American Breakdown

Karlysymon

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Iam just being silly here...but are the lepers going to walk around with bells (like in the old days) to alert everyone else of their presence in the vicinity or are the tech companies going to sieze the opportunity and create apps that alert users that lepers are nearby, kinda like the apps in china that alert users of debtors walking nearby?
 

DevaWolf

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Apr 13, 2019
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Iam just being silly here...but are the lepers going to walk around with bells (like in the old days) to alert everyone else of their presence in the vicinity or are the tech companies going to sieze the opportunity and create apps that alert users that lepers are nearby, kinda like the apps in china that alert users of debtors walking nearby?
I'm just stunned that this is possible in what is supposedly the most advanced nation in the world. I know better, but still..
 

Karlysymon

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Karlysymon

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Karlysymon

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Is your movie meant to be a statement against the war or what many suspect to be the war's true motives?
Thank you...


Stephen Gaghan: That's a great question. It's tricky to ask a filmmaker to explain his own work, usually we're the least qualified to make sense of what we've done, unfortunately, because of the tunnel vision required to create anything over four years. But I found the war on drugs to be a war on an abstraction, a war on brain chemistry, a war on human nature. And I find the war on terror to be another war with an abstraction at the heart of its semantics. And I don't think that our democracy exportation project is working very well. If anybody had been with me in Damascus and the Syrian desert in '02 speaking to the Iraqis that I met, they wouldn't have been very optimistic about the democracy exportation project either. I think the war on terror has succeeded in creating more terror, more terrorists, a less safe America and a less safe world. But I have to qualify this by saying I'm not an expert. My research was cursory at best but I did try, flying repeatedly to the Middle East and asking a lot of experts their opinion on the same subject. General Odom, Reagan's national security advisor, recently said that he thought the second Iraqi war would turn out to be the single greatest strategic mistake in the history of the United States.

I believe decisions we -- and by we, I mean our government and the American people -- are making right now are going to impact all of us for a very, very long time to come.

I started researching "Syriana" in the fall of 2001. But I started thinking about oil politics and terrorism in 1998 when I realized that at the Pentagon the Bureau of Counternarcotics and Counterterrorism was the same bureau.

Syriana director Stephen Gaghan in 2005

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"At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire."
Why throw money at defense when everything is falling down around us? Do we need to spend more money on our military (about $600 billion this year) than the next seven countries combined? Do we need 1.4 million active military personnel and 850,000 reserves when the enemy at the moment — ISIS — numbers in the low tens of thousands? If so, it seems there’s something radically wrong with our strategy. Should 55% of the federal government’s discretionary spending go to the military and only 3% to transportation when the toll in American lives is far greater from failing infrastructure than from terrorism? Does California need nearly as many active military bases (31, according to militarybases.com) as it has UC and state university campuses (33)? And does the state need more active duty military personnel (168,000, according to Governing magazine) than public elementary school teachers (139,000)?"

SOURCE
 
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