. I can't remember who at the moment.

You seem to have not seen anything of the protests but what main news networks are putting out. There's nothing wrong with that, as that's the case with most people. Go to Youtube and look up amateur and independent reporters on the situation. It's quite a different picture than what Fox/CNN/CBS paint.

I'm not saying there are not those out there who fit your description, because they are most definitely out there. But the majority are not at all as you described.

EDIT: Protests are not "trends". International news would soon show you that. They take place when the people are dissatisfied with the current state of affairs in their nation. People do not protest when there is nothing to protest about.

Question for no reason other than I feel like asking: Would you describe yourself as politically conservative?

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

We don't need to fall. We just need to oust our childish leaders for more intelligent representatives.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

I utterly loathe the Occupy protesters. While I don't agree with you on them being "far left", because many of them are not, I'll agree that they're a burden to society. It's a bunch of people who know what's wrong, but aren't willing enough to actually try and change it. Bitching about something is one thing humans are good at, implementing yourself into the system and trying to change things for better or worse is something few people dare try. They're no better than the people they're protesting in my eyes. I understand they want change, but they seriously need to try fixing it themselves. The people who got you into this problem are idiots, do you think they care enough, or are smart enough, to get you out of it?

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Well thats what their "De jure" claim, but lets face it, "de facto" alot of the people who go on these protests fit into a certain catigory, they go on them to be part of something, to be counter-cultural, "proffessional Protesters" too and like I said, most of them complain because they can do so, from the comfort from the background the "system their against" provides, its a form of rebellion for alot of them, oddly and ironically, alot of them grow older to become the same arseholes who then rule over the country and order us around.

I suppose I would be considered "Conservative", yes, but if we face the truth, most of the right wing "conservative" side are just a diffrent variation of sh!t

arseholes from both sides who if they just somehow agreed to "meet at the middle" and worked together for what benefits people we might actually get somewhere, but it will never happen, its amazing how so many people can base all their views on one side of the political spectrum, even if they contradict themselves over varying issues, its like "monkey see, monkey do" than actual "free thinking".

Its like me, I am strongly anti-abortion, I would tell anybody why I disagree with it and why they shouldnt do it, but guess what I am also pro-choice, as its overall not for me to decide what somebody else does.

Like the left wingers who "value all life, no matter what" who agree with abortion, but are against the death penality (this affects America more, in England, we've got rid of the latter), then you've got their equivilent, the right winger who "values all life, including that of the unborn", but are in full support of giving a criminal the chair or the injection, firing squad or whatever method used.

The right wingers who want more restriction on "free speech", but more guns incase their "free speech is threatened"

and the left wingers who are all for gun control, but hope for somekind of "Armed Revolution".

It boggles the mind and you Lads in America seem to be more divisive over politics than us lot in the UK.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

*cries tears of joy*

I can't find anything I disagree with in that post. You're especially right about meeting in the middle.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

There you go.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

You're obsessed with that man, man!

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

We need fewer politicians practicing politics.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

We just need to kick out all the current politicians and start from a clean slate.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

This is the idea I was getting at. Not a complete collapse of the US, but a collapse of what it's become, it's current government and most of what it encompasses and stands for. For crying out loud, they think pizza is a vegetable. Tomatos are a fucking fruit!

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

For good reason. Carlin was an astute and funny observer.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

No, the money tells them that pizza is a vegetable. That's problem B with the US govt.*: lobbying. Big business is trying to get laws built around themselves favoring themselves and their income stream. Where do you think the SOPA and PROTECT IP bullshit comes from?

*Problem A is immaturity.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

I think he's completely over-hyped. I agree with him, but I think people need to stop praising him like a god.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

That's ironic since he's a very vocal atheist.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

All good (and many bad) things get over-hyped. It's the nature of our communication. We use hyperbole to express that we feel strongly about an issue or thing. Carlin was very funny and quite smart. This combines to make him one of the best/smartest public voices in recent American history.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Do like Italy? Put technocrats as ministers, instead of politicians...

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Isn't Italy rather on par with Greece right now?

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

The people need to stop electing representatives as a whole. We don't need a guy/girl running anything just because he/she won a popularity contest which is what voting has evolved into.

