Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen

This post has 10 comments with rating of 5/510

• 
  alnilam
  June 13th, 2021
  

  > America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers.

  Luckily for us, America was founded by “true believers”, a.k.a. Founding Fathers, who also happened to be very wise and accomplished individuals, almost perfectly qualified for the enormous task at hand — and not so much by “wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, impresarios and their audiences, hucksters and their suckers”.

  > …from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials…

  Some conspiracy theories happen to be true; replace “fetish for guns” with “fetish for fire extinguishers” and see if it makes any sense, both are important tools and hardly anything else.

  > From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies — every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody.

  Well, as long as they did abide by the existing moral and criminal laws of the country, no?

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  howlafist
  June 13th, 2021
  

  The US was officially founded by a crowd of libertarian idealists who were split fairly evenly between envisioning their utopias as economically “left” or “right”. Over the next hundred years or so their ideals were then rapidly replaced by the same authoritarianism that dominates every other country.

  And, unlike people obsessed with fire-extinguishers, gun otaku are a very common occurrence. Most privately-owned guns are part of large personal collections, needlessly large if the conceit is that they should be useful tools. How many private citizens do you know who own ten or more fire extinguishers?

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  alnilam
  June 13th, 2021
  

  @howlafist

  > Most privately-owned guns are part of large personal collections, needlessly large if the conceit is that they should be useful tools. How many private citizens do you know who own ten or more fire extinguishers?

  Good thing that it’s up to them to decide on that regard, and not enlightened third parties who somehow know better. And tool or no tool, or even “tools in excess” (still paid by their own money, right?) — under the angle of population disarmament history, mostly ending in mass incarceration and murders of innocent people, who can blame them?

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  Tunabopper
  June 13th, 2021
  

  …well I kinda groove off a dem ‘Founding Muthahs’… where deh at?

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  Jack_Milad
  June 13th, 2021
  

  @alnilam because the whole EU, UK and Australia ended up with mass incarceration and murders of innocent people. And there’s definitely no such thing as mass incarceration in America, and guns have prevented the murder of any innocent people.
  What a ridiculous statement. Found the gun otaku.

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  caesar963
  June 13th, 2021
  

  I’m a serious fire extinguisher otaku. My secret shame. It’s v difficult to procure surface-to-air missiles for home defence & recreation here in Europe. But the authoritarian phools forgot to restrict fire extinguisher availability!

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  howlafist
  June 13th, 2021
  

  Guns-per-capita and homicide rates are not reliably correlated. The disproportionately high homicide rates in the US (relative to countries of similar economic standing) are instead caused by the “war on drugs” and the near lack of effective social services (education and healthcare). These two factors create desperate, poor, uneducated people who need fast cash and give them something to sell, feeding the gangs.

  That said, the claim of guns as necessary tools is a ridiculous one to make in the context of a country with a negligible subsistence hunting population, and their presence is overall damaging for their contribution to paranoid policing that resorts over-quickly to violence and bullying and that kills, officially, ~1000 and, unofficially, up to ~2000 people a year, many of whom are mentally ill or deaf, never having touched a gun but still suffering for their prevalence.

  ….And fire extinguishers are neat.

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  caesar963
  June 13th, 2021
  

  I’m bringin’ down the whole fascist system, one fire extinguisher at a time. It doesn’t have much range, & is relatively powerless against helicopters, but u can give an innocent, unsuspecting bystander an awful whack with a good fire extinguisher. Allegedly.

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  organicbooks
  June 15th, 2021
  

  How I love reading these remarks. They’re often more informative—and usually more enjoyable—than the book.

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen
• 
  ImdaPrincesse2
  June 18th, 2021
  

  

  Howlafist is correct

  Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History - Kurt Andersen

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