I think seanyboy trolled me.

I'm so ashamed.

Sorry, Capn... let me address your question. They say these things with a straight face because someone in their company actually BELIEVES these talking points. I think FEAR is the motivating factor: fear of brown people, fear of Communism, fear that America is no longer "#1"... fear that they'll die alone and friendless...

Something is making these people so afraid that they're defending the fact that millions of American children live with no health care whatsoever.

The anti-muslim thing here never ceases to make me feel ashamed. It makes me feel literally sick to my stomach.

My friend in Egypt wishes so much that he could come here for a visit -- even for a week. And while I desperately wish that the U.S. would allow him to have a freaking Visa just once, another part of me wonders how people would treat him if he came here. He couldn't be less of a terrorist and yet I know how xenophobic people are nowadays. I hate knowing that.

Sometimes I wish I hadn't gone to Egypt and that I wasn't so vividly aware of any of this stuff and it didn't bother or affect me as much as it does now. Man, my stomach hurts.

This kind of rhetoric literally enrages me. I watch these and I really can't do anything except gnash my teeth and throw things for a few minutes.

Oh man, these people are dumb! Too bad smart people don't like killing them, because our world would be better off with stands of grapeshot cutting bloody swaths through groups of dummy pundits as they gather to chat about terror by the Fox News water cooler.

Seriously, smart people have to seize power from the idiots before they kill us all. I'm not being overly elitist (though I'll grant that I'm being an asshole); I think there are plenty of harmless and not-so-smart people out there who would be better off if we beheaded these overreaching morons on live TV, preferably on Fox News.

Does it seem to anyone else like this xenophobia is getting worse? It's like the more unpopular it becomes, the more they have to step up the fear and hate. It's really sickening. The thing that really bugs me is we're going to look back on this in 5, 10, 20 years and it'll be seen as completely ridiculous and overreacting, like Japanese camps in the 40s seem now. And CNN will have a special on it all, it'll be called "The Era of Fear" or some shit.
FDR's famous words were never more pertinent.

I like how bureaucracy is demonized as only a government problem. As if private healthcare has no bureaucracy at all.

Fox News makes me ill.

FDR's famous words were never more pertinent.

"A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward."

"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough."

"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."

"I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made."

"If I went to work in a factory the first thing I'd do is join a union."

"It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose."

"No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal."

"Selfishness is the only real atheism; aspiration, unselfishness, the only real religion."

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power."

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

"Be sincere; be brief; be seated."

Thankhugh.

Je vous en prie. À hellbientôt, mon ami!

À la votre!

Does it seem to anyone else like this xenophobia is getting worse?

Yeah - it is. And it's getting worse across the board. People are starting to hate the Muslims and other people are starting to hate the Jews and in the middle of it all is this quiet majority that doesn't know what the fuck is going on and is assailed from all sides by fear-mongering and propaganda. I don't know what to do about it. I'm seeing friends, good peaceful folk who I'd never classify as racist, saying more and more outrageous things.

It sickens me and saddens me and terrifies me.
And other than railing against all polarised opinions and / or potentially pushing myself away from the people I've been friends with for years I don't really know what to do.

I don't know that xenophobia has gotten worse, I wonder if perhaps I'm just more painfully aware than I was when I was younger.

I can't speak about the American press, because frankly it's SO TERRIBLE that I long ago tuned out completely, but the media here has certainly started USING xenophobia more and more to generate news stories where none exist.

There's no problem in Britain that the Sun can't blame on immigrants.

I love it when people here in Pittsburgh rail against immigrants which is not just racist but also stupid because we don't have any immigrants. The city is only 3% foreign born.

They say these things with a straight face because someone in their company actually BELIEVES these talking points.

No, I don't think any of them believe the crap they spew. (Yesterday's O'Reilly column in my paper had him saying he didn't care which party got into the White House as long as it was someone with a sensible policy to kill as many Muslims as possible. And he lambastes NBC for pointing out that the London bombings killed nobody; there goes the liberal media again, coddling terrorists. And of course the only rational response to a terrorist event in Islamabad is blind panic here in the USA.) They know and understand their role as propagandists and they are perfectly comfortable with it.

Of course I meant the recent London bombing attempts, which is what NBC was discussing.