Positions of leadership should be filled by the most skilled people, not the ones with an ideology or a list campaign promises. Do away with congress and presidency as a whole and let the experts make the calls. Decisions in economic matters would be decided by a group of expert economists. Energy policy would be done by a group of energy experts, education by education experts. The groups would be open sessions for the public, but there would be no lobbying by anyone. The bill of rights would still be around, but people would only be able to vote for local representatives.

The US has the best system of colleges in the world that produce the best of the best in nearly all areas of study. It is about time we put all of that brain power to use.

The other option is to simply wait long enough for our robot lords to take over the earth and hope that they don't exterminate us.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

I'm afraid that at this time of night I can't think of a better response to you than my first thought, which was of course: "Fuck right off."

People are protesting because their country has completely screwed them over and ruined their chances of making a decent life for themselves. Myself included: A Level educated from a good school, living in an area where it should be easy to find a job, yet I can't get a bloody thing (and I'm far from being the only one here) and I'm going to come out of higher education in three years time with £27000 debt, if I get the chance to go at all.

What we need is a government that's willing to come down like a ton of bricks on banks and companies who are acting irresponsibly, dodging taxes, and paying themselves inordinate sums of money as "bonuses", and start giving something back to the public who they're supposed to be serving.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Ok now how does this system deal with corruption? Corruption is inevitable, but the system needs to have a good defence mechanism against it. What you described is far too vague, it's a good idea but it isn't as simple as "You do this, I do that, we all get together for a circle jerk every now and then, and the public can watch". While I do agree with the idea, corruption is the reason so many governments fail in the first place.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

When possible their recommendations are peer reviewed by their respective fields of study. The peer review process has worked for academia for a few hundred years now. Any attempts to corrupt the system would be hard to get past a group of people who understand the issue just as well as everyone else.

The whole system would keep people who have no idea what they are talking on on issues out of the discussion. I do agree with the tea party on some issues and OWS on others. However both groups are full of people who don't know what they are talking about.

The best example of my system in recent memory was the bi-partisan debt panel which was commonly referred to as 'the gang of 6'. They worked out an excellent plan to fix the US debt problem, social security, and Medicare. Several of the members strongly disagreed on parts of the plan, but they backed them because they were the best ideas.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

The problem with just saying that the experts will rule is that whoever gets to decide who the experts are becomes the next closest thing to god.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Maybe lobbying and political parties should be illegal. They have too much influence on politicians.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Assuming those people are incorruptible, I think you may be right.

So if someone doesn't understand the discussion at hand, they're cast away, they get no say in what goes, their voices not even heard? The fewer people in control the worse, that's why these things go down hill. The fewer people who understand the problem the worse it is, they can take advantage of it much easier. Instead of casting away those who don't understand it, maybe taking time to enlighten them would be a better idea?

Great to see it worked.

It's worse than the current system they use. Instead of letting everyone vote, only certain people can vote for the leader they think is the most knowledgeable on the subject.

Of course, that's if I'm understanding this correctly, there wasn't much of an explanation beyond "experts vote for experts". Even if the general populace have a say, what good is it when they don't understand what is going on?

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

The peer review system has called out people on their biases quite often.

Also it is hard to corrupt thousands of people vs the 635 that are in congress today.

Blame congress and president as a whole, not the 6 people who came up with the plan. The gang of 6 sent the plan to Obama and congress. Both said no to it because it had things they hated.

If they want to get their voices heard on a particular subject they will seek formal education in said subject. If they get to the point where their voice counts for something at least I can know they are not retarded unlike the voting public out there today.

Better than a popularity contest where people like Perry and Cain compete to be the most popular. At least I know the people who are running things don't have a case of the downs.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Not necessarily, no.

The minute you make education required for something beyond the practical ends to which the knowledge can be put, quality nosedives. Because while you can pay people to teach you, you won't be checking to make sure that what you're being taught has any real use - and you won't find it out later on if the knowledge is never tested. That's just not why you're really there; you're there to get a degree, not to learn anything worthwhile. University's been going that way for a while in the West - you need a degree to do jobs for which there's no practical use for the knowledge contained in the degree. You can have an excellent degree grade and be a moron who just recites lists.

