Shard

New video going around. I liked it, in a jarring WTF is wrong with America sort of way. Waiting for some bright spark to make This is Canada now. Will it feature the FN? Maybe. Not sure what Canada's big societal issue is...

BristolUK

Do you mean Childish Gambino?

Shard

Yup. Hadn't heard of him before this, but he seems like a nice guy.

BristolUK

Me neither.

It reminded me of Gangnam Style.

Cyan

It's a start - having a creative interpretation of the gun and police state dystopia that abounds south of the border. But it's kind of preaching to the converted - the type of folks who will watch it and stroke their chin in nodding agreement, sipping their lattes with their MacBook open.

It will take years to build any momentum just like anti-smoking and LGBT issues. I thought Sandy Hook would be pivotal moment but I underestimated the low-life politicians who are in the pocket of the NRA.

Canada has no similar issues to speak of, other than the handbag fight between BC and Alberta over pipelines...

Oink

America is the "last primitive society of the future."

Shard

...he says while stroking his chin, sipping his latte and nodding at his open Macbook.

Hard to know what America is these days, but video certainly illustrated its ever present darker side.

Shard

Really? Gangnam was pure fun.

Will Gompertz reviews Childish Gambino's This is America video ★★★★☆ - BBC News

Shard

The preached to need more converting, given the lack of action. In any case, as music video it actually goes out to a very wide, although a younger demographic. I think it was more a statement on a broken American psyche than gun control per se.

BristolUK

Purely the dancing aspect

MarkG

America is becoming the first truly post-industrial society in the West. And that's unravelling all the uneasy compromises that were made to keep industrial society working.

Danny B

Do a search for the "call me maybe" version. The bullet to the back of the head is perfectly timed.

dbd33

Perhaps you could help me a little towards understanding your post.

In what way is it post-industrial? They still make cars in America, washing machines, drywall compound, commercial ice cream, guns, there's no end of industry.

Which societies in the East are post-industrial and which in the West are faux post-industrial?

Please do not express your answers through the medium of interpretative dance. Thanks.

MarkG

But it matters less and less every year. Today, if an American wants something made, there's no need to find someone in America to do it, they can just send the design to China and have the Chinese company send the results back to them. There are lots of tiny companies which do that already, for the parts they can't make on a CNC machine or 3D printer.

Tomorrow, they'll skip the whole China business and just make it at home.

And decentralization of production inevitably leads to the decline of centralized power. If you need a giant factory to make stuff, the people in Washington can do a lot to help you make that factory work, and there's a strong incentive to favour a big, centralized government and to go-along-to-get-along with people you don't much like but need to work with in your factory. If you get all your stuff from China, or build it in your basement, there's little that people in Washington can do for you other than get in the way, and you no longer have to care about people you don't like.

The whole post-WWII compromise between left and right was based on the belief that we'd be better off by working together, because we could build bigger factories and make more stuff. And that's increasingly no longer the case.

Hence the rapidly-accelerating breakdown of American society, with Canada and the EU not far behind.

I specified the West, because I know a lot more about Western countries than I do about any others, and I didn't want someone to say 'what about Wazakistan, eh?' And pretty much the whole of the west is faux post-industrial at this point, they just have lots of factories to make stuff to send to America.

dbd33

Thank you for the explanations.

However, I don't see that American society is breaking down. Granted, there's a lunatic at the controls but he'll pass, American society will survive him. I think there's a large industrial sector that will not outsource, that is the defense industrial and the civilian spin-offs. In any case, I don't think the role of central government is closely tied to industry; if all industry had moved to China, government would still be administering taxes and farm subsidies and the world's largest single-payer healthcare system.

We might say that Switzerland is a post-industrial society, there's some precision engineering but most of the watchmaking has gone and yet the government hasn't collapsed, society hasn't broken down. Taking a historical perspective, the decline of the textile industry in the UK left specific towns barren but society didn't collapse, life went on. The 3D printer isn't a harbinger of anarchy.