Hate, racism, and pornography
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:date: 2016-12-06T22:29:06
:status: draft
:category: faith
:tags: blogComment, politics
(reply to the Common sense no. 308_)
.. _308:
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-308-return-of-the-podcaster/
While I was listening to the show and thought about Dan’s
rambling on
* it is like porn, people just got a new huge horn and they feel
need to blast it. In the same time, we listeners, are not used
to the junk and we don't know how to tune out. Testimony of
the experience of the early 1990s in the post-Communist Czechia
To some extent we should just get used to the flat world. Next
time we will get better … overreaction from ignorance … the
next time we will know that Duke should be just ignored, and we
shouldn't get trolled into doing something stupid.
* talking about 1990s, i do remember our relationships with the
Russia. It was time of miracles, but we really expected that we
all post-Communist nations would get free eventually. Yes,
there was Romania (whose revolution was anything but velvet) or
Yugoslavia, but we all expected that these teething problems
(quite horrible in case of Yugoslavia) would be overcome and
then that we all would be *normal* (there was actually then
significantly little of the ideology, we just wanted to be
normal like everybody else). And we believed the same for
Russia. In some aspects they started even earlier with Glasnost
and Perestroyka, and yes their situation was (as expected)
quite horrible, but I do remember how incredibly little hatred
and plenty of good will towards Russia there was considering
the Russian state was our occupier for the past forty years or
so (in various forms and shapes).
A side note. It was quite shocking how much of the goodwill
there was towards Russians after 1991 in the post-Communist
Central and Eastern Europe nations, considering they were the
occupants for more than forty years (under various means, and
yes it is more complicated). All those talks by the
Conservative pundits hoping to restore the Cold War stability
when they could talk it over with their colleagues in Kremlin
(see Dan Carlin’s Common Sense) are completely wrong when
they consider the West at least partial blameworthy of the
current relationship with Russia. I really believe that the
Yeltsin (with all his problems) tried to make Russia just
a more or less normal member of the community of normal
states of the world. Yes, he hugely failed and 1990s in
Russia could be characterized like something between mess and
mafia wars, but
* of course, all this bad stuff is mightily amplified by all
professional media, because when it bleeds, it leads. So, we
have now in the newspapers inch headlines about the supposed
hatred towards Roma, which means that they have nothing real to
write about. Yes, there is a lot of hatred against Roma in
Czechia, but it is nothing new and journalists have really no
new news, just trying to instigate the feeling of outrage among
the readers;
* there is also the other pendulum … not only between the right
and left, but also between fringes and centers. We have been
for a long time in the political environment where all
politicians were stuck in the middle. Times when Bill Clinton
was a way more free-market supporter than supposedly right-side
George Bush with his biggest government spending since Lyndon
Johnson. Of course, I don't like the radical politics, but
perhaps if the politicians of different sides of the political
spectrum were distinguishable from each other, it could help to
prevent the panic a bit.
* and of course, journalists have absolutely zero concept of long
time. What matters is how to sell the papers today, who cares
that probably the panic will go away next week, that's seven
releases down the road.
- DON’T PANIC! I think the biggest danger is that we will make
a lot of panicky decisions. “World is falling apart, so let's
throw out all rules out of the window!” Remember, Korematsu_
case is still on the US books.
We will find out some solutions, we will learn how to deal with
the social networks in more sane ways, perhaps politicians will
turn back to thinking about what is liberal and what is
conservative or socialist. Only we shouldn't screw up by panic.
.. _Korematsu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korematsu_v._United_States
