The Road to Surfdom has been live since May 2002. It is a venue for discussion, argument, the exchange of information and the glorification of Chickenhawks. Anyone can comment, so please feel free to join in. And stay tuned for further developments.
It was two years ago today that I (more or less) stopped writing on this blog and took up the gig with News Ltd doing Blogocracy. As most of you would know, I quit that work a few weeks ago so I could work on some other stuff. That other stuff is going very well, and it makes me realise that, at least for the time being, I don’t have the time or wherewithal to keep this joint going. With Ken moving on as well — despite the input from the other terrific writers who help out here — I’ve decided to put Surfdom into hiatus. This is not to say that I won’t come back to blogging in some form at some point in the future, but for now, Surfdom is closed.
As difficult as this decision is, there is nonetheless something apt about the timing. The blog began life not long after I moved to the US at the end of 2001. It got up and running in the strange twilight period between the events of September 11 and the disastrous decision by the Bush Administration to launch a war in Iraq in March 2003. With the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency that period has come to something of a natural and symbolic end and thus, for me at least, some of the central motivations for this sort of writing has dissipated. This blog, and others like it, have seen off the end of the Howard Government and the Bush Administration and on that score I couldn’t be happier.
This is not to say that there isn’t now a role for the sort of work blogs do, only that I, personally, am not in position to take on that sort of commitment at the moment. In fact, the need, especially in Australia, for wise independent voices to discuss and dissect the great issues of the day is as great as it has ever been and so that’s what I want to go out with: a plea for people to support — genuinely support — independent media in this country.
The fact is, Australia’s mainstream media is moribund. Although there are great journalists and other contributors out there, the institution itself is stuck in a hopeless, self-serving, tenured cul-de-sac and is failing in its job to properly inform, discuss, debate and entertain. Not to mention, reinvent itself. The form is dominated by a handful of insiders who have grown so content with their own lot that they are immune to sensible criticism and lack the self-awareness to reassess what it is they are doing. They are supported in this self-satisfied loop by a political class that is happy to exploit the status quo, feeding them leaks and other tidbits to keep the whole charade ticking over in such a way that nothing really changes.
The narratives, the memes, the discussions of our political and social life are set in concrete and endlessly recycle. We have learned to accept the daily, largely manufactured, controversies of political and social discussion in lieu of genuine examination. The same voices — and there are only about 20 of them — continue to define what is important or useful or worthy of discussion and the few organs of the mainstream media keep churning them out. Their lack seriousness is only matched by their lack of courage.
To say that a fully-functioning independent media is the answer is glib. It is not that easy. And yet, there it is. The idea is not for such independent groups to replace the mainstream media but merely to get them to lift their game, to lead by example.
The situation as it currently stands is not completely hopeless. For all their failings, there are some new voices out there trying to make a difference. Some of them are thinktanks, some of them of grassroots organisations, some of them are blogs or other forms of online media. None of them has really “broken through” in the way that is necessary to make a real difference, but they are a start.
At the end of the day, though, they will only succeed if, firstly, they can organise themselves and offer a genuinely professional product and, secondly, if we-the-people properly support them. That means not just reading them and cheering them on but, by and large, financing them. And I don’t mean a few bucks in a tip jar once a year: I mean serious ongoing financial support. For as long as I have been blogging I’ve been hearing people tell me how wonderful blogs and other new media are and how much they enjoy and appreciate them. But I have very rarely seen those fine words and sentiments backed up with hard cash. It is about time it was.
I don’t mean you should toss a whole lot of cash at some guy with a blog. But at some point, enough of you are going to have to take a bit of a risk and invest a decent sum in this or that site so that they can genuinely operate as independent media. And the online media itself is going to have to get organised to the point where they can offer a product that is going to attract that sort of contribution, as well as money from other sources, advertising, or whatever.
Until this happens, stop whinging about the mainstream media. Spare me the heartfelt cries of how much you love this blog or that blog and just accept the fact that if you really want a functioning independent media you are going to have to pay for it. It’s that friggin simple.
As I say, Surfdom is now officially closed. We’ll go into archive mode as soon as Jon-the-tech-guy can organise it. It has been an absolute pleasure running this place for the past seven-odd years and it is hard to walk away. Thanks a million to all those who have read and contributed comments over that time.
