Political Crossfire Forums

So I read the whole book, which came out last week:

Fantasyland: How America went Haywire

I do highly recommend this revisionist romp through american history by Kurt Anderson, host of NPR's Studio 360. It starts with Martin Luther, dwelving into the fantasyland that Americans have created since then.

It focuses heavily on religion and how that has shaped america, but lays blame on the left and the right for moving us to the ultimate fantasy: 2017.

The 60s were described as a "big bang" and caused America to have a nervous breakdown. The anything-goes hippie new age nonsense gave way to a world where "facts" are what you believe, because science is just another truth and there are many truths. It was because of the hippies that "christians" like the bible fan-fiction-fanatics in Utah or the tongue-speakers of the south took off, and nothing seemed weird anymore. Everything became okay to do, mainstreamed. We live in a world where people dress up as animals to have sex with each other and really think they are those animals, where others do war renactment and recreate wars -- or milsim and play out fantasies of a new american civil war, or think they are the opposite sex than what they truly are (or neither), or think that homepathy is "alternative medicine" with same if not better effectiveness, where people can have relationships with other people without ever meeting them, where people can get into echo chambers online, where kids are dying from diseases long since eradicated in america because of insane conspiracy theories. The right has benefited more from this unhingement from reality than the left, but that's mainly because for the first time in american history, a party is explicitly christian. But much of these what used to be fringes on the left and the right feed off each other, like in the case of vaccinations.

Andersen doesn't have much in the way of advice, other than to stand up for facts and don't let alternative 'facts' slip by when you're talking to friends and family

8/10