Somebody once actually used the "Hitler supported gun control!" argument on me. This was in the beautiful pre-Godwin days, so I had to actually use words and thoughts to argue in response.

Beyond Godwin's Law the point I'm trying to get across is that the world is more complex then good v. evil, and it's naive to think that life is that simple. Thomas Jefferson was the principal architect of the world's first modern democracy; he was also a slave owning genocidal maniac (he started the trail of tears).

Sometimes bad people can have good ideas and vise-versa (Obama seems to love triangulation almost as much as Clinton did, for example).

No, yeah, I got that. I was just sharing a story.

It's really stopped being funny, though. Especially if you live in America. Oh god how it has ever stopped being funny.

i actually moved here 5 years ago. everything about the country is nice and shiny and wonderful and awesome and modern at first glance but it's just a facade - scratch the surface and it's a fucking third world country.

If you want to save your country, you need to do one thing more than any other: reclaim critical analysis. It was aggressively removed from the education curriculum after the social upheaval of the 60's and 70's, and the practice of deductive logic and understanding that philosophy is a study of 'what truth is' and 'how to determine what is true', is now fallen to the wayside, where said study is now scorned at and mocked rather than valued and revered.

Individuals are by and large left to introduce reasoning and critical analysis to their own perceptions of the world with little help from the education institutions. The direct result of denying large portions of the populace this ability to analyze bias- especially their own- results in an ever growing portion of the populace that cannot perform value judgements any further along than base dichotomies of absolute rights and wrongs, where anyone who disagrees is automatically the absolute enemy, and in true totalitarian form, any stance they have or quality they may posess that is revealed after the initial disagreement must be denied or disgraced rather than accepted. Every difference of opinion is treated as a combat, and the only true allegiance is to the fragility and perpetual insecurity of the ego- the ideals of patriotism, religion, culture or race all being superficial facets of the same gem of narcissistic, masturbatory self indulgement.

Critical analysis, or the lack thereof, is the very foundation of Orwell's nightmare, and the social engineering tool that allows the populace to be handily controlled through the mass media. The lack of said skill is the root of every mentality that shames the USA on an international level.

Good luck!

Witty_Pop_Culture_Reference: 5 stars for you. You may be one of my favorite posters here.