Your biblical quotes really are taken literally by some, but they are ignoring the context and metaphor just as you are.
That's exactly the problem with the bible. If you don't take it literally, then it becomes meaningless, and you can simply ascribe ANY set of morals and ethics to christianity. There are enough contradictions and disparities in the bible to support both sides of almost any issue. And if people are just using their own ideas about what morality to determine how they interpret the bible, why bother with the bible at all? People in our society now accept homosexuals, so we focus on the "love thy neighbour" stuff and not on the stuff about stoning women who lie with each other. Many people are uncomfortable with pornography, so everyone ignores the fact that an entire chapter of sex stories was deemed important enough to put into the bible. The bible even says that to add or remove from the bible is an unforgivable sin; yet how many "Children's Bibles" include the violent massacres of Numbers or sexuality of The Song of Solomon?
The reverse is even worse of course. If you want to know what happens to someone who actually reads the bible and takes every single word to heart, just look at the Westboro Baptist Church. Other Christians hate those people even more than homosexuals do, because deep down they know that they can't argue with them. Those psychos know the bible backwards and forwards. They know every word, and they believe it all. Their behaviour is the direct result of that.
There is no way around it -- Christianity itself is fundamentally stupid. It's either meaningless and little more than a weak way to justify one's beliefs, or it's a source of hatred, bigotry, and violence.
On the other hand, we aren't scared to fail.
This poor risk analysis by Americans at the heart of why Americans are so destructive and horrible. The rest of us look at the world, identify real threats, and try to resolve them. The flu is one of the biggest killers in any society. So we give seniors and children free flu shots. Car accidents are right up there, so we pass seatbelt laws and have strict driver's license requirements (which will actually become meaningful once all the seniors who got their licenses back in the 50s finally die). And the thing is, once we've done that, we don't need to worry. We're actually safe, or relatively so.
Americans identify minor risks that can't be prevented. Then they waste their time and money trying to prevent them. Naturally they fail, and remain afraid. Then they need to stock their house with guns, form militias, vote for a Republican police-state, go to war, etc, all because they need some way to address their imaginary threats. I mean, that's half the problem right there. The rest of the problem is that the government (particularly Republican governments) go to extraordinary lengths to increase those fears. "Threat Level"? "We don't know what the terrorists are doin', but they're doin' something!" It's called fearmongering, and most nations would try to recall any government official that engaged in it. Americans just assume that their leaders are telling the truth... which is so stupid that it staggers the imagination. I mean, they're politicians -- anyone who trusts a politician is doomed.
Take GM foods for example. Or labor economics.
Typical American misconceptions. Europeans don't want GM foods banned, they want them LABELLED. So that they can make free, informed choices. They want to KNOW what they are buying, rather than simply getting mysterious chunks of edible material that could healthy, or could be a mixture of mercury-laden corn protien and mad-cow bone-grindings. Only an American could be so psychotically evil and stupid as to think that knowing what you are buying is a bad thing.
You didn't even read my post: the key term here is "had" -- as in "the US had HAD an absolutely enormous positive impact on the world". The US now has an absolutely enormous negative impact on the world. The USA spreads war and conflict, it strips other nations of their sovereignty, it assassinates democratically elected leaders simply because their economic policies conflict with America's, it gives weapons to both sides during wars in the middle east, it holds foreign nationals without trial and tortures them for suspected crimes,... and that's not even getting into what America does to its own citizens.
Everyone respects the Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the half of twentieth century. Nowadays though, you'd have trouble finding enough honesty, compassion, integrity, intelligence, honour, creativity, or even basic human decency in the entire nation to fill a thimble. Americans produce very little of worth (most Americans work in the service industry or in management, both fields that produce no value of any kind), and what they do produce is grossly overshadowed by the destruction that America wreaks all over the world.
When you get down to brass tacks, the US is little better than places like Iran and Syria -- full of irrational, violent, stupid, cowardly, close-minded religious zealots. And the handful of good people that America has left are despised by the rest for being "liberal elitists" (no matter how humble or conservative they might actually be).
