Us & Them (war thread)

Or, if most people were to honestly recognise how much their lives depend on other people's cheap labour, the wheels of everything (culture ESPECIALLY) would grind to a halt.

No. Cuz I honestly recognize it and everything just kinda keep chuggin... funny.

You may have a point. I disagree with the assumed WOULDN'T BE NICE phrase - you're no visionary: I really believe it can be GRATE.

There are pockets of non destructive humanity throughout the western world who have amazing, fulfilled lives: self-sufficient communes, little villages, individuals who choose to opt out. The mainstream may have lost its appetite for physical labour and self-reliance but its not impossible to relearn. That reads trite but it's increasingly real: even something like the Farmers Market explosion counts.

The other thing is: however much *overt repression* *we* resort to, the oil is still going to run out within a lifetime. It'll be all gone BEFORE anyone's replacement measures are remotely ready. This crazy worldwide subversive fight for a combustible finite product - especially when the fighting itself uses up that product fast - is even more ludicrous than the fight for territory.

I'm not proving you wrong - I could imagine in your eyes this answer implying an even worse picture since I'm assuming your first point will inevitably occur, whatever happens.

cheap labour often only used to increase profits - i.e. sweatshop labour used by clothing companies not because they're struggling to stay afloat, but to increase the size of their already huge profits. until recently many clothing companies used Western labour - e.g. M&S making clothes in the UK, Adidas making trainers in Germany. in the past few years there has been a major switch to Developing World Free Trade Zones (i.e. sweatshops) from companies that were doing fine before.

the oil is still going to run out within a lifetime

Whoah, there -- this is a gross overstatement of even the most dire estimates of fossil fuel supplies. The most alarmist you can find any respectable person getting is the speculation that we'll have reached peak production within the next century or two -- meaning there'd still be as much oil left as we've already pumped out, but the cost of acquiring it would increase exponentially with each gallon obtained. Plus:

There are pockets of non destructive humanity throughout the western world who have amazing, fulfilled lives: self-sufficient communes, little villages, individuals who choose to opt out.

Ludicrous. Show me a significant number of non-fundamentalist westerners who "opt out" on health care, transportation, media, education, the protection of the state, or any of the other core benefits of western living. Even the Amish ride Amtrak, shop at Walmart, send letters through the U.S. Postal system, take their buggies down paved roads, and live under the protection of police.

I really believe that Westerners need to abandon this idea of a return to substinence living; it is the dream of people who have never had to sustain themselves, or even bother to watch other people have to sustain themselves. "Opting out" means not knowing what's going around you, or where you are in the first place. "Opting out" means breaking your leg when you're 10 and walking with a limp for the rest of your life. "Opting out" means drinking mud, eating goat bowels, and dying of malnutrition at age 6. If you want to "opt out," the people of Mozambique or Ethiopia will be happy to have you, since the people of Afghanistan are a little preoccupied right now.

I really believe that Westerners need to abandon this idea of a return to substinence living; it is the dream of people who have never had to sustain themselves, or even bother to watch other people have to sustain themselves.

*cheers wildly* Nitsuh has it on the money. The whole back-to-the-land romance image is centuries old now, in various incarnations, and they're all utterly bogus. Chris, if what you're celebrating is a sense of community first and foremost, that can and does exist in a near-infinite number of milieus. I agree that should be celebrated -- but not the presumption that there's something much better and more 'honest' about the dour conditions community sometimes finds itself in.

Chris and Nitsuh both speak good, but it's not either/or, not goat's bowels or full-on Western decadence, not subsistence but SUFFICIENCY. Nitsuh is right that no-one should have to be scrabbling around for the means of life, but Chris is right that modes of human satisfaction outside western consumer capitalism are both imaginable and possible, and exploring them is urgent and key. Opting into a nationalised health care system doesn't implicate you in wanting to extend obscene and socially/environmentally exploitative affluence. These are social and politial choices about priorities, and primarily about the just distribution of material resources that we shouldn't be trying to extend.

FWIW, I also think that prediction debates about exactly when nonrenewable energy sources run out isn't the point; this is a conceptual point about the logic of economic expansion on a planet whose capacities to provide finite fossil fuels and absorb pollution and waste are limited.

