On The One Hand This, On the Other Hand That

It seems that the things you don't like about National Geographic are the very things that I like about it. Although they tend to lean one way or another on an issue, they always try to give you a sense of what the other side is saying too. That way you can make up your own mind about it, and you have enough information to do that intelligently. I remember one time they did a piece on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They said later that they received more mail about that particular article than about any other article they had ever published. About half of the respondents accused them of being biased towards the Israelis, and the other half accused them of being biased towards the Palestinians. The editor said that must mean that they got it right, and I tend to agree.

All kidding aside, the real reason I put Italy and Greece in the liberal camp was that they have both wrecked their economies by passing out more benefits and services to their citizens than they had  money in their treasuries. When it got so that nobody would loan them any more money, they appealed to the richer nations in the European Union to bail them out. I'm not sure about Italy, but Germany agreed to help Greece out only if they would implement certain belt tightening policies, which they called "austerity measures". The Greek government reluctantly agreed, which resulted in the Greek voters kicking them out of office in the next election. This was a couple years ago and, last I heard, the crises has yet to be resolved. It has been my experience that, any time somebody gives you money, they're going to try to tell you what to do. If you don't want them telling you what to do, you shouldn't ask them for money.

I believe the word you were looking for as an opposite to "collectivist" is "individualist". This probably makes more sense than using words like "liberal" and "conservative" because those words seem to change their meanings a lot. In describing the governments of the Scandinavian countries, people tend to use terms like "socialist', or "democratic socialist". That's okay except that all
governments are socialist by their very nature, varying only by degree. It would be more accurate to say that they are more socialist than the United States, although I'm not so sure that's the case anymore. We've been drifting that way for a long time, and we may have caught up with them by now. I'm also not sure if the Scandinavians are more or less socialist than Italy and Greece. If they are more, then they must know something that their Mediterranean brethren do not because, as far as I know, the Scandinavian nations are financially secure.

Sure, you and I pick and choose who we want to believe, but many people do not. If you think back on it, we were less discriminating about it in our younger days. At first it was because we didn't have many options, because we didn't know that many people. The more people we know, or know about, the more aware we become that there is more than one way to look at things. I'm not sure why some people never advance that far. It's like one of my old army buddies from Georgia used to say: "Some people don't know nothing, some people don't want to know nothing, and some people don't even suspect nothing."