Please don’t read the above the plea as some sort ingratitude for the fabulous support given to me personally here at Surfdom and over at Blogocracy. It isn’t. I luvs yers all. I just want to see the blogosphere and independent online media develop into something more than it is, to move into a new and more vibrant phase. To offer some genuine competition to the ingrown toenail that is the mainstream media.
The criticisms above are directed at myself as much as they are at anyone else. I just really felt, as I closed this place down and ponder what will happen next, that someone had to give us all a bit of stern talking to, to maybe encourage people to think about what needs to be done and what we can do. Citizenship matters and it is too important than to leave in the hands of the cynical gatekeepers who currently decide what is important in this democracy of ours.
Thanks again, and please stay in touch.
UPDATE: Once again I’m over overwhelmed with people’s generosity and good wishes. Thanks everyone for the kind comments and hope to see you online — somewhere, somehow — in the future.
A while ago I posted about our prime minister’s apparent wish to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and bathe in the reflected glory of our long-ago deeds of war. In particular I criticised his assertion that in 1942 ‘a young nation found its very survival at risk’, on what I thought were the very good grounds that the assertion was not true.
My post attracted a flood of righteous wrath and some conspiracy nuttery that would have done the ‘Bush bombed the WTC’ mob proud; I was apparently in league with Alexander Downer and some bloke called Peter Stanley to traduce John Curtin’s memory and thus bring down the Labor government, or something along those lines. Like all conspiracy theories it was a bit light on detail.
Anyway it prompted me to find out who this Peter Stanley was and why his views were apparently so incendiary to all right thinking people. I discovered that he’s Director of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia, which is not generally regarded as a hot-bed of unreconstructed Liberals. He’s also published 19 books. In short, his CV inclines me to place a bit more weight on his opinions than on anonymous comments in the blogosphere.
Since 2002 I’ve written a succession of historical pieces exploring the question of whether Japan intended to invade Australia in 1942, and reflecting on the meaning of the way Australians look at their wartime history. In Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (published by Penguin in July, 2008) I summarise and elaborate upon my research.
The rest of the piece elaborates on that theme: whether Japan intended to invade Australia. Not whether they had the capacity to do so, but the intention.
Now this is the kind of question that can keep professional historians happily writing papers and publishing journal articles for years, with the outcome being perhaps a consensus that finds its way into a paragraph in history books in 2020. It’s an intrinsically difficult issue; one might just as well ask if the USA intended to follow up the invasion of Iraq with an attack on Iran. The answer is that some people in a position to influence events might have had that intention and others probably didn’t. Trying to synthesise all the various shades of hope and ambition into a national ‘intention’ is fraught with difficulty. The same problems must arise in trying to establish any sort of consensus among the rulers of Japan in 1942, who were by no means agreed on war objectives or strategy.
Fortunately the point is immaterial to my post. I wasn’t writing about Japan’s intentions in 1942 but about the reality of the threat that it posed to Australia. Rudd wasn’t speaking about intentions but about actuality: he claimed Australia’s ‘very survival’ was at risk and that ‘We’ll never know what success [in New Guinea] by the enemy might have meant for Australia – invasion, occupation or isolation.’ These statements have to be evaluated not by the standards of what was known or feared in 1942 but in the light of what we know today, and clearly the statements are wrong.
By 1942 Japan’s offensive capabilities had run out of steam. Regardless of anyone’s intentions in Tokyo, Australia’s survival was not at risk and Japan lacked the means to invade or occupy our nation. This has been widely known and accepted by historians and military analysts since the mid 1940s and for Rudd to state otherwise is simply peddling a romantic fiction.
Does it matter, or is it just a semantic argument as someone suggested in comments on the last thread? I believe it matters very much, because beliefs about past events influence present day attitudes. The belief that Australian forces defeated the Japanese where other nations had collapsed in a heap and that the USA subsequently saved us from invasion and occupation underpins all sorts of wrong-headed attitudes that have caused us to adopt misguided foreign policies from 1945 to the present day.
For example:
1. The belief that Australian soldiers defeated the Nips after much more populous nations like China and the Philippines capitulated under the Japanese onslaught encourages supremacist ‘one digger is worth 10 Asian soldiers’ jingoistic nonsense. This reinforces racist attitudes that lead to us lecturing Asian countries about the superiority of ‘Western values’ and smugly announcing that we’ll strike first any time we suspect someone might be up to no good in one of our neighbouring countries.