You stand a very good chance, if we enact your proposal, of ending up with a system where people have to know about the works of Confucianism and crap like that in order to serve in your government. As China did with their own civil service exams. The mass of over-educated people with pointless educations eventually got so bad there that they had among the most destructive civil wars that have ever been seen. The most destructive revolt of the 19th century, the Taiping revolt, was led by a school teacher, Hong Xiuquan. Who, after failing the civil service exams, hallucinated that god told him he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and had to rid China of demons. It took 14 years to put his rebellion, the "Heavenly Kingdom", down and cost tens of millions of lives - and he could do it largely because of the fractures in the empire's structure that resulted from having lots of disillusioned over-'educated' people floating around.

Arguably a far more serious problem, in terms of China's strength, was that by the time you got around to Daoguang in the closing days of the Qing dynasty, education had become so separated from the concerns of ruling that you just couldn't GET good help. Even the top of the crop, otherwise intelligent, diligent people - like Lin Zexu - failed to make proper use of even the most trivial of resources that could have saved their bacon.

We already (back in the West, and modern times) teach most subjects as the history of X rather than actually teaching people to do X. You just sort of pick up a few tips and tricks (if you're lucky) that are useful for publishing stuff when you're doing post-grad as far as actually learning to do your subject. We're not far off the point where education becomes totally irrelevant for anything beyond getting your foot in the door. Having a degree, even being a widely published professor, is no guarantee of good sense. Especially when your job security relies on the number of papers you publish.

And there are other parallels with Imperial China - they too enjoyed a period of almost unchallenged martial and economy prosperity. From the Chinese point of view the history of the world was the history of the Mandate of Heaven (by which they justified their rule) and that of the, 'ten thousand subservient [other] nations.'

You talk of peer review - well peer review has not solved the problem. There are thousands of papers published every year with absolutely no redeeming value. Research is funded to support particular points of view with methodological tricks.... And very few people will pay you to find things wrong - (which is much of the true business of rationality; any idiot can generate a hypothesis and find evidence for it - that's not the hard bit.)

The person selecting the experts might be a complete and utter moron who just selects random professors that publish a lot of cookie-cutter papers. (Who he thinks are good simply on the grounds they agree with him.) However, even if he's not, that's no guarantee that his predecessors won't be. The original rulers of China when they set up their system of exams for government office were incredibly competent - and it still went utterly tits up.

If you're going to look at academic elitism as a model for leadership you have to look at historical examples of how it's failed. Not just how it has succeeded.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

Is this a democracy you're trying to explain, because it sounds like the exact opposite. The general public doesn't have the time to learn half the things about how a country works - that's why the PEOPLE can elect someone who does! If you don't let people have a say because they don't understand, you're narrowing it down to a select few people who do have a say.

What you're proposing is an Oligarchy, a system where the elite (or in your case the few who are educated) have the say in what goes. Which is basically tyranny. And few people in America would want that, but I guess that's what you're getting at isn't it?


[Nemmerle's Post]

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

They've gotten a new gov't under Mario Monti, which includes 0 politicians and a whole bunch of technocrats; people who, in theory, know what to do and are experts in certain domains. I wouldn't be surprised if Draconian measures would be included in his reign, since they're pretty much in large debts.

Italy has become on par with Greece because of Berlusconi's non-chalant and non-adequate leadership. Now, if Italy leaves that much beloved "broken countries" group, then it'll mean that Monti's tactics have worked and that technocrats make better rulers than politicians. This is without including possibilites of corruption etc... This would also be a clear message for us: kick them unable politicians out and give some more posts to technocrats.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

yeah, it suddenly all matters when it happens to Students and the middle class, working class and labourers have been getting the rough end of the stick for generations and years and it never mattered to half the people who are now "making their voices heard" as new changes are affecting their social group.

All you ever hear about this reccession is the Middle Classes moaning that they cant run over two cars and go on decent holidays anymore, it makes me bloody laugh.

For the working classes, unless we lose our jobs, our lives aint even effected, as nothing has changed for us anyway, our money is always mainly taken. End result is its often us who face the Redundancy from work, because those higher up the ladder never want a decrease in their lifestyle, even though even their lifestyle decreased is lightyears better than ours.

Re: The United States of America needs to fall
 

The founding fathers intended to have an educated voting public. For the most part that is why at the start only white, land owning males could vote. In that time only white land owning males had a real education.

I would still prefer it to the Oligarchy that we have today where the only people who have a real say also have boat loads of money. Today anyone with enough drive can work their way through the university system and get a PhD. Going from nothing to the super rich is more luck than drive.