This is how weed will ruin your life

We get to be mushrooms then

In seriousness though, capitalising on ruining peoples lives is pretty sick.

 

But that's the American way.

 

People either feed the system or get destroyed by it, either way everyone is being laughed at by the government.

 

Precisely.

 

Oh no doubt we're a bit full of ourselves, and get told America is, well America constantly. We are no great protector of world freedom, but it goes again into context are we really any different then any other western nation? And western nations compared to most of the world are fantasy utopias.

Honestly I think in general our rights have become more vs less, it's just thanks to technology and media we have become more painfully aware of when they are abused. Take 1950's America vs now, the ideal view of the 1950's never really happened, as a culture we have opened up greatly.

We can fix everything that is wrong, but our people are lazy and our schools are failing, but again this is a symptom that seems to be taking over the entire western world, America is just leading the bandwagon.

But I really do think we have something most places don't. That's why I like that quote from East of Eden so much, it touches on the fact America just isn't a location or country, it's an entire idea, and probably the greatest experiment in sociology in the past 200 years. We are all descendant from dreamers, people who came here on an idea, just the world America, having no idea of what anything in the country was like. And yet, despite the terrible conditions most of those immigrants lived in, the news they sent back home wasn't discouraging enough, people kept coming. People still keep coming, we take in more legal immigrants then every other country in the world combined and then some. The American dream has never died, it's just unfortunately taken a back burned to much narcissism and cynicalism, and society keeps feeding into this both in our obsession with popular culture and a spreading of negativity combined with laziness, people keep bitching about how bad things are but never get off the internet to actually change something, so we just constantly read about how we're all screwed.

The dream isn't fully dead though, there's a spirit that keeps us going, that somehow in the end it will all work out fine because it's America and it must. Whether it's true or not I believe is of little relevance, unemployment rates drop and fall, economies grow and shrink. We have little control over whether a job is taken from us or not unless we're our own boss, but we are taking away and slowly decapitating a spirit that has survived here even though the great depression. That if it goes we will never be able to get back. Obama almost helped saved it, the story book narrative of a kid from single parents who was once on food stamps to president of the United States. Now it's dying again. Good job Republicans(it's not just them, but their obstructionism is at a ridiculous level) you will kill something that is not even physically tangible.

 

Well- my belief is that the internet is one way we can knit back together as a culture and speak with enough of a voice that we can't be ignored. To shut down my electronic voice here and try being activist in a corner of the universe that wants nothing to do with such a message is to embrace defeat via taking a strategy that will enable the propagandists to label me as a terrorist and an anti-American extremist. The internet presents an ideal environment to kindle the fire of change outside the ability of big money voices and monopolized news media to snuff it out.

When the ideals being discussed here and other such forums begin to find their way back to us via empathetic word of mouth we will know that the time is close that real action can be taken because we will finally be able to speak with a somewhat united voice.

Please don't underestimate the potential for this form of speech to be the flash point of something far bigger.

 

The internet is an ideal environment, but it's also the problem, internet has become television, people don't leave it. The entire wealth of human knowledge found on the internet is useless when so many people don't put it to practical use in the physical world.

 

Very true... like everything else it is what we make of it... so really it's not the internet per se but its users who choose to deal in this way.

 

To an extent though the internet has made us lazy, what television didn't finish the internet did. Most people are addicted to entertainment media like they're shooting smack.

Like damn, most people I know get pissed when they have to miss certain shows or haven't checked their facebook in a day, I get pissed when I haven't read the BBC in a day.

 

At least the knowledge is there. I dont care whether other people use it or not but the amount of things that you can learn these days, information that didnt exist 20 years ago. The world really is miniscule because of the internet. I mean even now, 20 years before I would have had to travel to America just to talk to people there, and probably ended up talking to a stupid asshole but now I can converse with people from all over the world from my bed room..

Intelligent, interesting people at that :cheers2:

 

You make a point... and a damned good one but I take issue with "it's the internet doing it" assertion... nothing does anything to us that we do not allow to happen. Nothing or no one can have any influence over you without your permission.

 

This is true, I just see a a gradual decline in human knowledge and interaction. Like I'm not old, and we had plenty of TV as a kid, and gaming systems, but now people are willfully putting themselves into a near quasi virtual gaming and networking state of existence. I'm young and I've seen a serious decline just in my life in the amount of time kids actually spend doing something active, or even reading a book. The internet is creating near 2 different worlds. On one hand you have a world of knowledge at your fingertips. On the other hand it's seriously promoting a culture of stupidity. The internet itself isn't causing this of course, but it's just us as a society perpetuating our free fall.

Maybe if we ban everything on the internet but porn, wikipedia and the news for a year or 2 it'll stop it.

 

You're far more observant than most...

I'm about to veer a but topically but I'll say that our interactions are declining because the level of convenience allows us to be lazy that way- that is the economic downturn isn't such that we've HAD to stop hiding behind our monitors... there was tremendous potential for good to come from a collapse but the artificial soft landing afforded by government intervention has forestalled that- and probably this was by design.

I'm going to venture into the colorful world of theory now- and all I really have to back up what I say is my own somewhat shaky understanding of human nature and an unquenchable thirst for history- and my interest is largely focused on WWII and the decades preceding it.... in part because it was the culture that was directly shaped by this period that brought me up- I was born in 1963... most established adults- the working class- experienced this period day by day and blow by blow. They had weathered the uncertainty that undoubtedly existed about the eventual outcome of the war... and most had also experienced the decade plus period beforehand. I find myself wondering if there had not been a great depression whether the diplomatic stalemate that arguably prompted Japan to attack Pearl Harbor would have taken place and whether the general isolationist sentiment would have run as deep had so many not been unemployed and underemployed.