Can I still dislike Walmart (suburban big-box planning exacerbates pollution and waste of resources), not feel protected by the police (glorified undertakers), not drive, and generally try to reduce waste (I grew up a mile from the mountain that is Chicago's landfill, so it's not as if "Westerners" don't suffer from western waste as well) and *not* be a naif? My grandparents were Irish farmers who seemed to prefer their way of life to the American suburbanized one.

Can we have some stats on this whole oil thing? Because I attended a conference a few weeks ago in which I heard Jan Lundberg (former petroleum industry insider) say that experts are saying production will reach its peak within the next twenty years and then decline.

Christ. Back to nature = stupid. But whoever said that was the only way to radically transform society. I know plenty of foax with more appetizing proposals.

back to nature/subsistence living = dud.

better living through technology AND the equitable distribution of money for goods and services performed. this is urgent, and quite literally, key.

urgently literally *metaphorically* key, in fact (sub editor gets his coat)

My grandparents were Irish farmers who seemed to prefer their way of life to the American suburbanized one.

But did they say why?

Ooh I like this one.

Nitsuh: I seriously believe your oil guestimate is as over-optimistic as you believe mine is over-pessimistic.

The rest was beautifully put, however I feel you're arguing down the weaknesses in my writing rather than the essential content. I'm not espousing total back-to-basics as existing right now: of course *dropout*-style communities retain contact with / elements of modern society, since that society surrounds them, interacts with them and imposes on them daily.

BUT your bleak view of the alternative is emotive and ultimately a facile polemic: as if you can't set and completely heal a broken bone at home, with basic facilities, so long as there's a little learned skill? as if there's a significant difference between eating *goat bowels* and McDonalds (except of course for the organic, home-cooked, chemical-free nature of the former?)

In response to the original fascinating thread q I maintain: a) the change will come, whether we attempt to overtly destroy those who oppose us now or not and b) it won't be all bad when we get there.

But what will happen to Moore's Law?

Hold up, Ellie -- I'm not arguing that we should somehow abandon hope of sustainable energy or ecologically sound development. And Chris is right -- I am arguing more about his language than his details. What peeves me is the contingent of leftists who seem to have given up pushing for sound policy and decided instead to fetishize subsistence communitarian living, as if the world of sixteenth century Danes or twentieth-century Masai were any better just because they didn't have food additives.

This tendency best exemplified by Chris, just now, who seems to think the fact that goat bowels are "organic" makes them somehow safer or healthier than thrice-inspected, FDA-approved, Health-Code-compliant McDonalds hamburger patties. I have a cousin who made this mistake while visiting Ethiopia: she took one bite of fresh, organic, lightly- browned beef and had to be carted off to the hospital for an antihistamine shot. Luckily you could get clean needles if you had American money to bribe the doctors with.

My understanding is that probably more than 99% of Westerners scoff at this "back to the land" stuff, and the <1% who don't might do it simply to overcompensate for other people's waste, or for more complicated "spiritual" reasons, i.e., trying to see if they have what it takes.

touche.

got no time - fuckit - to continue, really sorry. I'll see what's here tomorrow. Nitsuh I swear I'm not fetishising but I'll try to put together something coherant in the morning. xx

Nitsuh is a capitalist!

To jump past the pessimism, I should answer the question itself as well.

To put it crudely: the 9/10ths of the world that is so consistently shit upon is too busy ducking the shit to hold much of a grudge about whose ass it's coming from. The only nations to really foment a sense of this as "conflict" are those where state-run media uses that tension to prop up totalitarian governments (yes, I'm looking at the Mid-East and north Africa); for the average poverty-stricken African or South American, though, America is less a source of evil or a point of envy than a magnificent dream to be aspired to. And every time we watch a country develop -- economically or into cultural modernity -- we see that viewpoint emerge ever more strongly to drown out the stridency of conflict. Every time you see an immigrant living happily in the U.S. or U.K. or wherever else, you're looking at the potential of his homeland to modernize and secularize, given the economic tools.

What's sort of sad about this is that the first world will never really be held accountable for the paths it's led the third world through. But if the goal is to lessen horrible future conflict, probably that's not such a bad thing.

A realist, surely...

bnw -- NO!!

