Amitai, I can understand how you feel and I am sorry that you have been abused by the commentators. On the other hand, I have to welcome you to America.

Children in this country do not learn about respect and speak and act with little consideration for others. As they grow up, they can say whatever they want and they are protected by the first amendment and they are not afraid of retribution or retaliation. They can do whatever they want until they are caught by the law, i.e., if their act is found to be in breach of the law. This is uniquely an American culture and they are propagated by the TV, radio, newspaper and the internet.

In many countries, whenever an expert speaks, the rest of the country listens. In this country, everybody has an opinion even a child has an opinion, even they do not know what they are talking about, they are still entitled to an opinion.

Dr Hans Blix, the former UN Chief weapon inspector, is a man of integrity. He was forced out of the office by the Americans in the white house in 2003. This was because Dr Blix refused to support the existence of WMD in Iraq and he was bullied by a bunch of “highly educated” and powerful officials in the white house. Dr Blix was standing in the way of the war profiteers and the oil companies and he was “assassinated” by the white house officials.

So I can understand how you feel when you said “the barrage of personal attacks”. America has a culture of bullying, intimidating and torturing and the Americans called it amusement.

No offensive but isn't your comment a personal attack.
You are right but did you have to bring his mama into it.

Best to you

I just had to reword just one of your sentences Mr. Smith.
"Children in this country do not learn about respect and speak and act with little consideration for others."
There are parents in this country that do not teach children about respect and speak and act with little consideration for others. Though in today's U.S. respect is becoming a thing of the past that is no reason to shake our heads and resolve to accept it.
The next time you see disrespect personally call it out, politely.

www.taureandevi.blogspot.com

Thank you for your comments. Some parents do teach their children about respect but once children are exposed to the real world, these kids just give in to the peer pressure and become disrespectful. Respect is a thing of the past, at least in America. You can still find respect in many poor and developing countries. By the way, public schools do not teach respect and moral values, they leave it to the parents who, more often than not, have to make ends meet all the time and there is little time left to teach anything to their own children.

Going back to the subject of moral vs market in organ donations for a moment. As someone with 10 years in funeral service and thousands of bodies and families later, I have a different perspective.

First of all, at least in Florida, the organ donation card is basically ignored at death, especially an accidental or unexpected one. And it stays ignored because the doctors and the funeral directors don't ask the family at the time. It may be remembered when the family comes to the funeral home to make arrangements, but by then the body is either embalmed or refrigerated.

My only experience in asking for donations is with eyes, but the success rate was astounding, maybe about 75%. Looking back, I don't think the families that agreed did so on a moral basis, though. It seems like most of them equated the opportunity to donate as a way of making the death "count" in a positive way, if that makes any sense to you.

From these experiences, I wonder if Prof. Etzioni is targeting the wrong audience as a beginning. It would be interesting to research how many hospitals can actually harvest organs 24/7 and if there is a procedure for procuring even those that have already signed up for donations through the DMV or other places. (Forget about doctors doing the latter, death is not a subject they like to spend a lot of time on.)

However, like specially designated trauma hospitals that cover a regional area, what if organ donations had the same type of availability and coverage, along with trained personnel to assess the potential donor's capabilities and consult with the families at every hospital?

Because most hospitals are understaffed and underfunded, the community involvement would come in the form of funding, at the least. Whether through bonds or tax increases, clergy, educators and local leaders would need to be on the bandwagon. Just as trauma units are a point of pride in many cities, 'organ centers' can have the same prestige, with the right people on board. And once a community has voted to fund such centers, certainly the number of donations would go up accordingly.

Anyway, that is my 2 cents on keeping organs out of the market and the market people out of what should be civil discussions, but usually aren't.

War does not determine who is right - only who is left. Bertrand Russell

I think that an America whos government shows disdain for a national healthcare system can only show more disdain for some sort of Organ Donor program. I'm all for the body being up-for-grabs after death. I firmly believe that the soul is seperate from the flesh and if there are people suffering and my dead body can help them, go for it!

