Continued elsewhere

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Friday, October 23, 2009

The right way to present economic statistics

I've occasionally wondered why there isn't more anger at the looting of the economy by its upper echelons. Americans are violent, but they are also lazy and disorganized. So there hasn't been the kind of rioting in the streets that the situation really demands -- most Americans don't even have proper streets, just subdivisions and strip malls, not at all suitable for civil insurrection.

Then there's this guy. plenty of violent anger but apparently confined to his own garage:


He scares me a bit, maybe due to the trace amount of racism amidst the otherwise perfectly reasonable ranting.

Of course, this being 21st century America it's likely that this anger will result in nothing more than a viral YouTube video and 15 seconds of fame, rather than a mob of baseball-bat wielding crackers marching on Wall Street looking to break heads. Probably for the best.

via Matt Taibbi

3 comments:

TGGP said...

Probably for the best.
Yes, rioters tend to destroy their own neighborhoods. Outbreaks of violence, however righteous participants and observers may believe them to be, rarely result in improvement.

Badda Being said...

I think this old blog entry at i cite pretty accurately describes what is happening to today's revolutionary contingent:

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2005/01/communicative_c.html

John Redford said...

Only 35K hits on Youtube, though, so it doesn't seem to have the cachet of skateboarding dogs. People may have been put off by the amateur ad for his silver dealership in the front. He's got a pretty good swing, but that printer was built tough.