MSM is over after MJ and Palin shows.

CNN.com had a quick vote and 77% out of about 100,000 people said they were not going to watch the funeral today...yet CNN and the rest of them continue with their freak shows. What is wrong with these people? Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddows, shows I watch often, have been spending EVERY show on MJ and Palin. I am just sick of if. At least we have salon.com!!! I have not been watching Fox, all MJ and Palin?

The problem with Afghanistan has always been the fact that Afghans don't value Afghan lives sufficiently enough to make peace with one another.

They're very tribal. Each tribe values the lives of its own members and to hell with anyone else.

Those tribalist tendencies even persisted among the supposedly internationalist Afghan Communists in the seventies and were partly the reason why Afghan leftist governments kept ending with assassinations

If Afghans had valued Afghan lives before the Soviet invasion, there would never have been a Soviet invasion.

If Afghans had valued Afghan lives after the Red Army left, we wouldn't be there right now having to sort out the civilian tribals from the terrorists.

Why don't we mourn the innocent victims of our presence there now?

Mourning is about loss. It's hard to feel the loss of people you don't know who don't even really want to know you, especially when they're people who have been shooting at each other for decades who don't seem ready to stop any time soon.

Michael Jackson's music made people happy. The war in Afghanistan made people sad and that's why they and the press chose to ignore it. That's just the way the world works, so accept reality.

They're very tribal. Each tribe values the lives of its own members and to hell with anyone else.

You mean, sort of like the way American deaths are a lot more important to Americans than Afghan deaths? Gee, go figure...

war isn't real...entertainment is.

Tribalism is part and parcel of the underevolved human condition--psychological, emotional, and cultural.

We fear The Other and at least 50% of us (US) could care less if someone from The Other is tortured or bombed into bug splatter by a taxpayer subsidized "smart" bomb. Most people don't have the emotional capacity to empathize with people they've never met. Particularly those who pray, look, or speak differently and are geographically remote from the continental US.

It's why the financial/political/military elites have very little trouble whipping US into a bloody frenzy to enact a measure of fear based revenge on some Other for every perceived wrong done to US. Never once giving a moments thought to what WE (our elites) may have done to Them to warrant an inappropriate response. Meddling in their internal affairs, deposing their democratically elected leaders and replacing them with brutal dictators, always reneging on promises, swiping their natural resources . . . bombing their cities, families, and infrastructure into rubble (what little they have).

But I'm sure none of US would be provoked into a undifferentiated violent vengeful rage if someone bombed OUR farmhouses and families in Nebraska or our big banker buildings in NYC.

If for one don't think goat herding in Afghanistan sounds all that "unenlightened" compared to the pathetic overconsumptive superficial slave labor rat race that is America. Maybe we could just learn to leave OTHERS alone to practice a little self-determination, political or otherwise, based on their own unique history, culture, religion, and geography.

But wait, that can never happen because God "hid" all our oil underneath the lands of all those pesky brown barbarian squatters wearing funny hats and praying to Allah. My bad.

Apparently we only feel truly human through inhumanity directed toward the perceived Other and unquestioning loyalty to Our Own shortsighted nationalistic goals. It's why humans are doomed to a pathetic bleak future. We identify as members of small superior groups rather than as human beings first, entitled to equal dignity and respect regardless of our particular cultural or relative economic/power status. It's why we try to "change" other cultures or win "hearts and minds" with bullets instead of books and teachers and a truly "free" exchange of ideas over time. Bombing The Others we disagree with, or more importantly who have "something WE need" is so much quicker and easier. Morally superior--not so much.

Thank you Thank you Thank you

I'm sorry, but this article already starts off on the wrong foot with a title that is not only false advertising (hint: it doesn't really have anything to do with Michael Jackson) but implies that it delves into that most tiresome and obnoxious of argumentative tactics: the guilt trip. Even ignoring the "King of pop", such tactics are asinine.

For starters, this type of argument is habitually used because it's so insincere and generic (after all, you could easily replace the words "Michael Jackson's death" with ANY percieved "vice" and still get the same article). Secondly, as a Black man AND a gay man, I know the problems that can occur when people try to "go for the gold" in the Oppresion Olympics. It's not a competition for sympathy, people. (After all, THEN we could say "Well people are ALSO not surviving weddings in Rwanada. So why should we feel sorry for folks in Afghanistan?" It's a slippery slope to nowhere) Also on that note, I wish us liberals would remember that people CAN walk and chew gum at the same time. After all, if I mourn a recently deceased family member, does that mean I'm incapable of mourning anyone else? If you really want to mourn the Afghani people, well, there's nothing stopping you, you know. You don't need "our" permission to do so.

Finally (and I'll admit this is my own generalized observation) but there seems to be a bigger generosity of spirit in other countries then in this one. For instance the tributes and mourning to Jackson has been global (including places like Afghanistan, where they listened to his music too.) This, of course doesn't seem to stop other countries from mourning their own or paying attention to "what's important".