We waged wars on poverty, not poor people.This alone is win.
Too bad that in this day and age the being the greatest is determined by the ammount of guns and nukes you have
food that you don't have to have an ''sophisticated'' taste to eat.
The movie industry and the "superior" music. Mhm. :rolleyes:
:lol:
What else? Indie music from Europe? Low budget movies that are ''THE BEST EVER'' and that's at Cannes?As the saying goes - You don't argue about taste...
What else? Indie music from Europe? Low budget movies that are ''THE BEST EVER'' and that's at Cannes?
:)
As the saying goes - You don't argue about taste...(click to show/hide)
Sharon, the NEA is a loser, yeah, it accounts for a penny out of our pay-check but he gets to hit you with it any time he wants. It doesnt cost money, it costs votes, it costs air time, it costs column inches. You know why people dont like liberals? Because they lose. If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so god damn always?
And with a straight face youre (conservative pundit) going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that were the only ones in the world that have freedom? Canada has freedom. Japan has freedom. The UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Australia, BELGIUM has freedom.
So, 207 sovereign states in the world, like 180 of them have freedom.
And you, sorority girl, just in case you accidentally wander into a voting booth one day theres some things you should know. One of them is theres absolutely no evidence to support the statement that were the greatest country in the world. Were 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, Number 4 in labor force and Number 4 in exports, we lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.
Now none of this is the fault of a 20 year old college student, but you none the less are without a doubt a member of the worst period generation period ever period, so when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I dont know what the fuck youre talking about. Yosemite?
It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chests. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the worlds greatest artists and the worlds greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men, we aspired to intelligence, we didnt belittle it, it didnt make us feel inferior.
We didnt identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election and we didnt scare so easy. We were able to be all these things and do all these things because we were informed, by great men, men who were revered. First step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one. America is not the greatest country in the world anymore. Enough?[/size][/font]
.. Gotta love Aaron Sorkin, brilliant writer ..[/center]
At least he put the good, useful information on top of all the hollow hyperbolic bullshit. I see his point, but I hate when writers write things like what I bolded out. Complacency/laziness is one thing, but to say that we've forgotten what it means to be american and need to go back to the way we were back in the good ol' days.. What a load of shit. When were these "good old days" anyway exactly? Anyone that reads a history book would know that americans of yesterday are just as selfish and close minded as many of us today are. Waging wars have pretty much always been a matter of convenience, not morality. Social programs and government regulation have always been a subject of hatred. Guys like Frank Zappa were seen as a bane in their own country for refusing the relent to system of morality/law based around theology. Most Americans have always been by and large uninformed, ignorant jackasses. They used to work harder is all. This isn't me arguing in favor of such traits, but lets be real. Im all for saying America needs that hunger and competitive spirit that has eluded us these past generations, but if we aren't stepping forward, id at least rather be standing still. I sure as hell don't want to be stepping backwards.visitors can't see pics , please register or login
At least he put the good, useful information on top of all the hollow hyperbolic bullshit. I see his point, but I hate when writers write things like what I bolded out. Complacency/laziness is one thing, but to say that we've forgotten what it means to be american and need to go back to the way we were back in the good ol' days.. What a load of shit. When were these "good old days" anyway exactly? Anyone that reads a history book would know that americans of yesterday are just as selfish and close minded as many of us today are. Waging wars have pretty much always been a matter of convenience, not morality. Social programs and government regulation have always been a subject of hatred. Guys like Frank Zappa were seen as a bane in their own country for refusing the relent to system of morality/law based around theology. Most Americans have always been by and large uninformed, ignorant jackasses. They used to work harder is all. This isn't me arguing in favor of such traits, but lets be real. Im all for saying America needs that hunger and competitive spirit that has eluded us these past generations, but if we aren't stepping forward, id at least rather be standing still. I sure as hell don't want to be stepping backwards.
It sure used to be. We stood up for what was right. We fought for moral reasons. We passed laws, struck down laws for moral reasons. We waged wars on poverty, not poor people. We sacrificed, we cared about our neighbors, we put our money where our mouths were and we never beat our chests. We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases, and cultivated the worlds greatest artists and the worlds greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men, we aspired to intelligence, we didnt belittle it, it didnt make us feel inferior.
Were 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, Number 4 in labor force and Number 4 in exports, we lead the world in only three categories: Number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending where spend more than the next 26 countries combined, 25 of whom are allies.
