Calilasseia wrote:

real

all

TM

still

auto-da-fe

Well I suspect the Norwegians themselves would roundly reject any suggestion of stereotype homogeneity, in the same way that we do when supernaturalists try to lump us all together as an amorphous mass. Likewise, they would also reject any suggestion of being "rich" in the Koch Brothers have-yacht sense. Additionally, whilst Norway manages to sustain an elevated position in the United Nations Human Development Index table, and has an excellent per-capita GDP, that nation still has its poor, and as Anders Breivik demonstrated, its share of potentially or actually dangerous malcontents.Thedifference that counts, in my book, is that along with other Scandinavian nations, Norway has exerted effort to sustain a view of human value based on something other than how many metric fucktons of money one has hoarded, or how many mansions and Bugattis one owns. The poor are treated as fellow human beings, not vermin, and prison is regarded as a last, not first, resort for criminals. The Scandinavian nations have avoided, in large part, the venomous effects of right-wing "divide and conquer" politics, with its attendant hate speech propaganda against easy, vulnerable targets and religious worship of the über-rich. Diligent effort has been expended building a society for, not just for the tax-avoidance bonus bankers and corporate robber barons, a society in which the malign effects of the Gordon Gekko mentality are actively curtailed. In short, they benefit from not treating fuck-you capitalism as The One True Economic Religionbefore which all must genuflect.Norway also benefits from the fact that it went through its "flirtation with fascism" phase during World War II, with Vidkun Quisling. A phase that soon taught the Norwegians what a bad idea that was. Even though they didn't endure the same level of horror as, say, the Poles or Czechs, they still experienced Nazi occupation, and enough horrors of their own to teach them that fascist politics are an evil to be studiously avoided.The USA suffers first from the fact that the generation best placed to warn against plutocratic fascism, the generation of World War II veterans, is now old and dying off at an increasing rate, the Vietnam protest generation is cruising toward the wrong side of middle age, and the civil rights generation is largely made up of septuagenarians and beyond. It also suffers from the fact that the Reaganomics yuppie generation got their hands on the levers of power, and terminally corrupted the political system by making it the manservant of corporate money power. Worse still, all too many Americans (though commendable exceptions to this rule post here frequently) still cling to the dead totem of the "American Dream", which was killed off a long time ago by that same corporate money power, as those who reached the exalted heights of the über-rich moved swiftly to pull up the ladder behind them. The continuing festering canker sore of racism doesn't help, of course, along with the fact that whilst numerous other nations excised slavery from their systems via the simple expedient of passing legislation, the USA had a blood-soaked civil war over the issue, and resentments from that civil warpermeate the American political landscape.Factor in a frankly self-parodying machismo of the sort that would make even Mexicans point and laugh, a still more absurd attachment to religious mythology of a sort that would even be regarded as an embarrassment in Portugal (and might even have been considered embarrassing during the era of), a bombastic militarism whose visible symbols utterly reek of overblown pomposity and vainglorious self-deification, and the picture is sadly complete.