The horrible truth about our American moral heritage, is that the Christianity that we have adopted in our "American Moral Base" is rooted in guilt and hate. We use the name of God to destroy everything we love and to hurt anyone we feel even remotly uncomfortable about. It is a terrible blasphemous shame and one that we as a people have to live with until we can actually find love for each other and mean it.

That Dan Drezner acts like a jerk is Dan Drezner's fault and not the culture he lives in.

hmmm....well yes if you're talking about what you're talking about...but if you're talking about what Prof. Etzioni is talking about, I would point out that jerks can now create little walled off sub-cultures to live in where their jerkiness is encouraged, lauded and imitated by an adoring fan base, and their writings get more "hits" the jerkier they get.

For example, I have never come away from reading the comments at Atrios without being reminded of a very juvenile frat house enthralled with their dear leader and seeking to protect him. Firedoglake is another example of a clubhouse where everyone reinforces a certain type of behavior until the point where the leaders get the mistaken impression that they have the whole world figured out and know exactly what it wants, until they are shocked by the outside world reception of a photoshopped image that all their fans would think neat and cool and funny, and in the end shocked by the reception of the candidate they thought was a slam-dunk. Though it's just hearsay because I never paid much attention then, I have seen more than a few say that Deaniacs were famously rude....

I fear that if the blogosphere doesn't tire of this type of humor soon (juvenile frat-house-quality humor, only a noch or two above fart jokes) it is going to go the way of TV news--anyone with any education level at all is going to give up on it. Old Saturday Night Live shows are still rerun to an audience, while the google bomb "George Bush miserable failure," lost its ability to induce yuks a long time ago. The whole sub-culture is growing quite tiresome, hence people coming to TPMCafe and saying basically "now this is nice, many people here seem to actually act like sophisticated grown-ups."

Sadly I fear that we here face the business model of blogging. Some bloggers sell stuff, anything from diapers to baseball cards to soft porn (in Drezner’s case). In order to make money they have to bring buyers to their sites. And those bloggers that succeed in kicking up a fuss, seem to draw a much larger crowd than the reasoned ones, that is make much more money. Is there some other way to finance blogging? Do we need a NPR and PBS for blogging, to ensure civil dialogue?

Amen. Also one of my favorite rants, stated so much more precisely than I usually do. I am addicted to the potential of the medium, but to keep coming back in the face of a lot of what I see requires continual blinders and an almost unreasonable faith that things will change. If all people like you give up on it, it's sure to go the way of cable TV news. Please don't give up on the medium changing, you'll doom us all to a world of liberal Anne Coulter's and we'll have to go back to discussing those big ideas in our own heads.

P.S. I raised the advertising issue on this site back in Dec. 2005, here: Et tu, successful blogs? and some of the commenters seem almost naively clueless about what I was talking about. I don't think that would be the case today, so maybe some progress is being made? Really what you end up running into here when you talk about this is the elite v. populist thing, and it is nothing new. Satire about NPR or PBS being a bunch of sissies offering boring tea party news and entertainment has been around a long time. Likewise, if you raise the issue of making some kind of rules about civility on a political internet forum, you get those who argue that "politics is not a tea party." How long will it take for the blogosphere to realize that the lovers of professional wrestling and lovers of sophisticated intellectual discourse (including humor above the fart joke level) are too totally different markets that conflict? There's a lot of money in advertising to elite sub-markets, so advertising per se is not the problem.

oh I totally agree

but the problem is that if you do something like this

What we need to do as readers is to continually call these writers out when they do this. I don't care what "side" a writer/reporter is on, the lying and exaggerating has to stop.

on a clubby blog like Atrios or Firedoglake, chances are high (unless you are exceptionally skillful & willing to be devious & put in a lot of time,) you will be labeled a troll and be attacked & chased by a snarling pack of fans devoted to protecting their turf and supporting their alpha.