Like I said, I don't mean for any of this to stand as a defense of the status quo. In fact, it's my desire to radically reframe the status quo that makes me so irked at those who seem to want to give up the project of modernity entirely.

I believe modernity works, and this belief is based largely on a direct comparison of the lives of my fellow Americans with the lives of my fellow Ethiopians. I believe modernity can work much, much better than it currently does, I'm committed to any effort to steer it in a more just, egalitarian direction, and I'm convinced that over the long term, that is indeed the direction that it will move. What I don't believe is that there's much value in trying to adopt the social organizations of the past (or the third world -- same thing) for the purposes of solving the new problems of modernity. I think the people of the first world -- Americans in my age range and social class especially -- have a really irritating tendency to fetishize rurality, subsistence living, etc., without having a very clear concept of all the hardship, ignorance, and hopelessness that such things entail.

But Nitsuh not everyone can live like us. It is not feasible, resource-wise. The "hope" of other countries modernizing and secularizing (the "offer they can't refuse" cuz alternative is ostracization and/or pestilence and death) is a false hope.

E.g., on television last night, I saw two separate commercials focussing on the liberating effects of throwing one's cell-phone into a body of water.

Whereas 50% of the world's population has never made a telephone call.

Kerry has a point, I think, insofar as those attempting to articulate anti-instrumental, anti-'modernisation', anti-consumerist viewpoints are forced into a kind of desperate extremism. That is, I think that hardcore 'back to nature'/self-sufficiency philosophies and polemics might be better read as a challenge than as an answer, as political and rhetorical strategies rather than literal policy statements.

I maybe envy those of you with faith in technocentric/administrative and *purely* redistributive strategies (sustainable development, energy efficiency etc) - Alan, Nitsuh - but don't think that without a major ideological/lifestyle shift emphasising, as I said, the notion of sufficiency (ie a commitment to live with materially less) in the West those strategies are enough. Which is why I approve of Chris' willingness to defend the idea that a life with less stuff may prove more fulfilling and doesn't necessarily involve oppressive austerity.

On safety of goat bowels vs McDonalds (I am not speaking from direct experience of either here) - this is a matter of perspective and epidemiology, surely? One bite of infected (or whatever) meat might pose an immediate threat, but the *overall* effect (heart disease etc) of a Western diet riddled with antibiotics, saturated with fat and cheaply produced is not a good one, no? There are lots of instances (BSE to name but one) in which it is the institutionalisation of production under the aegis of science and safety that creates the risk (real or imagined) that we live with.

Every time you see an immigrant living happily in the U.S. or U.K. or wherever else, you're looking at the potential of his homeland to modernize and secularize, given the economic tools.

The truth, however, is that the overwhelming majority of those "happy" immigrants are doing the shit work in the US and UK - long hours, no unions, no health care, little pay. Please don't set up this Horatio Alger argument, Nitsuh - I actually do not disagree with some of the things you are saying, but this construction just isn't true, and it sets immigrants, their children and grandchildren up for a cruel, cruel letdown. I'm reminded of the time I worked in a plant that was staffed primarily by Polish immigrants. Having heard nothing but Reagan-era news items about life in Poland, I was quite surprised to hear these workers talk about going back to Poland, and their complaints about the US lack of health care and other safety nets.

Well, Tracer, it's not even entirely necessary for every nation to "live like us" -- it's only necessary for the process of modernization and secularization to be an ongoing one, enough so that the sort of mass conflict Dave Q is positing seems meaningless and counterproductive.

Plus: with regard to fossil fuels, yes, there is definite limit to world modernization. But let's remember that a large portion of the wealth of the west is dependent not just on consuming resources, but on having this tremendous wealth-generation capacity already in place. We've seen inklings of the same sort of capacity developing all across the globe in the past half-century, with even small outpourings of resources making much more massive shifts in those people's standards of living than the same amount of resources can accomplish for us. (E.g., the fledgling modern middle class of the Indian tech industry.)

"no it WOULDN'T be nice no matter what the 'revolutionaries' may think"

Is what we have "nice" now? Think of the smart people you know. Are they happy, fulfilled, or peaceful? Are things "as they should be" in their minds? No!! And they're the ones WITH the cell phones!!!!

