i'm listening to the assault on reason by al gore. it's a very good book.

why is this? why do people sit idly by while the bush administration continues to conduct, by the letter of the law, criminal activities on a daily basis? why do americans allow the bush administration to decieve them time and time again with indisputable evidence that they are being deceived so that he and his staff carry out a personal campaign to get richer and richer?
to know the evidence, there are hundreds of pages of it in gore's book which has assumably been ripped apart looking for inaccuracies and seemingly none have arisen.

Because we (and I use we to mean people, not just Americans and I definitely include myself on this) are lazy. We're bone-idle, we can't be bothered, it's not really that broke from our point of view and frankly we can't be arsed to fix it. It doesn't immediately concern us, we have better things to do, more immediate things to worry about. We're self centred, short-sighted, and by CAKE if someone isn't any of those things they are a do-gooder with too much time on their hands and I'M GOING TO TELL THE NEIGHBOURS ABOUT THEM.

So yeah, we can't be arsed, and those that can usually come off as bores. That and we know damn well that trying to get those in power to listen to us isn't worth the effort. We're too busy dodging the s**t rolling down the hill to shout up and ask for them to stop driving the manure truck with the tail down.

Lazy? No. We're content enough not to have a revolution. Gas prices are not like those in Britain or Finland, and we all have 42"+ HDTV's. No one will care enough how their country is run unless it affects them directly.

Anovis. You appear to disagree with me in your second word, yet then totally agree with me in your summary.

Plank.

*walks*

and STAY OUT.

*slams door*

I just wanted someone to argue with

al gore is an assault on reason.

Why would people care when they can go to the cnn.com mainpage and find such important and news-worthy stories like Kurt Russ....err, Patrick Swayze might die, someone at a Wendy's in Florida was shot or something, kids can't hug at school, and most "modern artists" have about as much talent as a rodent. I mean really, with such important issues constantly on the public's mind, can you blame them for not caring about something as silly as war crimes, a tanking society, and environmental crises?

tl;dr

For the same reason that every single issue is biased to look black or white. Bushes administration has been a problem, but because everyone's so busy taking a stupidly polarized look at it nothing will change. No one really cares about the actual problems. They care about hopping on a bandwagon. Facts are merely stepping stones to be arranged for pointless bickering between obnoxious pundits. In order to get any attention everything must be looked at from one ultra-biased viewpoint or another. People don't care about fixing anything, they care about being fanboys. It's this lazy moronic attitude that has made the problems with the Bush administration possible.

"Ignorance is bliss"

We're sublime, and trained to think we're crazy. We're expected to find every possible method to sedate ourselves, and use them tenfold. Watch television and consider the commercials? What about the self help books? Why do you need Yoga? What doesn't a $400 handbag actually get me? Why am I not on any drugs right now? We're constantly trying to find the easiest way to consume our lives, and any kind of action or activity is considered pretentious and loud-mouthed. We're expected to be passive aggressive if we're unhappy with someone else.

"When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?" - Bill Hicks

For a moment I thought the book's title was "Assault on Reason By Algore". I might read a book by that title. No wonder I haven't heard him lately. He must be staying in from the cold writing books.

'No matter how bad a president is, he'll be gone in 4-8 years, anyway. The worse that president is, the more likely it is that someone very different will be elected next time around. Checks and balances prevent anyone from ruining the nation, but I guess it can be screwed up quite mightily.'

LOL

fixed

In the American public's defense, a lot of the Bush administration's crimes aren't exactly easy for the layperson to understand. They also aren't easy for the TV media to explain in convenient five-minute sound-byte stories. Most people, if they don't immediately understand something in politics, will ignore it and tell themselves that they don't have to worry about it.

And even among the people who do understand them, plenty don't see anything wrong at all. The assumption that only dumb people could possibly not see these CRIMES and want to do something about it is part of the problem.

It has nothing to do with people being dumb. You've misunderstood me if you think I meant that. Many of the illegal things that this administration has done are complex and violate laws that the average American is not aware of or doesn't understand fully, because they have no effect on his or her daily life.

And I'm saying that plenty of learned people who do understand these things fully agree with the president. I'm not saying you think it's because people are dumb, I'm agreeing with you and expounding, and saying how foolish it is to assume that people who don't see these things as crimes are dumb.

Ah, alright. I completely missed the point you were trying to make then. Carry on.