The only way to challenge this blog culture thing successfully is for the person attacked to respond in a post on his own ground, like Prof. Etzioni felt compelled to do. But like he implies by stating :I find it childish to engage in the kind of debate that is based on I-said, you-said, I-said, and so on." this is not a pleasant or useful way to spend one's time.

The insult culture, the ad hominen thing, the politics of personal destruction, it's a game, a childish game. What's so destructive about is that it's addictive and contagious and you can easily find yourself entwined in it, spending time on it, and not attending to real issues. If a section of the blogosphere is ever to advance over shock talk radio, it's got to marginalize those who do it.

Yes, I know what you mean, but personally, I still insist on calling them on the lies and exaggerations. It may not change their behavior, but at least a record of truth is established however lonesome the position might be. People should not be allowed to lie with impunity.

Frankly, I am sick to death of politics,politicians, their supporters and their philosophy of winning at all costs, but I know that it has always been that way and probably will always be that way. Reading newspaper articles of the first elections to this election they are all filled with snark, lies, bitter accusations and meanspirited personal attacks, the only difference seems to be the medium in which they're disseminated.

now see, you made me laugh. really.

Well, I have traveled overseas, and I've seen children behave in all sorts of ways, just as I've seen adults in those cultures act in all sorts of way. A wholesale condemnation of a society or a culture based on limited observation is wrong. The "reality" is that children in other countries are very much like children in our country. Some are more interested in education than others, some aren't interested in education at all and most kids have many interests and responsiblities.

It is also wrong to blanket a society with one's own prejudices or what one perceives as others' prejudices. No, not all Americans hate Muslims and Middle Eastern people. A comment like the one you made is a biased, prejudiced comment, guaranteed to polarize and irritate people and is demonstrably false.

Well, you're very good at stereotyping, blanket condemnations and painting cultures as uniformly bad (in your opinion) and good (in your opinion.) I don't think I have ever seen so many stereotypes, prejudices and biased perceptions loaded into one post since "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It's a shame you have such a xenophobic bias about the U.S. and have no understanding of this country.

BevD,

Thank you for your comments. Your comment is very consistent with someone who is born and raised in America. This is also my findings. You are in a state of denial. People from New York live on the illusion that the world revolves around NY. This is the same as you, “children behave in all sorts of ways, just as I've seen adults in those cultures act in all sorts of way”. This is an illusion.

The former US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, had antagonized the world leaders and diplomats with his arrogance, superior attitude, dominance and above all, ignorance. He is out of the UN now. He did not bring his diplomatic skill with him, he displayed his bully skill and anger and expected obedience from other nations.

Oh yes, there is something good about America. The people living in NC, SC and Georgia are the nicest people I have ever met in America. They are honest, polite, hospitable, helpful and charitable. Most of them are church goers and they are the kindness people in America. There was one thing that I discovered, again in the course of my research, they had tremendous hatred towards Muslim and Middle Eastern looking people. They called them evils and despise their religion and upbringings. Later, I discovered that they had not met any Muslim or Middle Eastern looking people in their life time and they had never been offended by the Muslim personally. So, where is the hatred comes from? Yes, it is the US government and the news media. The hatred is reinforced every time the government made an accusation against a Muslim or an Arab country. I have seen all the accusations by the Bush administration from 2002 till now, they were all wrong about Iraq and other nations. It resulted in many deaths among the Iraqi civilians and the US government has to under-report the Iraqi casualties in order to make them look good. This cover-up is similar to the one used by Hitler when he ordered the torture and killing of Jews in Poland during the 2nd world war. The Germany press was ordered to display the good side of Germans towards the Jews and quietly tortured, raped and killed the Jews.

I thank you for comments because it just confirms my findings of ignorance and denial in America. Please do not blame the world for failing to understand America, it is America that should be blamed.