Who said I'm European? I'm not, trust me. Only Americans could be SO arrogant as to assume that anyone who criticizes them is German, French, or British.
Incidentally, the French TOLD America that they should stay out of Vietnam, that there was no way they could win without millions of troops and a willingness to massacre a large fraction of the population. You see, the French LEARN from their mistakes. The vietnam war proved that America can't learn from other peoples' mistakes, and the Iraq war (and Bush's re-election) demonstrate that Americans can't even learn from their own mistakes.
Besides, we're talking about America's behaviour RIGHT NOW. Europe, right now, is NOT holding people without trial and torturing them into giving false confessions. They're NOT planning to deliberately disrupt two of their most important trading links and potentially cause a recession across all of North America. Other than England, they're NOT waging an unwinnable war of attrition against people with nothing to lose. And their heads of state DON'T say that God personally told them to invade other countries and kill certain people. So RIGHT NOW, Europe is looking really good, and America is looking like a nation of insipid bullies with paranoid schizophrenia.
Once you start looking at other countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and MODERN Europe, you start to see just how good things can be by contrast. Imagine paying nearly the same taxes, and getting a social support network with universal health coverage, instead of thousands flag-draped coffins that the government censors images of (so much for freedom of the press or of expression, loser) and crippled veterans who are denied any kind of disability benefits or medical support after they're discharged (so much for supporting the troops). I know which one I prefer, and it's the one with fewer crippled people rather than more.
"Fiscal republican"? What an odd turn of phrase... one who believes that money should be ruled by popular consensus as enacted by representatives? Sounds like a bankers' trade union.:P Seriously though, most of us just call them "fiscal conservatives", and Clinton (or at least his administration) WAS fiscally conservative. They reduced the deficit, cut the size of the beauracracy, and avoided needless new spending. I'm no Clinton fan, but credit where it's due: his government did a better job with the budget than any other American government in the last few decades. And he had the whole neoliberal thing going for him; for all the destructiveness and dehumanization that neoliberalism allows, it DOES make war virtually unthinkable, and the consequences of war are far worse than anything that free, unrestricted trade can cause.
What I personally think America needs, as an outsider, is the Libertarians. Granted, they're completely insane and their ideas are, like Marxism, based on completely inaccurate views of Human nature that have no applicability to the real world. But when the foundation of a house is bad, sometimes the only choice is to rebuild. Scrapping most of what the government's programs and gradually re-establishing the most important ones according to modern organizational and managerial principles would go a long towards making America a reasonable place to be. People could actually see the programs working, see what they do, and how they benefit society (or fail to do so, as the case may be). Maybe even try to take the separation of state and federal powers seriously this time.
But that's my whole point -- the dysfunction starts with Americans being incapable of selecting their leaders sanely. Nearly every other democratic nation does better in this regard. The exceptions are particularly quite notable since most of them subsequently ceased to be democratic, and the most prominent two later became known as the "Axis". Another one of the major gaffs in leader selection led to a formerly strong nation ending up a backwards third-world nation rules by Clerics who are still patting themselves on the back for successfully ridding their land of educated women and people that think freedom is something other than a sin against Allah.
Hey, I'd love it if America could clean up it's act. I just accept that it's impossible. It takes a disaster of truly epic proportions to change people. It takes firebombings of their cities, it takes holocaust, it takes the complete collapse of society. America's military is pretty scary NOW, but when the money's all gone? Not so much. The American government doesn't have the fiscal sense to run a popsicle stand without a trillion dollar budget. With a weakened economy, they'll be lucky if they can successfully operate a fleet of inflatable rafts to defend the coastline. And the nukes are irrelevant, since nothing has changed the politics of mutual annihilation. Americans still wont want to be exterminated like ants by a Russian or Chinese nuclear bombardment.
So you're suggesting that the US is NOT an invading force in Iraq?
US invades Iraq : Iran gives weapons to Iraqi resistors.
USSR invades Afghanistan : America gives weapons to Afghani resitors.
These scenarios are exactly the same. The use gave weapons to the TALIBAN. The Taliban did and still do kill Afghani civilians... not to mention arming and helping out Al'Quaeda.