2. The belief that Australia’s position in the Pacific War was more or less like that of other countries like China and Korea leads to puzzlement when people in those countries are so slow to forgive and forget. I mean if we can do it why can’t they?
3. Most importantly, the belief that the USA saved us from enslavement has made unswerving support of the US the bedrock of our foreign policy since 1945. People can disagree about whether this was ever in Australia’s interests; my own belief is that a policy of non-alignment similar to that adopted by the Scandinavian countries would have served us better. The main factor preventing it has been this bipartisan myth that only the USA saved us from being overrun by yellow hordes in 1942.
Needless to say, it’s one thing to believe in retrospect that a policy was misguided and quite another to argue that there was a feasible alternative at the time. Until Vietnam, it would have been electoral suicide for any political party in Australia to suggest developing a foreign policy stance independent of the USA. However the Vietnam catastrophe revealed the stupidity of so much US dogma that the way has been open ever since for leaders with vision and the national interest at heart to put us at arm’s length from the increasingly thuggish empire builders across the Pacific. New Zealand has managed to do just that but not us. Gough Whitlam’s government started to do it of course and the Fraser Government did not wholly reverse that direction, but Hawke and Gareth Evans seemed very happy to nestle once again under Washington’s wings and while I’m sure Paul Keating would have taken us in a very different direction, he was not there long enough to make an impact. In any event he seems more concerned to diss the Brits than to question the US alliance.
After 1996 we had 11 years of Howard and Downer with results that are well-known. Once again we are joined hip and thigh to the USA and their struggles are our struggles. Rudd (one tends already to dismiss Stephen Smith as anything but a cipher in foreign policy) has a great opportunity to break the ties and resume a progressive path to an independent foreign policy where we act in our own interests without the over-riding fear that if we offend the USA OMG 1942 will surely come again and this time the yanks won’t come rushing to save our necks!!! We’ll all end up speaking Bahasa Indonesian/Cantonese/Vietnamese/Japanese (the last for the handful of RSL warriors who are convinced the old enemy will return sooner or later).
It’s early days and Rudd has sent mixed signals but to date, indications are that he leans towards continued fealty to Washington. As he wrestles with economic crises, he will be increasingly tempted not to buy a fight with the Libs about our ties with the USA, knowing how easily any proposals for change could be misrepresented and exploited by the opposition. Nevertheless he should do it, and progressives who care about the future wellbeing of Australia should keep pressure on him to do it. The United States of America has become much too wilful and amoral an actor in world affairs for us to keep being its best friend forever.
*****
By the way … I’ve always blogged for one reason only and that’s to satisfy my own urge to write. Some time ago I let Tim know that the fun was fading and that I thought I’d finish up at Surfdom in December; a couple of weeks ago I decided to bring the date forward.
I might be back on a political blog some time in the new year and I might not; if I was a betting man I’d put a substantial wager on not. Thanks for reading and all the best for the future.
Pity poor Michelle Green of the Association of Independent (read Private) Schools (Vic division), who had to catch flak on RN’s Life Matters about the violent and intimidating rampage by the exclusive Xavier school kids on year 12 “muck-up day”. Some of the things she had to say: It was very distressing for the principal and for the local community, who felt terrorised. (Boy’s leg broken in three places, woman parked on the street had to lock herself in her car, etc.) It can’t be explained away or covered up, and the school is dealing with it appropriately. You can’t stamp out human behaviour. “On one level” it doesn’t improve the reputation of the school, but a school’s reputation is multi-faceted. Parents send their children there for religious values as well as for education… This may not do much to diminish the reputation of the school in the community… “they’re learning from this as a group”.
Now this is all pretty uncontroversial stuff. Yes, we know young’uns can be pretty wild little bastards at times. In this case, maybe fuck up would be more a more accurate term. But wait - don’t the parents who send little Tarquin to these schools pay about sixteen thousand dollars a year, firstly to secure them a high TER score and prepare to join the ruling class, but otherwise to keep them away from the riff-raff, violence and bad behaviour that we’re constantly told is the daily fare at Scarysuburb High? I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been earnestly told that someone doesn’t know what to do with little Tarquin, because if he goes to our local high school he’ll automatically graduate in Crack Dealing and Violence 101.
