>> ^StukaFox:
Al Jazeera's Lucy Keating discovers in the US town of Knoxville in Tennessee.
Lucy apparently has giant goddamn balls to tell people in Tennessee she's with Al Jazeera.


Why should someone have to have "giant goddamn balls" to tell someone in Tennessee that she works for one of the world's most reputable international news organizations?

>> ^westy:
she is driving her car A CAR big huge fuel blechign truck to get food stamps i mean whats with that . i guess fuel must be proper cheep in usa, in uk it would probably cost her more in fule to get there than what she would get from food stamps.


Also in most places over here if you don't have a car your going nowhere because places are just to far to walk. There is insufficient mass transit in America, to me I think this is one of our biggest problems.

Hard to pick just five:

1. Hyperion and the rest of the Hyperion Cantos series by Dan Simmons
   
2. Marooned in Realtime by Vernor Vinge (though everything else he's written could easily have taken this spot)
   
3. Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan (and any other Takeshi Kovacs novel)
   
4. Footfall by Larry Niven -- IMO the best he ever wrote
   
5. Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
   

Other favorites:

• The City and the Stars by Arthur C. Clarke
  
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
  
• Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton
  
• Iron Sunrise by Charles Stross
  
• Virtually anything by Robert J. Sawyer (particularly the "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy)
  
• Snow Crash and Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, though I'm with dag, everything that's followed has been disappointing
  
• Domesday Book by Connie Willis
  
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis
  
• The Golden Age Trilogy by John C. Wright
  
• Any short story by Michael Swanwick (particularly "The Radiant Doors" -- dft, there's another dystopia to be found in that one)
  

Oh, and I like Dune, Foundation, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, 1984, Brave New World, and Animal Farm too, but that almost goes without saying.

I do read politics too, but those aren't really very fun most of the time. Educational, but not fun.

That post was much too disjointed for me, so I ignored it like KP ignores his illegitimate children. (Sorry blankfist and rottenseed)

Congratulations, King of Dystopia!

I can't think of one thing why China would be a better country to live in than the USA, if you aren't a leader of the party that is. Their distribution of wealth and political powers are not much better than that of some European country in the dark ages. The same goes with their freedoms and rights.
Look up dystopia and you've got all the characteristics of China. In the US of A you can wonder if some politicians are really serving the people, in China you can rest assured that they are working against you.

The only thing they (the Chinese government) are saying is that the US (government) should remember that they aren't the protector of all things good either.

No one is in this video implying that China has a moral high ground on the US.

See how this is a never ending loop of "you can't judge us!" "we'll you can't either" "well neither can you" "like you could!"?

As much as I loath all the dirty anti-anything-but-far-left selectivity of the sift, it's not a news sight and no one said it had to be fair and balanced. The only problem with that of course, is that the sift could increase its viewers by probably 20-50% if it were not so vehemently one-sided. If I were less tolerant of sayyyyy leftists and atheists, I'd never come back to this site again.

I'm also surprised that other forums of more moderate to right wing thinkers have not tried to invade and balance the tables. That'd be a fun little war. I'd get some popcorn for sure.

I would DEFINITELY however vote to have a "democrat" and a "republican" channel during election time.

and dystopia...
http://www.videosift.com/video/Fred-Thompson-in-Iowa-Here-are-his-views-face-to-face
http://www.videosift.com/video/An-Overview-of-America-by-the-John-Birsch-Society
are 2 reasonable, unoffensive, educational conservative posts that are worth watching even if you disagree.

Welcome to Dystopia, and Congrats DFT.

Welcome to Dystopia, where beaches are made of diamonds and beers are a nickel. Congrats!

Dystopia never looked so...well...diamondy.

Congrats!

DFT was the first guy I met on the Sift, and was the one that made me realize that this place is exceptional. Congratulations to you, and you're right, Dystopia really isn't that bad!


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|Redeemable for _(1)__|
|__*tossed salad*____|
|Dystopianfuturetoday |
|choice of jelly or syrup|
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^CLIP AND SAVE^

(that better, choggie?)

I saw that "dystopia" was a possible side effect. That explains a lot.

Your view of the world, indifference in the face of collapse, is the philosophy of a lemming. Dystopias are an artistic response to the short-sightedness of utopias, not a picture of reality.

Systems are not as stuck as you think they are, there is much room for improvement without throwing out the bathwater.

In the book, Goldberg attempts to convince readers that six decades of conventional wisdom that have placed Italy's Benito Mussolini, Germany's Adolf Hitler and fascism on the right side of the ideological spectrum are wrong, and that fascism is really a phenomenon of the left. Goldberg also attributes fascist rhetoric and tactics to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and describes the New Deal's descendants, modern American liberals, as carriers of this liberal-fascist DNA. In a sense, "We're All Fascists Now," as Goldberg puts it in one of his chapter titles.

The vapid stupidity of this argument is profound, Jonah cites what Mussolini said as fact, as if the usurpation of power in Germany and Italy were political campaigns run in democracies not simply two men saying and doing whatever would garner them power. The whole argument reads like an excuse to call liberals Nazis.

John Cole put it very well in saying that Goldberg basically twists words to make them mean whatever he wants them to mean.

The Salon.com interview from which I pulled the gist of the book is a hilarious read, and filled with miles of bullshit and quotable lines.

"I would argue that Nixon was not a particularly conservative guy. Measured by today's standards and today's issues, Nixon would be in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party."

[On Mussolini but could be self referential] "And he said a lot of stuff. He was sort of a buffoon in that sense; he was constantly changing his definitions of fascism and talking out of one side of the mouth, then out of the other side of his mouth, largely because of the sort of pragmatic idea he had about politics. But in terms of the policies he implemented and where he came to, once again, at the end of his life, he always clung to the policies that were associated with the left side of the political spectrum."

"But there's another dystopian understanding of the future, which we get from [Aldous] Huxley's "Brave New World." That was a fundamentally American vision ... [T]he vision of the Huxleyian "Brave New World" future is one where everyone's happy. No one's being oppressed, people are walking around chewing hormonal gum, they're having everything done for them, they're being nannied almost into nonexistence. That's the fascism in Hillary Clinton's vision. It's not the Orwellian stamping on a human face thing, it's hugs and kisses and taking care of boo-boos. It is the nanny state. That is a much more benign dystopia than "1984," but for me at least, it's still a dystopia. An unwanted hug is still as tyrannical or as oppressive -- not as oppressive, but an unwanted hug is still oppressive if you can't escape from it ... [O]ne of the biggest distinctions between what I'm calling liberal fascism ... and classical fascism, is that classical fascism was masculine and violently oppressive and today's liberalism is feminine and not oppressive but smothering with kindness."

The full interview is here at Salon.com.

Hi. How is dystopia these days?

>> kronosposeidon:
Seriously, has anyone besides dystopia and me thought about euthanizing all those Simpons/Family Guy/Futurama clips in the dead pool? Or how about this: If any video has been dead for over a year how about automatically * killing it quietly in its comatose sleep? After a year it's probably suffered irreversible brain damage anyway, so pulling the plug on it is probably the only humane thing left to do at that point. Maybe that's something to consider for VS 3.2 or later. Let's not let this end up in the courts, people.

I disagree. Maybe we could have a graveyard or something to put the kinds of dead sifts that are constantly cluttering up the dead pool, but there's no reason to remove the sifts altogether.