Sorry man, but the US is JUST LIKE IRAN on this one. America supported terrorism -- and more specifically, Americans PAID for terrorism through their taxes. And America IS the unprovoked aggressor is the Iraq conflict, and Iran is the one giving weapons to militants to use "against an invading military force". They DO attack American soldiers, and the pupppet government's soldiers. The genocide and murder of civilians pales in comparison to the stuff that the Taliban did. Deal with it. It's precisely this kind of naive stupidity that makes people hate Americans. You don't acknowledge simple truths about what your country has done, and that's why you keep getting stuck with this bullshit. That's why America will just do this again and again, arming terrorists one decade and then fighting them the next. And you'll be stuck paying for it, and you'll have to watch as those terrorists try to attack your country. You'll have to watch as they very effectively turn entire nations of muslims (or whoever else you manage to alienate) against the West. And you'll have to face the fact that you CHOOSE this path, deliberately.
Free speech is great. Those idiots are free to call America the "land of the free", and I'm free to laugh my ass off when they do, and promptly remind of all the ways in which they are substantially less free than the Europeans, the Canadians, the Mexicans, the Australians, the Japanese, etc.
But to answer your point, the US actually is remarkably lockstep. Individuals may differ, but individuals are not society. In American society as a whole, you'll be shouted down if you suggest that, say, American soldiers who die in Iraq deserve what they get for agreeing to fight in a war that they KNEW was being started based on lies (frankly, they deserve it for having voted for the Brownshirts in the first place). You'll be shouted down if you observe that the American did every single thing in its power to provoke an attack like 9/11, and is still completely unrepentent about its role in making the middle east a horrible place to live. You'll be shouted down if you suggest that maybe, just maybe, voting for a third party is okay, since there's no functional difference between the two principal parties (thanks to the GOP of course, this is no longer true; I'm surprised that more Republicans haven't started trying to take down the GOP for derailing the more legitimate politics of the republican party). American society, thanks to homogenous capitalist media sources and a completely out-of-control political system that fosters and rewards corruption at every turn, is completely in of the hands of the very worst idiots that the American genepool has to offer -- not to mention the most greedy and evil people, the most power hungry, and so on.
It stands to reason that the bright people would congregate into groups, doesn't it? Presuming that you are one of the aforementioned bright people, your associates are not exactly representative sampling of the American population. I might as well try to claim that most Canadians want to be doctors, based on the fact that most of the people I associate with regularly are on the medical-school track in college. I could even claim that most Canadians are immigrants, since most of the people I associate with are from other countries.
Deep down, you know that people who "fearfully from cheeseburger to church to the couch to watch Fox News" are the vast majority. After all, if you shaved a chimpanzee and gave it the capacity to ignore reality in favour of delusional beliefs, that's what it would be doing, right? And most people are no better than paranoid, delusional, shaved chimpanzees. Luckily, most people live somewhere that has folks who know how to take care of chimpanzees and keep them relatively calm and safe. Those shaved chimpanzees have the sense to allow whichever of the keepers does the best job to be the one that they allow to manage them. America is the place where the shaved chimpanzees killed the keepers and started letting the chimp with the loudest howl to lead. And predictable, most Americans behave -- both individually and en-masse -- precisely the way you would expect 300 million paranoid shaved schizoid chimpanzees to behave.
Most people are idiots, period. But it's quintessentially American to put those retards into positions of great power. Actually, no. I understand the Roman emperor Nero once made a horse his prime minister or something, and I'm pretty sure that Bush is at least as smart as a horse. Reagan, maybe not so much (anyone who consults an astrologer to guide his decisions should NOT be president).
My country was actually founded by people willing to slaughter cute fluffy animals and sell their skins to rich suckers. To this day, our economy and indeed, most of our society, is based on selling stuff to idiots (mostly Americans now rather than Europeans). Somehow, that works out to being a very pacifist and liberal society that simultaneously embraces capitalism and socialism, balancing them (not always skillfully) as the needs of the moment demand. But I can certainly see how being founded by the puritans, or indeed any group of violent and murderous religious extremists, could have negative reprecussions. It's like if Al'Quaeda got to form their own country and run it however they liked.
