The above picture was censored for years. What would the public have thought if it knew that thousands of people were being herded up on the West Coast and sent to prison camps without due process of law? The United States Government had considered these pictures too inflammatory for public viewing until they were unearthed from the National Archives in 2006.
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Most people don't know that Japanese food was as common as Chinese food in the USA (at least on the West Coast) until World War 2. But, after Pearl Harbor Day, our government had a ready made excuse to strip everything of value from law abiding people and deny them their basic human rights.
Could this happen again? Of course!
We now have a president elect (at the time this blog entry was written) who has expressed a desire to force Muslims to register themselves with the Federal Government, so that the government could do what it wants after the next terrorist disaster. This is dangerous. This is the same president elect wants to put limits on 1st Amendment freedoms for the rest of us. Can you imagine what would happen if Alec Baldwin did a Saturday Night Live sketch that offended someone who had the power to incarcerate people without due process of law?
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We live in a culture where people live in fear. They pick and chose their news sources to conform to the way they imagine the world as being, and not as it really is. So their biases are confirmed and strengthened. Recently, one self appointed "examiner" went to a pizzeria to examine reports of a Child Abuse ring in the Pizza Parlor, associated with some high level Democrats. The problem, is that this jerk opened fire on people, triggered by fake news. This person acted as a self appointed police force without any hard facts, and put people's lives at risk.
Of course, I have posted the BBC links to the real story, and have shown only the tip of an iceberg. Fake news is being disseminated, and people believe it. Although this was not done by OUR government this time, it has happened in the past, and will happen in the future. Thankfully, services such as Google and Facebook recognize the need to use Artificial Intelligence to filter out this misinformation. But it's not enough. People inclined to believe in conspiracy theories will do so no matter what facts are presented to them. They can't afford to challenge their beliefs. As the Archie Bunker character noted, "My dad was this way. How could this man be wrong?" When one is taught that right is wrong and wrong is right, how can a person come to a rational interpretation of the facts?
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The other night, I started to have a conversation with a woman I consider a moderate. I had posed the idea that Liberals should give up opposition to 2nd Amendment rights. Instead of opposition, Liberals should advocate that every law abiding person be required to own a gun AND to practice using it on a regular basis. My idea was to make it possible for people living in Blue States to resist being intimidated by those living in Red States, if we came close to having a second Civil War. She was horrified, as she realizes that we need gun regulation based on population density, and not arbitrary geographic boundaries. So this line of thought ("Should we increase the risk of violence in cities, so that we can protect ourselves in a war between rural and urban areas?") got shut down for a while, as it triggers great intellectual discomfort among liberals and moderates who live near big cities.
This is a big problem. How does one fight back against an armed opponent? Should we be taking butter knives to gun fights? This is an issue that Liberals must tackle, both as a metaphor, and as a literal statement. Liberals have to become serious in defending their rights - even if that defense has to use tactics which Liberals find abhorrent.
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Life is all about risk management. People (by instinct) want to eliminate each and every risk in their lives. When they can't cope with what life puts before them, they give up hope then make big mistakes. Sadly, enough people gave up hope and chose someone who could be a tyrant. They have put their faith in the wrong things, and now the piper will be paid. These will not be pleasant times for most of us, and I hope we finally learn to see through the fog and act a little more rationally 2 and 4 years down the road.
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