maybe in movies. governments mostly tend to lie about things they did badly, not about long-term accomplishments that can be fairly easily measured against their previous record, currently level of expertise, etc.
this also isn't the type of thing that governments tend to lie about. it's not like a scenario where a contractor overpromises and underdelivers and government media has to do damage control. they're also not announcing some new leap in scientific understanding. it's old science.
it really is a great challenge, because for example america will have to rethink its habit of paying for today's excesses by harvesting the labor of future generations. it's a completely different inter-generational relation than we have now.
It's crazy. I always subconsciously assumed that Red Delicious apples were how apples have always been (because they taste/look so much less appetizing than the other ones, therefore they must be the most "natural"), and that those other apples were genetically modified. And, being an immigrant, I thought it might even be a cultural difference, and that Americans just prefer the taste of Red Delicious. This is blowing my mind.
I personally don't care whether it was or wasn't terrorism. Either way, you and I are never going to know (barring a Russian whistleblower). I was just commenting on the bizarre and coordinated behavior of the U.S. media.
It was remarkable how quickly U.S. media accepted the "it wasn't terrorism" line after years of going on about how the Russians are the most comically evil superterrorist masterminds who are destroying the fabric of blah blah.
It's all of the above. A large, unproductive rentier class creating a barrier to capitalist dynamics contributes to a stagnant economy, which generates popular discontent and erodes government authority.
A liberal state is not capable of granting religious freedom. All it can offer are religious rights, which means that you are allowed to imagine that you are Christian (or whatever other religious affiliation), and you may dress up in funny costumes and participate in funny symbolic rituals, but as soon as you attempt to exercise your religion in a way that contradicts the economic logic of our society, then the state has to crush you as ruthlessly as any political enemy.
To ask the liberal state to do otherwise is nonsense. If you want to exercise your religion in a way that exceeds the bounds that are set for you by the state, you have to step outside of your fantasy and engage directly in politics to convince the rest of society that your religion should have greater authority than the state. If you actually believe that your religion is greater than all others, then you should be able to prove it in the political realm.
> Perhaps a particular chimp or gorilla was having a really bad day and just went out looking for a fight.
This doesn't necessarily contradict the food competition or climate change hypothesis. To the individual ape it might seem that he's just having a bad day, but then you could look at weather/food data and compare it to incidence of violence and see a causal relation. It would actually be surprising if those things didn't affect ape behavior.
> their industrial underdevelopment which was partly due to their economic and political system
I'm sorry? They went from a peasant society immediately to defending against multiple foreign invasions (including the U.S.) to fighting and defeating the fascists, all in three decades. That was achievable only due to their economic and political system.
and then there will be a million "Top 10 things the government doesn't want you to know" videos that amplify whatever it was they were trying to censor
What? No. I specifically referred to the Total War speech, not to election posters. You seem fixated on making your own point unrelated to what I was saying.
> They promised to fix the economy, fight unemployment, fight back against the unjust Versailles Treaty, support families, bring political stability and make other countries respect Germany again, etc.
You're missing one component, which is that the Nazis took all of these (more or less) legitimate grievances and redirected them into the figure of the Jew. You're right in that this wasn't a result of some supernatural ability of Hitler and Goebbels, and that's the whole point. There doesn't need to be. I'm sure individual Nazis had similar thoughts as you do (this is just another motivational speech, these are decent campaign promises, etc). The precondition to repeating Nazi ideology is already present in normal psychology.
When you introduce the notion of "logical sense", you're already deviating from an objective standard. For example, Amazon's warehouse bathroom policy is logical from a profit-maximizing perspective, but it's illogical from the perspective of the health and wellbeing of its workers.
Well, not exactly. The ideological trick is to package pain and hardship and to sell it as something wonderful. It's not really even about promising good things in the future. That only works for part of the population (essentially the marshmallow experiment). What Goebbels did is much more immediate. If you identify with Goebbels, then the hardship itself registers as something that's good, and not merely as a promise of a delayed reward.
If you want to see a counterpoint to this, watch Goebbels' Total War speech. You can absolutely mobilize a great mass of people by promising them pain and hardship. Similar idea with JFK's moonshot speech.
> they could not be seen as other than opportunistic and exploitative
I find this a bit hypocritical considering the incredible opportunism and exploitation represented by the WTC, as well as Bush's immediate command to spend money. They're moralizing other people for holding the very same values that America upholds.
Maybe micro-celebrity personality cults, where micro-communities develop a design language that only has meaning within their bubble, and they practice consumer rituals around their idol's birthday, for example.
Well, America isn't a Europeanist project. It's an autonomous project, for one. Second, I don't trust the fact that the myth of America as a beacon of individual liberty became dominant just when America started to roll out its mass surveillance and censorship-without-censorship capabilities.
I think you're misunderstanding. Learning not to live according to the fears of the American Empire doesn't mean learning to be opposed to the American people or to break alliances. If anything, it should our job to lecture Americans on what is and is not appropriate fears to have.
South Korea has been less of an ally than it has been a client state of the U.S. "Ally" implies some degree of autonomy for both parties. South Korea has never really had the opportunity to act for itself, and when it has, it has received cold and rather tonedeaf responses from the U.S. (just look at the recent visit by Moon to the U.S.). That's not at all to say that the SK-US relation is inauthentic; there's definitely something genuine there. But that authenticity doesn't to seem recognized by the current administration. Biden seems to want to keep South Korea as the client state that it has always been despite (what seems to me) to be reasonable demands of sovereignty.
The South Korean position locally is actually not that challenging in a particular sense, despite typical media exaggerations. It's almost straightforward. SK has strong economic and cultural ties to its neighbors that can be accessed to stabilize relations if needed. North Korea is not really a liability in itself. KJU has been acting consistently towards opening up the North Korean economy on NK's own terms, which would benefit both nations tremendously. Those kinds of attempts are being stonewalled by Biden, and that's causing the U.S. to lose favor even among some pro-Americanists. As for the kimchi problem, I don't know what to say. That's the same kind of bickering as when France tells people to stop labeling things as champagne. I understand that those things can get brutal, but it's nothing world-changing. Beneath the headlines, South Korea has been quietly strengthening relations with China, because South Korea is not suicidal. The groundwork has to be laid today for the eventuality of a Chinese economy that is at least twice the strength of the U.S. economy. But even without China, at some point people are going to have to learn to live in a way that isn't dictated by the fears of the American empire.
> Take a look around the neighborhood. Maybe that’s the point?
Probably not, since South Korea maintains pretty good relations with its neighbors. South Korea (as well as the rest of the world) doesn't see the U.S. anymore as a rational partner, but as something to be managed with caution. North Korea is unironically seen as a more predictable and reliable enemy than the U.S. is seen as a reliable ally. Nobody is happy about this, but that's the reality.