Too bad that in this day and age the being the greatest is determined by the ammount of guns and nukes you have
Being the greatest = being the worst, having the ability to kill all life on earth, being the most aggressive, most manipulative, most dominating, most corrupt, most polluting, most selfish, survival of the fittest when it comes to humanity isn't about fitness, it's about manipulating the fittest to do the deeds of men with evil plans, who plot in the shadows and behind the curtains while their strung up actors are doing all the smiling and public manipulation, selling misinformation as reality, portraying propaganda as fact.
And this is the other side of ridiculous propaganda :rolleyes:. I can't even decide which approach is more unrealistic and retarded.
Being the greatest = being the worst, having the ability to kill all life on earth, being the most aggressive, most manipulative, most dominating, most corrupt, most polluting, most selfish, survival of the fittest when it comes to humanity isn't about fitness, it's about manipulating the fittest to do the deeds of men with evil plans, who plot in the shadows and behind the curtains while their strung up actors are doing all the smiling and public manipulation, selling misinformation as reality, portraying propaganda as fact.
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See there's what i just told ya. What makes YOU think that an One world government would actually do that and make it a totalitarian ruled world?
Just theories and theories and opinions and shit. Maybe and just maybe it would actually be for the better of mankind. But no, it's much better to fight useless wars for stupid nationalism and for your theocratic nations. Right? And i'm positive freedom won't be robbed if and only if a one world government appears.
If you think being poor and "powerless" somehow makes nations less selfish, violent and corrupt, yes, you were born yesterday. If you think modern nations such as the US (that you malign as some sort of Great Satan) are as bad as literally ANYTHING that existed before WW2, you are not only a newborn but a complete retard. Or heck, don't even need to go that far back. Just look at wtf is going on just south of their border right now. These are just a couple of random examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_San_Fernando_massacre
Where, in anything that the evil corrupt masterminds that run the US have planned, has been as sick and fucked up as this?
Only retards and ultranationalists with zero understanding of geopolitics have ever tried to portray the US and it's real politik selfish moves as anything but that, but your bleeding heart idiocy is just as moronic.
If you think being poor and "powerless" somehow makes nations less selfish, violent and corrupt, yes, you were born yesterday. If you think modern nations such as the US (that you malign as some sort of Great Satan) are as bad as literally ANYTHING that existed before WW2, you are not only a newborn but a complete retard. Or heck, don't even need to go that far back. Just look at wtf is going on just south of their border right now. These are just a couple of random examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_San_Fernando_massacre
Where, in anything that the evil corrupt masterminds that run the US have planned, has been as sick and fucked up as this?
Only retards and ultranationalists with zero understanding of geopolitics have ever tried to portray the US and it's real politik selfish moves as anything but that, but your bleeding heart idiocy is just as moronic.
Why the hell are you taking a piss at USA? Im not a big fan of America nor its wars either and it has massive problems but its not that bad, that you would make a full essay of it......
There are far worse countries to discuss about, no point of trying to convince people to turn against USA cause I dont think you would achieve anything with that.
The difference is in America where generally speaking, access to education, healthcare, and employment is relatively easy to find when you compare us to developing nations. You cannot argue that a developing nation is equally accountable to crime until you have given the world an equally distributed amount of power and resources to fight crime. I've traveled to Mexico and visited where the average pay ranged from $4-8 a day for a worker who sometimes worked consecutive six hour shifts. Drug dealing was fairly common. Still, the people living there were some of the kindest, most gentle people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I saw families who were crossing the border, I even talked to a few people who did cross the border. Do you have any idea how much they lost to try to make it to America where they did not face constant economic strife and persecution? One man lost his child, another has an untreated leg injury, and another left his family behind when he was found and deported. Oh yeah, for all of you people who enjoy statistics, here's one: over 2,000 to 3,000 people have died in the last 10 years attempting to cross the border. Honestly, your comment just sounded like someone who has no concept of poverty and what it forces people to do to survive.
So let's try to think of a few things that are fucked up in America in recent times (post-ww2 right?) , besides the deportation and exploitation of an ethnic group.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDAA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs
http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB53/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmGcaOkRsTU
http://www.flagrancy.net/timeline.html
These are all documented instances of American abuses of power, or institutions relating to American private interests propped by American foreign policy. These are not conspiracies.
Murmillus_Prime: could you name a few examples when American intervention also led to a better world?
