Sorry if you find it very annoying, if it's any consolation, I find your side of the argument annoying too. Perhaps we can just respect each other's annoying points of view?

Making assertions about me being "myopic" is silly, not only does it suggest that you know anything about me, but it ignores the one thing you do know about me, which is that I'm a Brit who has chosen to live in a 3rd world country, which takes a fair amount of tolerance and understanding to do. Let's just stick to expressing our viewpoints and keep personal insults out of it. Or am I myopic simply because I don't see things in the same way as you, and therefore I must be wrong?

I hope that this is just an effect of relative media presence - the appearing gowring conservative base. With more older people, relying on pensions, more hispanic people, and more poor people - the conservative base should shrink considerably in the medium to long term - but of course they can become louder - but it doesn't have to mean anything.

Also the UK might not be paradise either. I am sure the average standard of living is lower on this side of the big lake.

But finding employment is the same as everywhere. You search some jobportals or go on websites of big companies and look for the open jobs listing. Being a young, fresh graduate, you even could apply for internship first, if really nothing else opens up.

Really don't know if this site is good but you might try it out:
http://www.totaljobs.com/

I don't know, despite all the shit that's happened recently, I still like living here.

From the Nordic rose-tinted glasses point of view, didn't you just describe UK as well? As far as I can tell, poverty is passed down in UK families about as strongly as in e.g. US. Of course I don't have any figures to back that up, that's just the impression I get from watching "Little Britain" on TV.

But then one could also argue that the Nordic welfare nanny state model has come to an end as well, and the thriving countries will be those which have billions of poor people to be used as cheap labour, while the welfare countries which live in a dream world thinking that they really can afford to keep people unemployed with good welfare will eventually go the way of Greece.

Anyway, as soon as someone makes cold fusion a viable energy source, I think the world economy will boom and interstellar commerce will make everyone's lives so much better.

Lemme think about that a sec.

Would that mean it would be tougher to get imports from east Asia, thus encouraging manufacturing to return to the US? Not a completely bad thing, that. Also, the remaining US would make a boatload selling water to SoCal: soon enough, water will be the new oil. And California would shortly implode from the weight of unchecked social policy on their way to some utopian vision.

That's great, but in a system that is ultimately "of the people", corrupt or not the public spaces of the taxpayers are being usurped, thus making it an issue. I know the Tea Party makes for a convenient whipping boy, but they managed to make do with permits. Virtually no violence, either.

I frankly don't care if the protestors feel the government is corrupt or not (kinda hard to argue against that when speaking of the federal government). Their 'feelings' don't make it okay to ignore some simple rights of the rest of the taxpaying public. When the laws respecting those rights are broken, then the police will get involved (except in those cities where the police chiefs and mayors caved). When the police get involved, as they rightly should in these cases, they will be met with varying degrees of resistance or acquiescence. If the resistance is of an active nature (physical confrontation), the police will respond in kind. It seems so obvious that, yeah, it IS tragically "funny" when someone gets pepper-sprayed in the schnoz, in a "no shit, Sherlock" kind of way. You poked the bear and the bear swiped back? Whodathunkit?

At any rate, my post was in response to the "without reason" comment. When police (and I'm not calling them angels, by any means) are attempting to enforce laws and are met with bottles, stones, and worse, from people in encampments where all of this other illegal behavior is going on, pepper spray is appropriate. This issue goes both ways, with both sides ramping up the confrontation in one instance or another. Were there cases where police came off right away with too much force? Yes. Were there instances where the protesters were lucky to get off with just a bit of sting in their eyes and a runny nose after inciting violence against the police? Yes. Should it surprise anyone when some noses get bloodied with this sort of behavior? No.

Anyway...

Rape allegation: http://cleveland.cbslocal.com/2011/10/18/occupy-cleveland-protester-alleges-she-was-raped/

Protester sez, "“I’m sick and tired of women getting taken advantage of, raped and murdered."
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/occupy-wall-street-builds-tent-afe-house-protect-female-protesters-article-1.972546

Unfortunately, protests invite these types of people to tag along. Er, some protests.

I'd like to take a moment to completely derail the thread and say that nothing pisses me off more than jackasses who end their posts with "good day" or "have a nice day" or any variation thereof, and then come back and post within the same hour. If you're going to give someone the 24hr flip-off, then wait the whole 24hrs before making your next retort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuNvxH5kSKU : D

I hate That 70's Show. Donna's a hypocrite. And a tease.

I know a Swedish guy in his late 40s who has never worked a day in his life. He takes advantage of all the welfare benefits Sweden offers and knows how to milk the system. It helps that his girlfriend is a welfare social worker and she knows exactly how to get milk the government for everything. They have 2 children together and the state takes care of the kids too and they are being raised to take advantage of the system and never work too. Sweden sounds like paradise, i really wish i could live there and have the government take care of me without having to work for my whole life. Not to mention, Swedish women are sexy and attractive. Sounds like UTOPIA.