At least my daughter doesn’t get her leg broken at Scarysuburb High. I did take her to Cas once with a suspected cracked ankle, but that was due to a klutzy negotiation of some steps, not being jumped on by her fellow students.
Michelle doesn’t like the name “Muck-up day” because of the connotations of bad behaviour and wants to change it to “Celebration day” instead. Imagine the sneers about boring political correctness if someone in the public system came up with that. And imagine the “ZOMG our public schools are a OMGHOTBED OF GANG WARFARE” type headlines in the Herald Sun if the Xavier rampage had been perpetrated by public school kids.
Then Green turned to the subject of social pressures - something that’s taboo for parents or officials in the public system, because then we’re accused of being bleeding hearts who are blaming society and should take more notice of individual responsibility. But it’s OK for the Association of Independent Schools to bring it on:
Interviewer: How do you reconcile the religious values of the school with that behaviour
MG: “Well, we have a different society…There certainly should be a code of behaviour and that is certainly something I’m sure that Xavier would be talking about. But you cannot impose a code of behaviour on a group of young boys who are affected by alcohol. You’d hope that they would have learned enough not to misbehave, but everybody knows there are sporting heroes who went to good schools and have good family backgrounds, and have a few drinks and muck up.”
Interviewer: How have schools responded to these muck-up day incidents in the past?
MG: “Independent schools were very concerned about it, because they could see it as part of a societal trend.
“[Dr Madeleine Levine has] written a study which shows that bright, charming, socially skilled young adults from affluent families are suffering epidemic rates of depression and substance abuse. And what she linked that with is the materialism and the pressure to achieve in our society. Now, our schools became aware of that research quite early on and what they said to me was that they were seeing that reflected in the end of year celebrations in these bright young students, who have been pushed to achieve by society and by their parents and by themselves, who have a few drinks and just let it go.”
Not good enough, AISV. Your point of difference, your marketing angle, is that your schools will take children out of a sewer of violence and riff-raff (the public system) and place them in an oasis of Christian values and firm behavioural coaching. You know: the rest of us are just as concerned about the violent, sexist and laddish culture of professional sport and many corporate milieux as well. You may say that’s separate to you, but you’re the ones who are boasting that you’re doing something about it; that private schools teach “values” and offer a superior environment where children too shy or vulnerable for the public system can learn without disruption. And I overhear a lot of people regurgitating this story quite uncritically.
An all-boys’ school like Xavier should be examining the Sam Newman/Wayne Carey/Eddie McGuire male culture in Australia, acknowledging their part in it and working on how to fix it.
Instead, Green suggests a Celebration Day with an early-morning jumping castle and a silver-service breakfast served to the year 12s. And some group psychology sessions. Yeah, that’ll work.
Who else has the sneaking feeling that all this talk about “Christian values” and the superiority of the private system is kind of beside the point with regard to elite schools? I think there’s a definite subset of parents who couldn’t care less about a little bit of ultraviolence. I think some parents who send kids to all-boys schools have a somewhat unreconstructed, masculinist approach to social competition. And I think for some, the elite schools represent membership of a network and a ladder to boardrooms and corner offices, and bugger the “values”. The values thing is a buzzword for the marketing company, and to keep our tax money coming.
(repost of Ken’s latest lost in the server move. Admin)
I’ve mentioned before that I’m no economist so these ideas might be totally wrong for reasons I haven’t considered. But if our current financial problems were caused by an excess of debt - as seems to be generally agreed - and if the way to prevent a depression is to maintain consumer spending (which seems to be the government’s belief) then isn’t the government implicitly trying to sustain the debt levels that got us into this mess in the first place? And won’t this merely postpone the day of reckoning?
Keynesian economics includes the idea that governments should act in a counter-cyclical way, so that in economic downturns they should spend more than in the good times. This evens out overall demand for goods and services, or so the theory goes. In the Great Depression, governments ran deficits to boost spending. The thing was, the problem in those days was that people had zero wealth and zero income. Government programs gave them some income in the form of the dole or public employment but it did zilch to give them wealth.
