What are our national goals? What about the international rules of the road? And who are "we", anyway?
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Monday, August 31, 2026 20:17
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1kiki
I hope I didn't imply a sense of decay. What I hoped to express was a nation where groups of people have very limited identities, very limited concerns, and very limited goals. Which leaves national and international decisions in the hands of the oligarchy.
My response
It did. The fact that we hold onto our identities 1kiki is so much of what is the problem here. We need to learn to let them go and embrace the human identity. Our selfish is what drives our concerns and yes is another problem. This is why the oligarchy has so much control. Think about it, we have the right to vote yet we vote against our own best interests. This is best illustrated in ignorance portrayed by JAYNZTOWN.
ikiki
So my vision of the US is one of many disparate groups, each focused on their farm, or their community, or their religion, or their borough, or their guns ... I suspect the people who have the strongest sense of the US as a nation and who have a sense of national identity are newly-minted citizens.
My response
Where you and I differ most 1kiki is in the fact that while you chose to point out what you see wrong in America you refuse to acknowledge is wrong in countries you wish to promote. These flaws exist everywhere.
1kiki
That leaves the oligarchy in charge of the mansion.
My response
I and many others are trying to evict them as we post here. It’s why the Republicans don’t stand a chance in the coming elections and why Bernie Sanders has Hillary leaning so far left.
I am not that much a liberal but at times you have to focus on one problem, meaning the growing wealth inequality and let the other shit pass for another day.
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1) DO we need to have more-or-less global memes and ethics? How individualized can we be, anyway?
What I used to find refreshing about listening to CBC radio was the sense of national identity and expression of national concerns (yes, even, and especially in the call-in shows). I could be wrong but I think part of that comes from the media itself. People are treated like intelligent concerned citizens of the country and the world.
I don't know that I'd say there was a national Canadian sense of ethics - the country is too diverse for that, I think. But there are common threads among a large majority, the sense of being a small country that has to weather the larger country to the south, of Canada looking out for its citizens, and of being a nation of fair play. All good things to identify with and try to promote, imo.
I don't know if that answers your question, since I don't necessarily connect common identity with shared ethics.
2) Are our rights and responsibilities "god given" or "natural" (as the FF believed) or are they subject to change? IF they're subject to change, should we be involved in their development?
My opinion is that people are biological creatures with patterns of behavior. THAT SAID you'll always find exceptional groups behaving differently than the rest of their species - the courtly dolphins off of Australia, the (reasonably) neighborly baboons in Kenya, for example. Whenever you have creatures that learn they can learn different responses. So, god given?, no, I don't think god has anything to do with it. Natural rights? Uhm, no, there've been too many kinds of societies with different kinds of rights extended to different people to think nature is giving us any.
As far as I can tell, human societies have a broad enough range that we can pick and choose our preferred way of life without coming into serious conflict with our internal limits.
3) And, if we're shaping our rights and responsibilities (or at least accepting them), what do we want our society to look like, anyway?
I guess the last question is the first question to answer, since it's hard to know where you're going without a goal.
Well, I'd like to think that society should exist to benefit all its members.* No one should be rich while others starve at the very least. And I have an idea of how that could happen that isn't an economic system, but an ethic.
* I think there also needs to be an understanding that at any time a certain number of people won't be self-supporting, either completely or partially. They would be the children, elderly, ill, injured and disabled. Society needs to take them into account and be prepared to accommodate and provide resources for them (directly, through accommodating caregivers, or both) as a routine social function, not an extraordinary one.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
And as for me trying to get a handle on the US is getting difficult for me.
blacklives fem hood rats interupted him, what should he have done different?
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"These flaws exist everywhere."
Well ... I disagree. I'm not saying any place is perfect, but some are much better than others. After all, where would you rather live? France or Swaziland? So the places that are more like what you want - they've avoided, or solved, or minimized problems, as compared to other places.
"I am not that much a liberal but at times you have to focus on one problem, meaning the growing wealth inequality and let the other shit pass for another day.'
The wealth inequality is also a problem of how long can the economy run like that, imo.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Quote:
I hope I didn't imply a sense of decay. What I hoped to express was a nation where groups of people have very limited identities, very limited concerns, and very limited goals. Which leaves national and international decisions in the hands of the oligarchy. - KIKI
It did. The fact that we hold onto our identities 1kiki is so much of what is the problem here. We need to learn to let them go and embrace the human identity. Our selfish is what drives our concerns and yes is another problem. This is why the oligarchy has so much control. Think about it, we have the right to vote yet we vote against our own best interests. This is best illustrated in ignorance portrayed by JAYNZTOWN. - THUGR
Both good points. I'm not sure I would say that we need to embrace our HUMAN identity, but I sure would be happy if we could identify what we have in common, as opposed to what divides us.
Many years ago, when I was young, I discovered the women's liberation movement. I recognized how women were oppressed in many ways- everything from having scientific, literary, and medical contributions expunged from history to being victimized by violence to being saddled with almost all of the (unpaid) house care, child care, etc The themes were very similar to black liberation movement. (I would say that these issues still have not been resolved to this day.) Hubby, of course, had a different take. As a large, superbly athletic male, he was subject to all of the expectations that large physically-fit males are subject to- from being expected to join the football team (he tried out, did great in a few practices, and then joined the English writing and chess teams instead) and being constantly subjected to the internecine pecking-order high school fights to being hassled by the cops and subject to the draft. He tried to explain that most men were subject to equally discriminatory (if different) prejudices, and that the extra 60% that "most" men got in pay - in the grand scheme of things - didn't amount to much, compared to the REAL beneficiaries of the "divide and conquer" setup.
As a woman making my way thru a competitive field where not many women studied and worked, I just wasn't feeling the message, yanno?