Conversely, had our manufacturing base been fully operational inistead of idled would it have taken extra time to retool for the war effort and would this delay been critical in how things turned out? Would the delay been enough to enable Germany to implement a strategy to launch air strikes here?

By not allowing the economy to bottom itself out the government has thus far succeeded in making it more comfortable to stay sequestered in front of the computer monitor, game system, or television; walling ourselves off from our neighbors- making it easy for us to not give a flying fuck what's happening to them because there's no immediate need for us to be concerned- like having to pool resources ensuring that both parties get fed because neither would be able to sustain themselves.

If we could somehow get people to start thinking about the welfare of their immediate neighbors then I believe the first domino will have been pushed past the tipping point and regular folks would begin to get back their rightful place in society. Unfortunately I do not see very many people willing to acknowledge their own responsibility- deferring all change as the job of the people in charge.

The biggest fallacy there is expecting the people who are benefiting most from a broken system to fix it. It just ain't gonna happen.

 

Bingo.

I think we have psychologically become too dependent on instant gratification, and that's a hard thing to break. No one including the government thinks beyond the present. The national debt is cliche, but it's true. It's not going to make the economy implode anytime soon as some people want to believe, but still, as of now we're paying near $200 billion a year on the interest for it, it's only going to grow. Nobody wants to admit a stimulus is just setting us up for another melt down later. Improving the infrastructure of a country is good, if you do it when you have the money to spare and you use it wisely, not $6 billion for example for a high speed train in Florida no one is going to use. But Florida is an important state come election time. We're just creating another bubble of economic growth that isn't actually in demand combined with protecting jobs that only exist anymore because we subsidize the hell out of them. Stop subsidizing them, use the money to send these people to school. No one wants to change careers at 45 but damnit we're holding onto a past that's destroying our growth and forestalling the inevitable.

The neighbor thing is very true too, how many people even here can name their neighbors, or even ever talk to them? There is no sense of community anymore, you can't go across the street and hangout with a friend anymore. So people lock themselves in their house and go on facebook.

Americans both personally and in government keep trying to lead a lifestyle where we fool ourselves into thinking everything is still ok while our country from roads to the education system crumbles around us and we load up on debt.


But.....to go to history! I think isolationism would've still been as high, it had been running strong since the end of WW1 and the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. Had the great depression never happened, at least on that scale, I think the nazis most certainly would've never happened. They'd never get the amount of votes they did, maybe rise to 40-50 seats in the reichstag at most, a little side note in German electoral history. The Japanese question is harder though, depression or not Japan had its eyes set on China.

 

Excellent point... as well as successfully illuminating the somewhat faulty premise of my reply that Nazi Germany would have risen in the absence of a depression. I think that part of what made Hitler's political ascension possible is the almost inevitable sense that the rest of the world really screwed Germany with the Treaty so I'm not entirely convinced that something wouldn't have been in the works but Europe may have been in a better position to contain it- likely forestalling the alliances with Italy and Japan.

Would Japan had still attacked Pearl harbor though and had they done that in the absence of a European theater and presumed isolationist sentiment over there would Europe have jumped in on our side and would Russia have sided with The Empire of Japan?

 

The interesting note is Italy would still be fascist as the depression had nothing to do with that. With only Italian support though and no German support it leads to the question of would the nationalists still won the Spanish civil war. Though prior to the depression, with the Dawes plan, a brilliant act of financing during the 20's, this is the system that helped make the crash worse:


Japan is still tricky though, there'd be no European war so it's hard to say what would happen in Asia. Japan might have to deal more diplomatically with the western powers. The oil embargo is one of the main things that lead to the attack, perhaps instead of a Nazi-Soviet alliance, it would've been Soviet-Japanese, not likely, but still no one saw the Nazi-Soviet alliance but it supplied Germany with the resources it needed until Barbarossa. Japan may have been able to get into a position to make China sign a peace agreement where Japan gained most of the industrial coastal lands.

 

Excellent food for thought.
Shows how general political moods are affected by economic concerns and helped divert the flow of history down different channels so to speak.

 

Thankfully we've learned our lesson. No matter what school of economics you subscribe to we've realized booms like the 1920's can't sustain themselves for ever. The problem with economics and international politics though is it sometimes leads to asinine theories. For example Afghanistan, we apparently invaded to build a pipeline that's financed by the Asian Development Bank to bring oil to India that hasn't even started construction yet, which we have no control or profit motive off of........yet to some people this is the main reason we invaded. Or going back to WW1 people will say we loaned too much money to the allies, we couldn't afford to have them loose. It seems to conviently ignore the whole Germany resuming unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmerman telegram aspect of everything.

 

Back to what the OP said, I don't think most of us think that kind of situation will happen generally speaking. But it's pretty realistic to say you could go to jail or prison for possession because you can get caught on more than one occasion. And getting raped in prison is definately possible.
So maybe the OP's post isn't too far of a stretch.
wtf, i feel so upset
THIS MAKES ME SO ANGRY and EMOTIONAL!

How do you all rationalize it's all gonna be alright when you plan to toke or have some? I need advice because honestly I feel stressed out just thinking about this topic. I usually try and avoid it but this thread smacked me on my face.Any advice?

 

I don't know I usually smoke weed indoors and the police don't do random drug searches house to house.