World's Happiest People? You Gotta Be Kidding!

Buz, have you ever been to Nigeria? Not that I have, but I'm inclined to take statistics over anecdotes. Honestly, though, maybe the survey is just stupid. How could you even measure happiness, anyway?

What I'm saying is that anecdotes don't make a science. Now, the study might not be good science, either - but anecdotes definately aren't good science, so it's useless to try to disprove a study with anecdotes. What possible motivation could lead someone to pick Nigeria as the happiest nation? It's "so weird it must be true." Because it might be that happiness is unrelated to all the various metrics that you think it is. It may very well be that everything that the Swiss have that the Nigerians don't - good watches, guns in every home, chocolate - are totally unrelated to real happiness. Maybe happiness isn't related to material goods. Maybe, as the study suggests, you're happier in cultures that have little because you don't know what you don't have.In the western world we're bombarded by images of things we don't have. If all you know is your village, then you don't know what's out there for you to have. It seems increasingly likely to me as I write this that the happiest people are those who don't know what they don't have. That sounds like Nigeria to me.

I don't speak, uh, Nigerian.It's because as I said, happiness isn't what you have, it's what you don't know you don't have. Coming from America I'd be all too aware of what I'd lack. Being born in Nigeria and subject to relatively little media, however, I'd have no idea that video games even existed (for instance).

That shit happens in this country too, dude. Yet I don't seem to feel any "clouds of tyranny", except the ones that Christians would impose on us for our own good. Or the clouds of tyranny our Dept. of Homeland Security imposes on innocent foreign nationals held indefinately without trial for the crime of being Muslim in the wrong place.But it deson't change the fact that what you think makes people happy may not be what it takes to make people happy.

Those are in Kuala Lumpur and are still standing, as I recall. Maybe you could explain to me how the invasion of a country with no discernable ties to the September 11 thing - which probably killed less people than just starved to death in Africa today, btw - and no weapons of mass destruction that we can find now that we've turned it into the 51st state (all the while letting the dictator we set out to depose slip right through our fingers) is what a "man's gotta do to save our nation."Our nation isn't threatened by a few guys with box cutters. 9-11 had no effect on democracy or freedom. What did have an effect was the radical expansion of government surveillence powers that immediately and recklessly followed. If the aim of terror is to limit our freedom, the hijackers have succeeded - by turning our government against us. I'm sorry, what nation has declared war? I must have missed that. After all war is the actions of the uniformed combatants of legitamate nations.Oh, you were talking about the so-called "War on terror"? Terrorists are criminals, not soldiers. Therefore to call it "the war on terror" is as stupid and meaningless as "the war on drugs". In this case it's worse - it's a smokescreen to acclimate American citizens to the idea of drastically reduced freedoms and government transparancy in the name of "wartime sacrifices." The real threat to democracy is in the White House, Buz. Take your "war on terror" there.

You're quite correct. To expand, war can be seen as a process of denying your enemy access to resources - manufacturing, manpower, food, anything. But since terrorism is an act that uses our own resources against us, a military approach harms our own freedoms. It's exactly like using a hatchet to remove a fly from our own foreheads, to paraphrase the Chinese proverb.

I can connect the dots just fine, Buz. The thing is, I'm connecting a lot more dots than you are. I'm connecting the dot of modern Islamic extremism with the Christian-led free-market idolization of the past century. I'm connecting American casualties in this country with American actions in other countries.History doesn't happen in a vacuum. You have to connect all the dots. When you do you see that there's enough blame to go around, enough culpability on the shoulders of both Christian consumerists and Islamic extremeists. Because one ridiculous fairy-tale religion is the same as another, to me.