Nationalist -- it's awfully nationalist. Like, if I suggest that the people living on the reservation outside town are a bunch of jobless gas-huffing losers, I'm not being racist. I'm attacking that society (which is an undeniably shitty one). Most native Canadians don't live on reservations -- they have perfectly normal lives, perfectly normal jobs, confine their addictions to perfectly normal caffeine and confine their gasoline to perfectly normal automobiles. Similarly, if suggest that Iran sucks hairy goat balls, I'm attacking a nation. I love Persians. My college has lots of hot Persian girls, most rabidly atheist on account of their parents being refugees that fled Iran during the revolution. My manager is Persian, and she brings me Iranian pastries just because she's super nice. Persians are great. It's the nation of Iran that teabags the hirsute scrotums of those most notable members of the Capra genus.
In order to be racist against Americans... well, let's just say that it would be more work than even the most bigoted asshole could handle. The sheer number of races and mixed races required would be staggering. That would be a level of hatred so extreme that the racist in question would probably collapse into a singularity of bitterness and selfishness so dense that hate speech can not escape its surface.
Every country has some "brilliant, vibrant and insightful individuals". In some countries, they are the leaders. In some, they are highly respected. In places like Iran, America, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, they are considered degenerate liberal elitists by most people. Your government is outspokenly hateful of those people, but at least America doesn't execute them.
Interestingly, getting pissy about generalizations is an almost uniquely American quality. In most other cultures, people understand that generalizations have exceptions, and that those exceptions don't detract from the quality of the generalization. I can say that Humans have livers in their chests, without hassled about the very small number of people that don't. I can say that Humans prefer to not be murdered, and that's a perfectly okay analogy despite the very small number of people that want to be killed by someone else. I can say that Americans live in America, without any bitching about a few expats residing here and there. And I can generalize about Americans being dull, irrational, stupid, cowards, without having to get guff about the handful Mark Twains, Truman Capotes, Brian Warners, and other exceptional people. The whole point, in fact, is that those people are exceptional -- they're not normal, and they don't represent their society at all.
There's no reason not to provide child molestors with psychiatric treatment. After all, they are quite clearly mentally ill. The mistake that stupid people make is to suppose that acknowledging that pedophiles have a mental illness means that you should just let them go. Half the problem with western criminal justice systems is that they think punishment is enough, and never try to actually correct the behaviour. These systems just end up being about revenge, and end up doing nothing to make society safer or to rehabilitate criminals. I don't suggest locking up pedophiles as a punishment, I suggest locking them up to protect children. And I suggest hanging George Bush in order to protect the Iraqi people.
So what attitude exactly was it that Europeans tried? World War 2 was caused by the fact that Germany was imposed with crippling war reparations after World War 1, and suffered under terms of surrender that were destroying their entire society. That's why the US had the sense to help rebuild Germany and the rest of Europe after WW2 (that, and the fact that it served as a form of workfare to keep Americans employed, since Marshall plan dollars had to be spent on American goods).
Rabid nationalism and prejudice
have never caused anything more serious than a civil protest or a rally. War is about economics -- period. There are no exceptions. Religion, race, nationalism, and all those things are nothing more than ways to trick people into supporting the war. And people will always be stupid enough to be tricked into suppporting a war by some means. The world wars were caused by economic conditions in Europe (Germany's lack of natural resources / Germany's crippling war reparations), just like the Iraq war is being caused by economic conditions in America (specifically, Halliburton's need for money, and Bush and Cheney's need for kickbacks and benefits from Halliburton).
You just don't get it -- you think the war in Iraq was caused by Americans hating Iraq or something. That's ludicrous. It's caused by the fact that Americans are a) stupid, b) gullible, and c) religious zealots. So when people like the GOP want to raid the public coffers (in the form of no-bid contracts for reconstruction projects in Iraq), they can always trick the people into supporting them -- particularly by playing to their religion. Even for the most reasonable people, religion creates a chink in their mental armor through which stupidity and irrationality can enter.