Today there is - so far - only a very limited impact on people’s incomes. The hit is on paper wealth in the form of asset values. Government measures to boost consumer spending are not going to have a significant impact on asset values, which are not deflating because of a collapse in demand but for other reasons. Presumably therefore Rudd’s $10 billion stimulus package is intended to forestall problems he sees emerging next year, when the flow-on from the financial system’s implosion causes loss of jobs.
Paradoxically however, the stimulus can only work if people keep spending like they used to, and they can only do this if they not only maintain their existing huge levels of personal indebtedness but increase them even more. Because that’s what’s been driving a lot of our economic activity for years now: consumer spending funded by ever-increasing debt. So Keynesian solutions can only work by perpetuating the extreme indebtedness that got us into this problem in the first place.
To my mind this would just postpone the inevitable reckoning by a year or two and make it worse when it arrives, because sooner or later people’s ability to carry ever-increasing debt levels will reach a limit and that will cause a contraction in demand. Personally I believe that limit has already been reached and overshot and Rudd’s $10 billion will be a pointless piece of symbolism, a waste of money that could have been used much more constructively than in first home buyer’s grants for people who don’t need them and Christmas presents (made in China) for the grandchildren of self-funded retirees.
Governments cannot prevent the bad times that are about to engulf us. If a good portion of the world has been living beyond its means then there has to be a reckoning. The most governments can do is provide a safety net for individuals who might otherwise starve or become homeless, and after the insolvency has washed out of the system, allocate resources funded by
deficits in a smart way to kick-start economic activity again.
The crying need is for people to be educated about the causes of the situation and to be made to understand that the current problems have to be weighed against the bounty of the last 10 years. Rudd and Swan have the capacity to deliver such messages coherently and consistently.
Bernard Keane expresses my sentiments eloquently in Crikey today. The current financial crisis is really bringing out the entitlement mentality that so many middle class Australians seem to share, whether it’s an entitlement to taxpayer-subsidised private schooling, or private health care, or private aged care, or in this instance, a taxpayer guarantee that your investments can only ever go up and never down.
Milne wrote a tendentious piece yesterday, bemoaning the horrible unfairness of investors not getting the same government protection that bank depositors got. In typical tabloid journalism style the story was based on the (alleged) facts of one individual’s circumstances: Greg Russell - a bloke who seems to have been singularly inept in managing his financial affairs if the information in the story is correct.
But the way these roosters try to have it both ways was glaringly apparent in this bloke’s absurd response to suggestions that he apply for assistance from Centrelink:
“It’s a complete joke,” Mr Russell said. “Imagine how the staff at Centrelink are going to cope with my circumstances.
“Wayne Swan is clutching at straws. There’s pride involved here, as well.
“Self-funded retirees don’t want to be lining up at Centrelink. He’s run out of ideas. They don’t know what’s going on.
Heaven forfend that a small businesman who can’t manage his money should have to demean himself by entering a Centrelink office, just like a common welfare cheat. And Greg your outrage would invite more sympathy if you could explain why you had apparently invested the whole of your savings in an account with a single firm, East Coast Mortgage Company - an organisation which explains clearly enough that ‘Your investment is not guaranteed and neither is the distribution of income or the rate of distribution.’
Which bit of that was hard to understand, Greg? Did you never pause to wonder why such statements are placed prominently on investment vehicles but not on bank deposit accounts?
As Keane asks, ‘Why don’t we guarantee all listed companies while we’re at it?’ I would go further; many people have entered into financial commitments on the assumption that their investment properties would keep appreciating. It would be completely unfair if the government didn’t now extend a guarantee to all owners of real estate that they will be protected against any fall in value.
The very expression ’self-funded retiree’ is objectionable. Its implicit message is that the person being labelled is of a superior quality, someone who’s conscientiously relieved the community of the cost of paying for their retirement. Once upon a time everyone was expected to take responsibility for their own lives and we had a safety net of welfare payments to support the minority who couldn’t manage to do it. Now this has been turned on its head and people who aren’t eligible for welfare claim some sort of exceptional standing in society - while they shamelessly hold their hands out for as many gifts from the government as they can wangle.
There was another one on the 7.30 Report tonight: Eleonore Henry, being interviewed in an apartment that looked a bloody sight nicer than anything I’ve ever lived in (or wanted to). She was described as having ‘a self-managed superannuation portfolio that pays her a self-funded pension’ … as if she had selflessly set out to relieve the poor old taxpayer of this burden. And what thanks had she got? SFA.
