Quote from: anarcho47 on February 13, 2012, 08:56 pmI'm merely pointing out that the tyrannical legalist bastards (who have the guns and write the licenses to kill people without punishment) have a plethora of ways to bring their violence down on someone's head. If I were a seller even selling something completely legal I would never use my return address.Guilty by association gets people killed by governments every year since we were stupid enough to bow our rights to them.Too right. It is simply extraordinary how many people have been collateral damage in America's various misadventures. I'm not anti-America in any way. I support Free Markets, Democracy and classical Western ideals that go all the way back to the Greeks. I think America increasingly doesn't, that's the problem.I just think it's a pity a large portion of American society apparently rejects their heritage. It's not a party political thing. There seems to be a considerable amount of latent decay in American's character. For all the battles in Congress, the parties fundamentally agreed on the basics of America. That no longer seems to be the case, I've never seen the parties so entrenched in their positions before, and believe me, that is saying something. Decay is normal in society, but usually it is replenished by fresh and original thinking. I don't see much of that around here.Economy literally looks like a re-run of Keynesian doctrine from 80 years ago. The Occupy protesters haven't the foggiest idea that far from being rebels, they are enthusiastically supporting the entrenchment of the State. The Venus Project is thinly veiled communism when you get right down to the economics of it. There are so many WTF moments with them it's unreal. They all want solutions, but they are falling back on old, tired solutions that didn't work in the past.My real worry is that 20 - 30 year old people today have no real hope for the future. The economists tell them they are fucked, with a fair amount of justification. The Fortune 500 seems to be entirely composed of patent trolls, or maybe ghouls. The scientists tell them what is effectively a doomsday prophesy called Global Warming. There doesn't appear to be any positive messages about the future from the scientific community. That pisses me off, because I know science and I know most people are dead fucking wrong about many aspects of reality. People are living longer, new materials/tech are being invented, the ozone layer is back, the world is not being deforested and is in fact growing more trees than before when all is told, almost half a billion people have been extracted from poverty to the middle class in China in a mere few decades, there is a *lot* to be optimistic about, but the only young people I've seen with a positive view of the future are, wait for it... the steampunk advocates. I miss that spirit, the exploratory, adventurous zeitgeist that characterized people attitudes to Science, Technology, Markets and Government in the previous centuries. Seems to me we've become jaded and misanthropic without justification. Anyway, this too will pass.