Yaaaawner!

What Europe, the U.S., China and Japan have now are leaderships that substitute lies for fact, obfuscation for transparency, artifice for feedback and propaganda for communication. The essential negative feedback of dissent has been choked off, leaving only self-reinforcing positive feedback loops in the system, feedback that inevitably leads to runaway collapse.

Point out to a liberal that any of this takes place at the direction of or with the connivance of government officials and his brain immediately slips into neutral. Let there be a hint of some kind of purely private transgression, however, and the liberal goes crazy like a bird dog in a pheasant farm.

Yes. The liberal will slobber over government and overlook every single instance of government overreach. Telling liberals stuff like what Mr. Smith does is pointless. They may acknowledge disparate problems but will invariably turn to "the rich" or "corporations" or "white people" to explain the ills of the world. Government threats to their safety and security they never see.

"Preserving the Status Quo with Artifice and Lies Leads to Systemic Collapse." By Charles Hugh Smith, of two minds.com, 11/18/11 (emphasis in original).