Quote - I have lived the US and loved the counrty and it 's people. It's just  incredibly sad tthat such a proud nation is giving away its frredom little by little. You should't care...

I'll stop quoting you there, because you've hit the nail on the head. We DON'T care. Much. About anything.

As one politically-aligned pundit, put it, America is a "TV NATION." Entertainment is all that occupies the thoughts of the average American. Politics is not entertaining, so we ignore it. Our news is produced by gigantic entertainment/defense corporations, and they tell us what they want us to "hear" (i.e. think) and most of us accept it without further processing because OMG Desperate Housewives/Monday Night Football/Surviror is on!

What happened? TV. People used to go to meetings, join lodges, talk to their neighbors, go get coffee with their friends, go bowling - you know, live their OWN lives. Now, the only activity most people regularly go to outside the home (besides school and work) is CHURCH. For those that attend, a church can comprise the whole circle of their non-work/school social life. For those that don't attend, there usually IS NO non-work/school social life. There's just the tube.

And guess what? Most curches aren't content to just let you believe whatever you want. Some even tell you that not only should you believe certain things, you should vote solely based on which politicians say they believe the same things. Since churches are the only large scale, non-business-related political organizing group here, their concerns tend to carry a lot of weight. They wouldn't if the non-church people cared, but the non-church people don't care... except about what's on TV.

If some of those pre-TV American were interested on politics because they wanted to... I don't know, protect their own freedom of speech, say... they would have found a much more open political process. Business interests have always lobbied government to get what they were after, but in years gone by, the corporations were smaller and less powerful, and so was the government they were lobbying. We haven't had anyting like the current corporate lock on our govenment since the 19th century. That was broken because captialism failed badly enough that middle-class people started to go hungry (for food, not low-cost consumer products) and because waves of immigrants disrupted the entrenched political process with the strength of their numbers. This time capitalism has its bases covered better. Anti-immigrant sentiment is a cause celebre among the middle-class, and they haven't crashed the economy so badly that John Q. Public can't afford to put McDonalds on his family's table. Yet.

American democracy has closed up like a flower in the night. Whether it will bloom again before the shears of tyranny come to cut it off remains to be seen.

BTW - I notice the proud tradition of saying "I'm all for free speech" just before you explain why you don't actually think free speech is a very good idea is alive and well in this thread. Just so I don't go toally OT, my question would be exactly what is illegal about creating violent, pornographic Poser images? No one is harmed in the process. There is no victim of the "crime." (People who are attacked by maniacs are not harmed by the production of whatever material the maniac might have been viewing at some point. They are harmed by the maniac actually attacking them, which is already illegal.) The only thing "criminal" about it is that it violates the "no violent porn" law. Shaky logic, at best.

One last thing - if there was a "no violent porn law" in the U.S. one of its most recent uses would certainly have been to prevent the circulation of the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, which are certainly violent and sexual enough to fall under the category of "violent porn" no matter who is determining the criteria. Would that have been better for democracy? When considering what is to become law, I think one should alway assume the authorities will abuse the law to the best of their ability, and if you want to really be on the safe side, imagine you, or some cause you care about, are the one in their cross-hairs when they do so.

"First they came for Pluto, and I did not speak up because I didn't live on Pluto..."

• Jimdoria  ~@>@