She complained that ‘the Prime Minister promised to help the banks, but he hasn’t promised to help all the other financial businesses’. I’m sure only her breeding prevented her telling us what she really thought of Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan for acting so unfairly. Clearly she had no conception whatsoever that returns were in any way related to something called ‘risk’. For many, risk seems to be an abstract notion that could never be expected to raise its ugly head in real life. For Eleonore, government is just a magic pudding that endlessly helps people by giving them money, and none are so deserving of help as the misleadingly-named self-funded retirees.
As Keane observes when asking why these people still have all their money in mortgage-linked investments:
Or did they just not like the idea of taking a lower return on a safer investment? One imagines that if these people received supernormal returns on their investments, they wouldn’t be offering the excess to the taxpayer. But they expect the taxpayer to come to their aid when they have to deal with consequences of their own financial decision-making.
Someone should tell Eleonore and Greg that bank deposits are not investments. They don’t appreciate in value. Indeed many of them pay a pathetic rate of interest or none at all. Many smart operators over the last 10 years would roar with laughter or stare open-mouthed at the news that an acquaintance would be so foolish as to have money in an ordinary savings bank account.
They get bugger-all return because they are supposed to be secure. Wayne Swan started to get the message across in the news tonight and I hope he and everyone else in the government does a lot more explanation of basic financial concepts in the coming months. We can’t expect idiots like Milne to understand them but if a few members of the middle class understand that they have to weigh the current problems against the bounty of the last 10 years, we might start to get a more balanced perspective on the present drama.
Over the last week I’ve spent quite a lot of time following links to the loonier conservative blogs in the US. Partly it’s sheer voyeurism, getting fun out of watching people make total prats of themselves as they realise Obama might actually pull off a win, and partly it’s finding anything to do except mark undergraduate assignments.
One thing that struck me as I reflected on the enormous volume of vicious ignorance spewing forth from the wingnut blogs is that it seems to have little connection to Australia. This is a very good thing. It means the Libs might have abandoned their forays into the politics of social division.
Remember the kind of bullshit Howard used to peddle? The terrorists would love to see Obama win, defeat in Iraq would see terrorism blossom throughout South East Asia, gay marriage is the pits, our role is to project ‘Western values’ in Asia, all that pandering to prejudice and fear for political gain … well it’s still meat and drink to the kind of people Howard pals around with on his frequent trips to the USA and gets risible awards from.
The thing is: I don’t hear it coming from the Libs here any more. Maybe it’s because they’re in opposition, and yes, Christopher Pyne, but lining up the Liberal Party with reactionary Republicanism doesn’t seem to be flavour of the month any more. Moreover the truly contemptible slimebags who were Howard’s accomplices - Ruddock and Andrews and Tuckey and Heffernan and Costello and the rest - might just as well have joined Downer in Cyprus for all the influence they appear to be having on opposition positions.
Of course it’s impossible to tell what ideology or policies are determining Liberal Party positions but that’s inevitable after the trauma they went through last year. Maybe there’s hope for them after all.
To wrap up this weekend’s series of vignettes from WingnutWorld, here’s a last piece of well-considered, entirely logical and evidence-based argument from one of the shrinking number of neo-cons who still believe that Bush is a great president:
Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the last year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?
Me, I would have thought North Korea invading the south was a more deliberate act of war than the September 11 terrorist incident, not to mention the Argentinian invasion of the Falklands, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Iraqi attacks on Iran and Kuwait, the US invasions of Afghanistan, Panama, Iraq and sundry other contries too numerous to mention, plus innumerable other somewhat warlike acts by various nation states since 1941.
But for the Krauthammers of this world these things are invisible. If something didn’t happen to the USA, it might as well not have happened at all.
The thing is, these people are not stupid. They have simply fallen victim to such egregious perception errors that their minds really no longer understand why September 11 wasn’t the most war-like event since Pearl Harbour, or that there’s not actually an Islamic war of conquest that constitutes an unprecedented international peril. They said they were going to create their own reality and they’ve succeeded … inside their own heads.
There’s a label for this kind of thing: pathological delusion. The fact that people suffering from the disorder still hold high office in the USA or continue to be accorded respect and carry influence at the top of the government and legislature is absolutely terrifying.