The problem is that all this back to nature crap = guilty white liberalism. Hells, most of the *American* population to say nothing of underdeveloped nations is lacking in quality of life. When you say "we" consume too much, who's the "we"? Are my sandwich lunches and campbells soup dinners rilly the cause of misery? C'mon. Not to mention which, a solar panel system half the size of delaware could more than power the whole U.S. So why doesn't it happen? Because there's no money in it.

Oh, and another thing: I hate that word "realism". I prefer "pragmatism". "Realism" seems to me to be the component of an Americanist dogma that refuses to entertain any sort of idealism or visionary creativity with regard to present problems, and it is frequently a justification for stagnancy and inaction. I don't think that idealism and pragmatism are incompatible.

Nitsuh I just think that "the process" of modernization is usually a synonym for the "process" of locking whole countries into exploitative relationships with their Northern/Western masters.

Such was not my intent, Kerry, and I have no problems with the term 'pragmatism' -- I won't, however, immediately apologize for not being able to read your mind, in the same way I wasn't expecting you to read mine. ;-)

God I sound like fucking Chomsky.

Said immigrants may be 'exploited' in our sense of the word, but it's important to remember that the wages they make doing shit work in westernised countries are (usually) better than the wages they would earn working at a decent job in a third world or 'developing' country. Of course the cost of living here is higher as well, so perhaps that equalises the situation...Of course, the fact of the matter is that most of the non western world is clamouring to be included in our secular capitalist system.

I'll remember to tell people that next time I go home. I'm sure they'll appreciate it, just as I appreciated upper-middle-class Northwestern students telling me that I shouldn't fret when I had five bucks in the bank because "other people have it worse".

So let's cut the bullshit here - of the people in this group, how many grew up in the rust belt and experienced unemployment first hand? How many had parents who worked in the service sector and were screwed by it?

Thought so. Boy, I feel just great today. God Bless America.

Turner makes the point I was about to. I don't mean to harp on Ethiopia, or anything -- and granted, it's a particuarly exaggerated example, but -- let me just say that there are people in the world who have so little that it's nearly impossible to exploit them. E.g., a village where women were fighting over access to a humanitarian road-building project that paid the equivalent of about 50 cents (US) per day. When your standard of living is dirt-low, 50 cents a day can be like winning the fucking lottery.

I'm w/ tracer that in fact relationships other nations are drawn into w/ US don't modernize but in fact constitute a block to modern develoipment.

Also, I'd lay odds that the Poland those workers were pining for no longer exists -- coz it was *soviet* poland which had the safety nets. Now unemployment, benefits, quality of life, is far worse there. Also, don't try to be gay or Jewish there these days either.

Yup, Sterling - you're right. It was the eighties.

Sorry, Kerry, but I had parents who had to get fantastically lucky just to come to the U.S. and find work in the service sector -- as janitors in nursing homes. I'm not sure how much that has to do with what we're talking about, though; if we want to talk globally, the lower classes of the U.S. still have pretty desirable lives on the grand scale. Unless you want to make the somewhat- legitimate argument that it's better to be "rich" among the devastatingly poor than "poor" among the devastatingly rich.

Nitsuh I think you've got it exactly backwards: when your standard of living is 50c a day you are EMINENTLY exploitable because you will take ANYTHING you are handed. Yes, the maquiladoras outside Ciudad Juarez provide better wages than selling Chiclets on the street. That's not progressive employment or modernization though, it's the definition of exploitation.

Let's look at the countries colonized either directly by western powers or indirectly through foreign investment. How are they doing? (I'm thinking of most of Africa here, Haiti, etc) How about Japan, who was never colonized or controlled by a foregin power?

I'm getting away from the question a bit. But I don't believe that the options are as stark as Starbucks vs infected goat bowels. Though our transnationals fervently hope I do.

Look, I'm not going to get into a pissing contest here. My only point was that pointing to the situation in other countries is small consolation to people who are suffering - yes, suffering - here. And I won't tolerate the insinuation that I *don't* know what I'm talking about - my grandparents are immigrants as well. The fact that there's always someone poorer is nothing other than a justification for appalling conditions at some "higher" level.