The United States is my home. I was born here and I love living here. The problem lies in the way my neighbors give up their civil rights because they do not accept the responsibility of upholding the constitution. Our ignorance simply catches up to us, as it did in all of those instances, as it did in the fiscal collapse of 2008, as it did in Iraq and still in Afghanistan, as our credit rating is downgraded, and unstable regimes in developing nations discover atomic power. When we should be subsidizing small businesses instead of paying for corporations to ship and peddle their electronics to our uneducated citizens. When we should be passing legislation in our government that makes it fiscally transparent, we're passing legislation that includes torture. Realize that if you're an American, law can and will be used against you. The lack of public funding will reverberate and negatively affect you and your loved ones. I'm not trying to scare you into voting one way or another, I'm just trying to spark some curiosity in people's souls so that they research that which is destroying democracy.
Besides, the argument that some countries are worse off than America doesn't mean that America can't improve, you're just skewing reality.
That was not the point. America can improve, im certain of it. I simply ment its typical for the observers to see and complain about it. Yes, its sad that every time USA declares war our guys from EU are dragged along with it and the rate of illiteracy and crime is quite huge in USA. But thats the problems u get when u have a big nation, corruption and loads of other problems.
Its typical for observers from other countries to start complainin how the overall system in USA is broken, while they themselves are giving very little for their own community. If you start really thinking about it, rather than complainin, I dont think any of us would come up with anything that whould solve the american problems.
And whats with this constant democracy crap all the time? The first rule of democracy is that u can do whatever u like aslong as it doesnt limit the freedoms of another individual. U can bend that rule as you please really. Its scientifically proven that democracy gets its power from stupid voters. Its quite odd that this is the only barely working system that partly works with us humans.
If all it did was deliver us to a much more bloody wide-scale third world war, then no. The amount of countries the U.S has attacked or tried to change the regime in ,or breached its sovereignty goes into double figures, American intervention delivered American dominance which does as it wishes, imposes its will and its corrupt politicians will through the military arm upon poor and stable nations and turns them into sectarian hell holes where, if war crimes actually mattered to the west, and weren't just used as a political tool, then they'd be imprisoning all the criminals, not only some of them who stand in the way politically or financially (to corporations and monetary institutions like the IMF).
u're really "black n'white" kind of person
Read some history. It's kind of hard to rail about the horrible injustices perpetrated by the horrible elite when compared to...any other time in human existence. Your idea of fairness and justice (first of all, completely dictated by occidental political ideology) has only ever existed as a theoretical construct. We're closer to it now than we have EVER been in the entire history of humanity, and getting closer. Judging by your interpretation humanity has reached the pinacle of horrifying warfare, bloodshedding, propaganda and jingoism at this precise moment in time with the fascist US empire...again, do you know any history? At all? Do you want to compare it to literally any other empire? Not to give them too much credit, it was entirely due to MAD, without nuclear weapons WW2 would've quickly devolved into WW3, they walked softly and carried a big stick because they knew the big stick was so big it would take them out too, not because they're so fucking benelovent as they like to paint themselves. OF COURSE the nation-state still acts in a selfish manner...that's what it's there for, that's the reason behind the continued existence of every nation-state.
Ironically you want them to act as if they were responsable for the entire world, as in, a one world government?
I'm not sure what you're saying, that violence isn't important because comparatively speaking in history we're not mongols sacking a roman city? Or that we're at the pinnacle of western civilization? Are you kidding me? Every major western civilization has thought that. Greece, Rome, Britain, and now the United States. Now you're beginning to understand the failed egocentric approach that's plagued the world since before written history. See "Homer".
Every major western civilization? Apart from the fall of Rome, when has there been a change/fall/decline/loss of western civilization? We are still here and have been for thousands of years now in some form or shape, have we not? We have also improved on pretty much all aspects of being constantly.
Sure, there are ways to improve and we should never cease to look for those (i still think demarchy could be, to some extent, incorporated into our current form of democracy), but complaining and whining about how everything is conspired against us and how the world is horrible and bad and evil is, to my mind, outright retarded and makes you just an annoying dead weight to the progress of humanity as such.
Oh, and, if you think that complaining about stuff somehow makes you the part of the aware minority or some such thing and everyone who disagrees are sheeple - you couldn't be more wrong. Meh, most people i know, and in fact, most people over here, commenting on news portals and such, are like you - an irritating background buzz of whine and tears.
Apart from the fall of Rome
I think Reagan (I fucking hate the cunt, but still quoting him in this case) said something along those lines as well, that if ever the planet was threatened by some sort of outside "alien" race we could unite the planet in about a week.
Fallacy in my argument? Where?
