"America is Not the greatest country in the world"

[SA210]

Beginning scene of the new HBO series The Newsroom

I haven't seen this show yet, but this speech is a pretty damn awesome :tu


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[Yonivore]

Wait a minute! Jeff Daniels character wants to take us back to a simpler time? Why does he hate blacks?

[Oh, Gee!!]

Wait a minute! Jeff Daniels character wants to take us back to a simpler time? Why does he hate blacks?

is that you how you interpret "simpler times?" blacks being hated on? telling indeed.

[clambake]

is that you how you interpret "simpler times?" blacks being hated on? telling indeed.

that never changed.

[Yonivore]

is that you how you interpret "simpler times?" blacks being hated on? telling indeed.
No, it's just when any conservative yearns for a time when things were as the Daniel's character describes them, they're characterized as wanting to go back to slavery and/or segregation.

[Wild Cobra Kai]

We haven't been in a while. Time has passed us by. Fucking Korea had 100" TVs like 6 years ago. I haven't seen anything bigger than 70 inches in the good old USA yet. People keep saying that soon you will be able to buy shit from vending machines and stores with your phone. Japan has been doing that shit for years.

America is not exceptional.

[jack sommerset]

Ive got nothing against black folks, i wouldn't mind owning a few though. God bless

[EVAY]

I absolutely love that show. Never miss it anymore. Sam Waterston's character is hysterical.

[EVAY]

You know the show is fiction because it portrays newspeople as principled occasionally.

[mouse]

1998 called they want this topic back.

[AussieFanKurt]

Don't know if all the facts are true, but was a well done speech haha

HBO always provides the goods

[Yonivore]

Here, Victor Davis Hansen explains to Daniel's character why America is having some difficulty with its exceptional-ism, right now.

California: The Road Warrior Is Here (http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-the-road-warrior-is-here/)


Sometimes, and in some places, in California I think we have nearly descended into Miller’s dark vision — especially the juxtaposition of occasional high technology with premodern notions of law and security. The state deficit is at $16 billion. Stockton went bankrupt; Fresno is rumored to be next. Unemployment stays over 10% and in the Central Valley is more like 15%. Seven out of the last eleven new Californians went on Medicaid, which is about broke. A third of the nation’s welfare recipients are in California. In many areas, 40% of Central Valley high school students do not graduate — and do not work, if the latest crisis in finding $10 an hour agricultural workers is any indication. And so on.

Our culprit out here was not the Bomb (and remember, Hiroshima looks a lot better today than does Detroit, despite the inverse in 1945). The condition is instead brought on by a perfect storm of events that have shred the veneer of sophisticated civilization. Add up the causes. One was the destruction of the California rural middle class. Manufacturing jobs, small family farms, and new businesses disappeared due to globalization, high taxes, and new regulations. A pyramidal society followed of a few absentee land barons and corporate grandees, and a mass of those on entitlements or working for government or employed at low-skilled service jobs. The guy with a viable 60 acres of almonds ceased to exist.
I agree. Discuss.

[vy65]

Premise may or may not be true -- how do you go about figuring that one out?

Bullshit nostalgia; I don't buy the "we were once great, but have fallen from grace" narrative. It tends to oversimplify the past and read out the bad shit going on back then.