I'm very reluctant to talk about my own experiences. But reading some things here is just like a slap in the face.

the onion weighs in: http://www.theonion.com/onion3739/hang_in_there.html
I hear you Kerry. And I was making the further point that even a lot people with well-paying jobs feel hassled and harried every day of their lives here. I for instance get a great paycheck and still can't afford healthcare, nor insurance for my nonexistent car.

― Tracer Hand, Tuesday, 6 November 2001 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

gack what happened there? http://www .theonion.com/onion3739/hang_in_there.html

i am crap at politics and modern history (would like to know more about it but don't even know where to start) and i am SO impressed by this thread. i'm not even going to try and argue with anyone, though overall i think i agree the most with Ellie and Kerry. this thread is one of the reasons i love ILE, thanks for being so articulate and well-informed chaps. now get back to it :)

The attitude of my parents and grandparents, who grew up in poverty, was not so much "thank god we're in America". In fact, they were curiously un-patriotic and ungrateful. Rather, the message I got from them about Ireland or Italy vis-a-vis the US was more like: "we'll shut up and do this, because the alternative is worse." What happens is that topics become forbidden, and children become masochistic, fatalistic and very often abusive - because they're not allowed to complain of their lot at all. I had a friend whose parents had been in a concentration camp. My friend's relationship with her parents was best characterized by avoidance out of fear of offending. You basically end up feeling tremendous guilt and work your ass off trying to minimize the burden, the offense of your existence. No matter how much worse it is somewhere else, this sick cycle, which serves to justify all manner of fear, ill health and discomfort, has just got to stop. One of the reasons for my lack of patriotism is that I heard every day the tales of the happy rags-to-riches immigrant and felt that as a cruel lie. Not so much in my own life, for which there was hope, but in the lives of my parents and grandparents, who really did suffer because they tried to tell themselves this all the while knowing in their hearts that it wasn't true.

Look, I'm not trying to use the condition of the third world as an argument in favor of exploitation, repression, or even the idea that people don't have a right to complain about very real, correctable ills elsewhere in the world -- you can do a little googling around ILE and find my complaining about just about everything imaginable. My comments above are all directed at precisely the opposite tendency of the one Kerry describes above -- what I began arguing against, and still am arguing against, is the idea that there's any charm or "realness" or preferability to the conditions of the non- Western world. This is pretty much an example of the arguing-against- what-you-are-closest-to phenomenon: my ire on this topic stems from the fact that there's currently a groundswell of opposition to the process of globalization, but that groundswell has done a notoriously poor job of focusing its rhetoric on changing the details of that processes as opposed to stopping it entirely.

Which brings us to the maquiladora issue. Two points to tracer: if "exploitation" amounts to people accepting whatever pay they get because it's better than the alternative, then everyone -- you, me, and Bill Gates alike -- is being exploited, in that we wouldn't be working at all if not for our biological need for sustenance and shelter. My point is that "exploitation" is completely relative, and any definition of it that tells a woman she should let her kids starve rather than working for the 50 cents a day it would take to feed them is surely worse than the "exploitation" itself.

But, as noted, these aren't the only options, and I'm not arguing that they should be. As I said, my ire is directed toward those who view industry as outright enemies, those who seem to think Juarez is better off without industries at all, as opposed to making firm and consistent arguments in favor of minimum standards of practice for those industries. I am definitely not trying to imply that Mexicans should be happy with the maquiladoras, or that the American working class has no right to complain.

What I'm looking for is a rough process that starts with the modernization of third-world nations in as responsible a manner as is possible. And what I expect from that process is a certain amount of what we're calling exploitation -- but at the same time a corresponding rise in the stability of people's lives, a corresponding rise in their standards of living and social organization, and therefore a corresponding rise in their ability to speak out about those abuses, organize against them, and engage in political activity targeted against them. Because it's at exactly that point that things begin to get better -- as soon as people can start to take their daily bread at least a little bit for granted, they can begin to agitate for the ongoing, substantive improvements to their areas that I think we're all, in the end, in favor of.

(All of which is sort of an apology for if I seemed overly strident, above -- it's not that I'm disagreeing with any of you in particular, just certain lines of thought that are being vaguely reflected here.)

