My friend Noel Passeri had a very detailed comment on my previous post:

"This is very well written and well articulated. A couple thoughts off the top of my head just from the content discussed.... First off I do appreciate and even love the freedom, culture, and prosperity of the "First World." That being said we should be honest if we want to correct some serious moral problems... I haven't read his book, but I don't think Ritzer is right to imply (if he is implying) that advertising/propaganda techniques of over simplifying complex messages is something, in principle, recent or unique to the West. Dictatorships always have massive murals lovingly caricaturising their ideals and their leaders. How is a giant picture of the Ayatollah or Mao different in principle from a skyscraper size Victoria's Secretbill board, or a jingoistic sound bite on cable news? They all can be boiled down to: Person/product/idea is mystical, relatable and good. That's obviously not to say that the U.S. and Iran are equivalent or relative. But they are not totally alien. I really think Thomas Freedman is grossly overrated. He makes broad promulgations on part of the bourgeois elite and is erroneously labeled insightful. The West vs. the Rest paradigm is flawed at it's roots. For decades the U.S. has used and continues to use Muslim dictatorships to maintain U.S. control over Middle Eastern resources, markets etc. The only time there's a real clash is when said Muslim state (or mass movement) doesn't want to play ball with the U.S. And forget Muslim. There are plenty of secular nationalist movements in the Third world that the U.S. has opposed and continues to oppose. Also the idea that wealthy capitalist, industrial countries don't fight each other is historically flawed. That's what World War I was. The idea that U.S. style democracies don't have wars is also flawed. That was the U.S. civil war. If Freedmen is saying "Neolibralism is the path to peace and prosperity" he's neglecting to mention the possible use of force needed to forcibly obtain closed markets with attractive resources. He's also neglecting to mention the race to the bottom (search globally for cheapest labor), and he's also not mentioning the mass hunger caused by growing foods for export and not subsistence. sorry for the rant great writing essay :-p"