I used to live in your country for a few years, so I have an international outlook that is lost on some people. When I lived in Germany, I thought the attitude was more sensible than in the US. Sure, there are conservatives, but how much do you hear about it? What I hear constantly from the news in the US is that homosexuals are conspiring to destroy the country, Christianity is the one true religion and anyone not Christian isn't American, keep fighting wars, etc. It's like the conservatives are not only gaining more power here, they are becoming more extreme in their views.

I don't think the conservative base is going to shrink. This has been going on for years now. The more it goes on, the more extreme it gets, latching on to new arguments or topics and going to the extreme views. For fucks sake, Newt Gingrich is the front runner for the Republicans at this time and look at all the crazy coming from his camp.

It's not going to end, and one of the reasons is because faith plays an integral role for many conservatives. Which is absolutely ridiculous when I see other countries who have a strong religious history and they don't act nearly as crazy regarding it.

I'm thinking we're seeing more of it, and also the left-sided whackiness, because it's what makes news. Those on the left will pick out the most noisome stuff from the right, and the right will do the same for the left, and then state that this is the norm (I've been guilty of this myself, and am trying hard to not do it any longer).

What I see, meeting with lots of different people in my region of the country at various working-class economic levels and with a wide range of viewpoints, is that the super-duper large majority of us are nowhere near the far-left or -right zealotry that gets portrayed by pundits, news media, and various dot orgs. Most of us fall in that dreaded "middle ground" that is lambasted for apparently having no direction. No, it's just that my viewpoints, and those of most of us, aren't so conveniently pigeon-holed into "Liberal / Progressive", "Moderate", or "Conservative".

I'm an American who's lived in multiple countries and done relief work for refugees, I'm fully aware of how shitty and fucked up stuff can be. I was suggesting you're myopic simply because you seem to have terribly little empathy as to how problems can affect different people with different life experiences.

I find the whole "first world problems" sentiment I've seen popping up all over (and you're hardly the only one who's done it) deeply offensive. Just because there's shit holes like Darfur in The Sudan doesn't mean stuff isn't deeply fucked up in first world countries. By that standard the Martin Luther King, Jr. was a fucking whiner for complaining (how did you put it?): "A Rolls would be so much better than a BMW."

I don't need to wait to complain until people have gotten beaten to death. We already have rampant nepotism, corruption, and a nearly complete breakdown of our democracy, if people like Lawrence Lessig (you know, the author of Free Culture and attorney that argued at least one case before the US Supreme Court) have been accurately portraying the current situation.

I've seen enough disenfranchised, poor people with basically no hope in my travels, I have no desire to see even more of that at home. I recognize the symptoms, I've seen them before, and I don't intend to personally insult you, simply communicate that you might be just a little too removed from the situation to assess it, since most of your posts come off as "rich little spoiled brats don't know how good they have it." So I don't know fuck all about you, just what you say and what you say, in my opinion does not accurately or fairly reflect what is going on in the US at this time.
You know, I hear this specter of some poor person getting a free ride and being "lazy" as an excuse to cut social services all the time. It's not new, hell, we were hearing about the mythical "welfare queen" back in the 80s (despite none seeming to have existed).

There's two things that annoy me about using people like this to direct policy:
1) They seem to not only be extreme outliers but their quality of life (in areas most folks find rather critical) is significantly below what most people imagine when they hear about them.
2) These people matter as much as a zit on your ass when you have tuberculosis. I.E. you have people stealing millions and having policy rewritten to benefit a few, redirecting social policy in fairly dramatic ways that earn them millions and sometimes billions of dollars... and yet people are pissed that some dude can manage to live without working and gets 15k a year for it. This kind of error in logical thinking is actually common in most higher level primates, from the research I've read, and it's terribly sad because it kind of puts a hidden bomb in the whole democracy concept.

I understand your point, but I don't feel like you're getting mine: I don't dispute that things are wrong in the US, or that something should be done about it. What I find offensive is the rhetoric like "nearly complete breakdown of democracy". You don't have a complete breakdown of democracy. People can and do get to vote for whoever they want - has anyone ever prevented you from voting, or tried to physically coerce you into voting for someone you didn't want to? I only bring up the 3rd world comparisons because they are what true complete breakdown of democracy looks like. If I were part of an oppressed minority, I would also take severe issue with you comparing your cause to that of Martin Luther King, which I find laughable.

And stop telling me I'm too removed from the situation to assess it. Again, you know nothing about me other than the fact that I decided to live in Cambodia. We're all entitled to have our opinions, just because mine isn't the same as yours, that doesn't mean it's because I'm ill informed. To think otherwise would be, well, myopic.

I wasn't being sarcastic at all. I'm happy for this guy, he has a good life. There are much worse ways a government could spend its money, like endless foreign wars and bailing out criminal bankers with trillions of tax payer money. And yes, i would love to live in Sweden. Its a great country and they really do take care of their people, nothing wrong with that.

I think I prefer Norway over Sweden, but they're both nice.