To answer Tracer's first point: I think ideology is no longer really what we believe, but what we practice as if we believe it even if we know deep down it is not true. Nitsuh's got a point about opting out (ie. 'the grand refusal') being not nearly the easy (or desirable) solution some leftists/anti-corporate types paint it to be, but at the same time I think not opting out almost ensures the continuing destructive cycle of the type of system we live in. I cannot provide an answer here, obviously.

A query that maybe others can provide answers to - is exploitative capitalism merely a subset of modernity, or is modernity merely a subset of exploitative capitalism? Can modernity be modified so as to no longer exploit the socially/economically disadvantaged, or is that exploitation crucial to modernity's existence?

Finally, Nitsuh, I think that while what your criticisms of anti-globalisation protesters are accurate up to a point, I also think you perhaps underestimate how many do have a grasp on the situation.

There's an Australian film that's just been released about a man who sues God because his insurance company won't cover the cost of the destruction of his boat due to it being "an act of God". The defendant is his Holiness, but the real enemy is the insurance company who use Him as an excuse for what is an arbitrary company-dictated policy. Likewise, protesters target the "inevitable" process of globalisation knowing that it is used as a foolproof explanation for a great many not-so-inevitable processes occuring in its name.

"Back to the land" may be a naive sentiment on the part of whatever tiny minority advocates it. However, it's important to point out that in the U.S., the "wretched refuse" didn't weep with gratitude at the sight of the Statue of Liberty and the prospect of industrial labor. Study the history of the labor movement in America, the people who brought us (well, some of us) our basic rights, and you'll see the struggles of immigrants - a testament to their lack of complacency regarding their situation.

The situation is not quite like Neil Diamond's "America" - leaving home was, in fact, a tragic situation for many. It very often means exchanging your culture and skills (and my grandparents had an astonishing array of skills) to become an interchangeable and often disposable component of industrialism. The question is: what happened to those skills? What happened to that culture? And who really decided this?

leaving home was, in fact, a tragic situation for many

And yet they left. I appreciate this 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' dichotomy you're setting up here, Kerry, but it boils down to the fact that a lot of people made the choice to come here and that the vast majority remained. Clearly America isn't perfect, and yet.

Of course not - it costs money to go back. My whole point was that it isn't as much of a 'choice'. It's more complicated than that. You just don't understand, you're not really saying much here, and your tone is more than a little smug and condescending. Please don't you *ever* interpret my family history to suit your agenda. It's really fucking irritating and arrogant.

God I'm so sick of ILE. Why do I put up with this shit.

*bows* I wasn't intending to read it as specifically your own family history, Kerry, and I'm sorry it came across that like that. I was referring to the vast amounts of folks who came over in general -- and if it cost money to go back, it cost money to get there in the first place (though admittedly it would be interesting to see a comparison of rates -- did in fact companies price one way trips to America lower than one way trips from, do they still? hmm...).

And without trying to sound put upon (compared to the amount of abuse I get from people in my job who can't understand why they have to follow basic library policies like paying overdue fines, any fierce discussion on these boards has been a cakewalk), while I don't question your obvious passion and commitment to many issues, you seem to think I don't have that in turn, or rather that I don't have it on terms you find to your taste to deal with.

You seem (*seem*, I emphasize -- this is all a matter of possibly incorrect perception) to think that most everybody here, or at least who cares about these debates to get directly involved, is either against you or is merely flippant, and that you are the one with the truth, period. Tell me if I'm wrong, I'd appreciate that. But right now it seems you spend a lot of time fighting people as much for how they say it as for what they are saying, and drawing some pretty sweeping conclusions as a result.

I dunno -- the comment I most frequently hear from third-world immigrants is something along the lines of "I'm glad I'm here." Plus "I'm making enough money to support my family," or "I'm going to school and learning some sort of skill," or just plain, "Things are a lot safer here than where I came from." My comment wasn't meant to reinforce any stereotype of the Happy Hardworking Immigrant Man. It was only meant to point out that plenty of people live in impoverished nations where they can't meet their basic needs, don't have access to education, live in constant fear and flight because of political or ethnic strife, or, most often, live in such underdeveloped areas that they have no hope of finding any sort of gainful employment, or anything to do with their lives at all -- and a huge number of those people see the west as desirable enough to risk their very lives just to get over here.