I am not dismissing independent thinking, i am encouraging critical thinking.
What is wrong with the current Western Civilization as a whole? The power of the corporations and shallow populism. What feeds it? The average voter. And, unlike what you would believe, the average voter is oh-so-"aware" of:
a) Banker conspiracy
b) New world order conspiracy
c) Evil government conspiracy
d) Some other government conspiracy
e) Their government acting as puppets for something else
f) Whatever-the-fuck-else you can come up with
Cheap populists make use of this to conjure up some sort of imaginary enemy and promise that they are the ones going to fight it. The masses vote for them, rather than the ones, who can actually offer real solutions.
"Aware" people spreading such "information" merely contribute to the problem.
Decadence, fading away from an imperialist, blood-hungry dominant society. You don't even realize that's what your advocating and you tell me to look up history. Why don't you go talk to a historian about how great the British empire was, or Rome. We're the same except that we've prohibited slaves, contracting that out to multinationals who operate in third world countries ruined by western administration.
Read Murmillus posts then. In either case, it is not about conspiracy theories, it is about the way of thinking, one that sees almost solely the bad, exaggerates it and conjures up some more.
Dressing it up in more words and with references doesn't change the essence of it - a whine. Try constructive feedback instead.
That's a typical white and/or privileged world view, and I'm paraphrasing "things have never been better" because while you're the guy wearing your comfy Nike's, you're not the guy who has worked for the past 5-10 years in a sweatshop making them.
(click to show/hide)
Except in Britain you had Victorian era workhouses which had far worse conditions than the modern sweatshop. It's not like western civilisation didn't go through that already.
Also arguably they are a good thing. If you knew anything about development then you would know that. No one outside of popularist writers thinks sweatshops are a negative thing.
What was your point with all this?
Wrong.
http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/article.asp?id=1369
Read the paper.
Read the posts above. He said that violence today and living conditions are nothing compared to previous ones.
Read the posts above. He said that violence today and living conditions are nothing compared to previous ones.
I read the paper, thanks for asking. What the paper shows is that the sweatshop model provides workers superior rages considering previous earnings, but the author also proposes that critics (like me) believe that those wages are non-negotiable and without providing a standard of living. What you're saying about violence doesn't make sense. If we look at who is harming other people in the world we would see that people from wealthy areas are carrying out wars which will make them even wealthier while the poor -- poorer. And in instances like what happened in Rwanda, our ability to suddenly intervene in crises of liberty and genocide is absent, even though we have intervened in Iraq underneath the same pretense, where comparatively speaking, people were prosperous. There is no logic in saying that there are quantifiable degrees of violence. Violence is violence, and I don't believe that it's inherent. I think violence is the result of failed diplomacy and politics.
Seriously, how can you justify materialism with, "well, they're earning on average 20 cents an hour more?" Even prominent economists like Paul Kruger who formulated that idea can't establish a convincing argument that they're "better off".
http://slaveryfootprint.org/
I have 23 slaves working for me. How many work for you?
In terms of relative wage they are better off. In terms of standard of living and what is provided for them, plus negotiability well that's something that is very broadly debated. Heck my girlfriend (Indian) who has studied development and Anthro and worked with a number of development agencies in India that work with people in those conditions has found little wrong with them as a lot is provided for them. I can't argue that that is the same everywhere. But no absolute statements can really be made by either of us. By our standards it's still fucking shit, but then standards of living, wages and livelihoods are completely different between countries. By British standards there are still a lot of people living in poverty in this country. Things are relative. That little bit of money makes a big difference in a very poor country. You can't come at things from a purely western stand point. I'm more concerned by sex trafficking and slavery in that sense than I am sweatshops. Another thing my girlfriend avidly studies and is working with. In the sex trafficking world slavery is a very very real situation and there is no way to excuse that as 'better standard of living'.
Well no shit. But that doesn't mean violence has in any way increased. I still think from a violence standpoint things are better or just the same, certainly not worse than the overall history of humanity. But that is where you and me then differ. Violence is inherent. Otherwise we wouldn't have seen it throughout history dating all the way back to the beginning of time. Competition is inherent. What the modern age has perhaps given us is a better understanding of our morality and a smaller world to criticise violence. But that doesn't mean we still won't jump at the opportunity to kick our neighbours arse if they piss us off.
Also things like that slave survey are just an awareness gimmick. They are good for awareness but that's about it.
America is a pig, just turn it upside down. Sums it up well.Just like the people living there :3
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