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Recent postings at Salon.com (June 30 2016)

E.L. Deflagrante kumicho "we do not get that the member nations are not US states, but nations with thousands of years of history"
I always wonder when people talk about the importance of the length of time a country has been a country, if they're thinking that somehow a race's history gets passed on through the genes. It's like as if some serum was injected into each young child, so they're inextricably infected with the millions of voices of their ancestral heritage. Within each one is actually a Jungian legion! I'm sorry, but weren't they rather just playing with their X-boxes and listening to their Taylor Swift? How exactly was the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, Chesterton and Churchill lurking somehow, even within that?
Maybe it's rather that if you've been well loved as a child, you don't project onto a nation anything mythical or magical -- you're spared that psychological malady. It becomes... simply a collective; one that might not make anywhere near as much sense as one you might choose to formulate within your own generation, with people of similar dispositions, across other countries. Like the E.U. was for the post-war generation. 
jak123 "the fact that even at this late date that no one seems to know exactly why she wants to be president"
More opportunities for women. A society with better healthcare. Less disparity between the rich and the poor. A more educated society. Encouraging a less egotistic, more generous way of looking at the world. 
She may not be the best progressive out there, but she IS progressive. Her intention to be president is very worthy. Her example will encourage other intelligent people to do the same. 
By the way, borderlines love an Orwellian, 1984 society. It is something they'd wish upon themselves. For it means their "parents," however loathsome and distrusting, have not abandoned them. 
We need to explore just how much people ACTUALLY hate a surveillance state, or are somehow eased by it. I don't think you can tell simply by the fact that someone is criticizing... sometimes in the criticism one feels that the world would be psychically molded to be this prison, this panopticon, even if the outside world didn't much substantiate. At some level, they actually feel more at ease than they do ill-at-ease, in this ostensibly existing surveillance world prison.  
Reality-based Liberal Emporium "people with crappy rearing generally bow the corrupt and powerful"
Yes, this is right. For them, the horsemen of the apocalypse come riding when they self-actualize too much. When they've suffered, it's proof of how actually selfless they've been living. 
You can only get "Scandinavia," not with the successful spread of examples and ideas, but when the childrearing, the true level of genuine love in families, is high enough for everyone to feel well at ease when each one of them lives an enriched, fully independent life. 
Reality-based Liberal Emporium Oligarchs are actually our parents, displaced. Anyone who complains about how they've been humiliated through too much boot-licking, has come out of childhoods where their parents inflicted similar humiliations upon them. There IS a sense in which they're actually innocent... people who would have been forced to play their parts, had they not been willing, so the world could re-stage their early childhood humiliations... the pretext, to eventual glorious revenge. 
firstpersoninfinite Emporium The electorate know what they're doing. They deliberately vote in people who'll abuse them. Kill our easy prosperity. We'll develop character through suffering -- i.e. we won't self-actualize at all, so our parents won't think we've abandoned them.
Scandinavians don't do that. But then with them it's just silly to discuss psychic behaviours like masochism because their level of childrearing is too good. The professional class everywhere is getting beyond this as well. But the good old white trash -- who need their children to make up for attention they did not receive from their own unloved parents, and who ferociously abandon them when they have the audacity to do their own thing -- keep the Freudian concepts of superego, sadism and masochism, fully relevant. 
This hugging of the flag we're about to see plenty of now is regressive clinging to mommy. Borders will outline the beautific mother country's body. Everyone inside will be good the "good children" again, as they displace all their own "bad" aspects, as well as those of their Terrifying Mother's, onto other countries.
E.U. has seen a beloved period of peace. This period of nationalism will have countries looking at other countries like the fellowship did Mordor. 
Without neoliberalism the world would have fashioned themselves like Scandinavians have now. They'd all be earning living wages, have 5-week vacations. Anxiety-levels would be down, and life would be all about rich self-development and self-actualization. 
Hardly.
Without neoliberalism, the working class would have found some other way to make the world make them suffer. They're actually content when they've scars aplenty to show the world. Look, mom, not the least bit spoiled, am I! The problem for the world is that they've decided the time for them to accrue scars is over. Now's the time where they take out revenge. We'll all patsies to their executing their own personal psychodrama. They'll project on us all the appropriate parts. 
Slickship Gunner Emporium This is the great "men" theory of history. Leaders change the course of a nation. I think they just follow the emotional rhythms of the rest of the country, and as such, could have been replaced by hundreds of others, and each would have been established indisputably singular and "great." I hope in temperament, whatever reality is, we prefer to know more of undistinguished Brussel democrats than great Churchill leaders facing the tide... It'll mean we won't secretly relish periods which are ultimately truly nasty; find heroic, figures who lead millions to their deaths.  
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