It’s where we like to keep ourselves. It much cozier, isn’t it? In our bubble, white supremacist murderers aren’t terrorists. People killing for Allah? Of course they are; but not Catholics who murders abortion doctors in the name of God. In our bubble, no white man posesses radioactive material. It seems as though only brown people do it.

In our bubble, we don’t need to know what Pakistan’s Swat region is, or that more people have been displaced from there than the entire population of metro Vancouver (2.4 million people). We’d rather concern ourselves with fighting the government from telling kids that evolution is science. We don’t like to concern ourselves with economic issues, because it’s too boring and complicated. We don’t need to be able to ask questions. Everything just works out on its own. Some us us think guys like Joe Stiglitz are enemies to everything we stand for. I mean, who else would say stuff like:

Today only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly.

and

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Yeah the news really isn’t what I feel like hearing. I’m going to pop in a Hot Pocket and watch Twilight again.