But here's the thing -- looking back over the thread, I have to point out that the comment that started this whole thing was about something else entirely. When I said that any reasonably happy immigrant is proof of his nation's potential to modernize -- and that includes even the most pissed-off union-organizing anti-patriotic immigrant around, so long as he or she would still rather be fighting that fight in the U.S. than elsewhere -- all I meant was that it reflects the capacity of the nation to be modern, secular, economically developed. I meant that if everyone I talk to in Ethiopia would on some level rather be living within this system -- and if some of them, like my family, can come do it and be happier and more fulfilled than if they hadn't -- that's empirical proof that a good portion of the nation's populace is perfectly willing to embrace and benefit from western values and social systems.

I said that as a means of addressing Dave's original question -- an argument, essentially, that the third world is not, by and large, against the West, and more specifically that the modernization of the third world in line with Western values wouldn't turn them against the West.

Err -- any more so than us Westerners in this thread are against the West, anyway. :)

Summary: Dave sets up a stupid counterposition based on the same stupid proposition that the media spouts about good and evil and attacks on freedom and everyone takes the bait and ends up playing right into his hands and produces lots of entertaining(?) heat.

No, Ned - you're wrong about me. Which is exactly why I'm beating my head against the wall. This thread touches too closely on things that I *know*. Not *the* truth, but a truth, and one that simply does not get articulated here or pretty much anywhere else on the internet. I *hate* having to be the one to represent. I only do it because I feel a responsibility to do so. But my intention was never to call attention to myself, so I'll just quit now. But the way people say things *is* important - it shows that you are aware of the people you speak to. I don't have the narcissism to think that 'everyone is against me'. It's more like, a feeling of complete alienation.

Nitsuh, can't we just agree that YMMV? I don't think I'm disagreeing with a lot of what you've said, although I do think that the positions are getting mischaracterized by a lot of people. Also, I'd like to point out that my family has said similar things about the US - in particular, they were sending money back to their family. People make the arguments you make - regarding the success of immigrants in the U.S. - about Ireland and the Irish all the time. None of the things you say are unfamiliar to me, who grew up in a community of immigrants and their children - third-world or otherwise. But the point I was trying to make regarding labor history here in the U.S. is that labor struggles here are not discontinuous with labor struggles elsewhere.

First, I hope you *don't* go, Kerry, because I do like you a heck of a lot. People speaking their mind = cool.

This thread touches too closely on things that I *know*. Not *the* truth, but a truth, and one that simply does not get articulated here or pretty much anywhere else on the internet. I *hate* having to be the one to represent. I only do it because I feel a responsibility to do so.

Here, then, is probably the crux of our own personal disagreement -- for better or worse, I speak only for myself, and in terms of personality I cannot see myself taking on the role you have done. It sounds like you had a similar dilemma and made a sacrifice in order to speak on a wider level. I'd fear getting lost in that message if I was in your shoes -- but that's just me talking.

But my intention was never to call attention to myself, so I'll just quit now.

This is the thing, though -- if you're going to represent, as you say, for something larger than yourself, you are the one who is going to be noticed, critiqued, argued with. You sound terribly uncomfortable with the role you've got, and that's quite understandable. But unless you were literally a non-person, if you only issued the equivalent of press releases, if you didn't respond to anyone directly, then that level of attention is surely inevitable. And what can happen is that others may agree with you on your personal truth but can, for instance, disagree in how it is said or expressed. That can't be avoided, not unless you only talked with people who exactly and totally agreed with you.

But the way people say things *is* important - it shows that you are aware of the people you speak to.

I agree -- but I don't agree that how somebody says something, if it differs from one's own way of saying it, automatically condemns them or implies that they have no commitment to something. A truth can have multiple interpreters -- which is perhaps the point.

I don't have the narcissism to think that 'everyone is against me'. It's more like, a feeling of complete alienation.

...hm. What or who exactly do you feel alienated from? Clearly it's not just us -- but is it literally everything?

Oh, I'm not ready to flounce off ILE just yet - I just meant I should get out of this thread since I can't think straight anymore. But Ned, you've been far too charitible toward me - I don't deserve that, and I'm sorry.

Nonsense. I'm a very crusty crab at many points, and can easily be unaware of my own cutting nature. So fret not -- we all deserve good thoughts. :-)