It took many years and a lot of heartache, lost sleep, and stress - not related to being a woman but to simply being a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a child, a worker, and a person - to realize that I had a lot more in common with almost everybody else than differences. Experiencing helplessness when facing the death of someone you care for is a near-universal experience; sooner or later, one way or another, we almost all come to it. For me, that's the touchstone of what unites us. And if the grief of others simply doesn't move you, if you can ignore that by thinking of "them" as gay or straight, or Russian or Ukrainian, or black or white, or poor, or male or female, then you're not human, in my book. That's MY dividing line.
The woman's movement of yesterday is like the LGBT and "black lives matter" movements of today. These "rights" are being used to divide us when they should be uniting us. They're being used as wedge issues, kind of like the Confederate flag, and sometimes simply lead to meaningless and cosmetic changes. When the LGBT and "black lives matter" and environmental movements can sit down together and hash out a common goal, that's when we can make real progress.
I "get" that the conversation about what we (collectively) need - what we can (almost) all agree on (less the sociopaths among us), what meaningful changes will lead to the changes that we (almost) all require, will be a long and difficult one. Not only that, but since no changes come all at once, SOME changes will have to be delayed in favor of others. This is likely to be a conversation of epic proportions: What is good? What is bad? Why do we have a society? Why do we have an economy? What is our goal? Wha
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Quote:What do you mean by #1? #1 in military power? Production-power?
In science, in economics, in military, in production these other countries are leading now, or moving closer to the American lead and the USA is not so far ahead of everyone in this world anymore. Back when I first came on this forum it was an Andromeda site, not a Firefly site with Joss shows and Joss movies but a site showing the writing of the tv show Andromeda, the actors like Kevin Sorbo as High Guard Captain Dylan Hunt and its crew of aliens and a robo-hologram affectionately named as 'Rommie'...Firefly had just started, and Joss and other scifi writers started to see a future, a frontier in space vision, the wild west around dusty planets like Mars and terraforming, a strange vision where the USA wasn't always number 1
Quote:Same question. Great in what? Ahead in what?
and nations like China would rise....I thought some of it was good, a cowboys in space scifi with elements of Chinese culture but I didn't think so many predictions by scifi writers would start to come true. Bush Jnr was in power and the USA was still ahead, still great
Quote:
but he was so bad, such a moron with his neocon cronie friends that many of us belived even a leftist pot smoking fool like Obama might be the answer, the elites picked Obama, they paid for his planes, his fancy banquet dinners, they paid for his posters, elitist bankers and elites from Bilderberg global government inc bought his tv ads because they thought a black man with a muslim middle name 'hussein'would be able to fly over to the middle east, hold hands with the wacky muslims, sing happy songs and dance around the sand dunes with a bong, weed and flowers in hand and chill all this radical muslims out...you don't think the globalist elites Dutch, Saudis, Jews and British secret elites....you don't think they own Obama....ask youself who owns the Fed? did you know the Fed is a privaite bank and not a bank owned by the American people? the fake Federal Reserve with its phony dollar owned borrower or debtor money clocking up trillions in national debts, making profit from mistakes in war and possibly making money future wars and future corruption and they will add trillions more on the US national debt... Bush was a disaster and we were told Obama was the answer, elites picked this black dude with a 'hussein' name as a mark of friendship to the wacko muslims and boy did the elites get it wrong....especially now with members of the Senate and the Congress making moves that would formally designate the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization
Yes, I know about the Fed and all that. But personally I don't think that the international banksters, neocons, and militarists were so naive as to think that Obama would cause the whacky Muslims to chill bc I think they own the whacky Muslims too.
Quote:I think I would put a more measurable threshold on military action than "absolute must", because we have been fooled so often into thinking that some nation's destruction was an "absolute must" ... because Saddam had WMD and it was an "absolute must", or Qaddafi was "massacring his people" and it was an absolute must, or Assad was "killing his people" and it was an "absolute must". The threshold for military action should be that the United States is being militarily threatened. And, no, I don't mean that our "interests abroad" are being militarily threatened, I mean that our nation is being threatened.
After all my rants I am still a non-interventionist, I belive the USA or France or Russia or whatever country should only invade/attack, only respond with destructive warplanes & military violence only if it is an absolute must
There are a whole bunch of tools in the toolkit besides military action that the USA can use, among them: HOW ABOUT NOT FUNDING AND ARMING TERRORISTS? We had a multi-decade deal with Saudi Ara
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but how is he on Israel Palestine madness
A vid on the Regressive Left
Ben Shapiro on Free Speech, College Campuses, and The Regressive Left
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Quote:Not Russian, and not humor.
Ahhhh, I get it now. You can't *build* a nation with bombs, but you sure can flatten one! Russian humor!
But, yes, you CAN'T build a nation on bombs. Which is why, when a nation starts dropping them, it must be fully aware of what it's doing, and why.
Which is why certain goals like Responsibility to Protect (R2P) or Democracy or Freedom are such fatuous cover-stories for a campaign of destruction. After all, if one nation is trying to destroy another, at least give it the honor of recognizing exactly what is happening, not some sort of rationalized feel-good balm for the masses. Which is something that you are fully brainwashed into; apparently you believe the propaganda that you've been fed and you still can't put any two nations on the same scale of justice, but must constantly weigh one side and lighten another. Something neither you, nor KPO, nor THUGR, nor RAPPY will ever be able to do, apparently.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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"So Russia should at the very least inform Ukraine that it wants to destroy Ukraine?"
When did Russia start bombing Ukraine? Was it during the 'invasion'? I must have missed that.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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I would have thought one of your national goals should include not allowing someone who has filed for bankruptcy to run for president...what kind of weird universe is it, where Trump gets nominated??????
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