It's odd how, despite the fact that I CLEARLY condemn Iran and other Islamic Theocracies, you seem convinced that I think they're great. I hate America for the same reason that I hate Iran. So Iran gives explosives to terrorists in Iraq -- that's bad, right? Of course. But somehow you can defend America giving explosive to terrorists in Afghanistan so that they can fight the USSR? Or giving weapons to Iraq so that they can invade Iran? Or supporting genocidal regimes in South America? America and Iran DESERVE a war with each other. They have the same religious fundamentalism, the same tendency to encourage and support terrorism, the same pointless belligerence. Seriously, I hope you're looking forward to that war as much as I am, since you're going to be footing the bill. Plus, you'll probably get to pay to have Iran rebuilt, although Halliburton will keep most of the money and do very little actual reconstruction (funny how Iraq doesn't seem to have any of that awesome reconstruction going on, despite billions of dollars in public spending...).
Did Americans elect a president who repeatedly claims that he speaks the word of God, or didn't they? Did they elect a president who said that Atheists should not be considered citizens, or didn't they? Did they elect a pedophile to congress, or didn't they?
Pat Robertson is a personal advisor to the current administration. That's ALMOST as bad as the Reagans consulting with astrologers... almost.
"Don't use the word 'gay' unless it's an acronym for 'Got Aids Yet'". -- Bob Dornan (Rep. R-CA).
"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." -- George Walker Bush (President).
"We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand." -- James Watt (Secretary of the Interior).
"The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian."... "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction."... "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."... "Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches." -- Jesse Helms (Sen. R-NC).
"Civilized people - Muslims, Christians, and Jews - all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator." -- John Ashcroft (Attorney General).
"I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote." -- Kay O'Connor (Kansas Senate Republican).
"George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God." -- Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin.
"For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ." -- Ronald Reagan (President of the United States).
Americans VOTED for these people and for their political parties (except for William G. Boykin, he's in the military, which is even scarier). The kinds of claims I make are NOT exaggerated, not one bit. Americans are happily following evil, terrifying people, and giving the power of life and death over everyone on Earth.
You keep talking about the 50s like it was some golden era of American contribution, it was, but why?
I'm referring to everything BEFORE the 50s. Like WW2, or the revolution -- both very "brave" acts. America didn't need to get involved in Europe during WW2; a strong navy would have been more than enough to protect North America indefinitely. The US didn't need to revolt against the British -- it actually made American taxes much higher and made Great Britain even richer than before, minus the cost of the conflict itself. Americans were leaders in industrialization, and practically reinvented the idea of capitalism -- both of which qualify as "great" by most estimations.
I know plenty of people that work just as hard as any man did in the fifties and you know what, the manager at McDonalds makes the same. It's just not profitable any more, because we no longer have a monopoly on infrastructure, that's why we need to control things like oil, it's because our economy was built on a world that doesn't need us like they used to.
The problem isn't that the world doesn't need America. Most nations don't really need each other. Trade is nice and all, but most countries can produce enough food to feed their people, enough cotton or wool to clothe them, and enough housing to stash them all somewhere. But Americans are so sickened by the idea of anyone getting something with working themselves half to death first, that they insist on making most people do meaningless nonsense jobs like working at Macdonalds. The rest get jobs micromanaging them. The service industry is economic death, because it keeps people out of genuinely valuable and practical jobs like resource acquisition, manufacturing, and research. Farmers actually produce value for society. Everyone would be better off if the people working at Macdonalds just went on welfare and people went and got their own damn burger. Yet Americans keep pushing more and more people into the service industry.
I think our nation (generally) realizes this and will at least make adjustments for our next election, but the next president will not be popular in the US as the best thing for us right now is to build international relations at the expense of our industry without letting unemployment go into a landslide.
Why not let unemployment rise? There isn't any evidence that it's actually a bad thing, assuming society has a good social support network (which the US doesn't). It's a natural way for economies to adjust and rebalance themselves. Unemployment periodically rises, which results in lots of people going off and getting higher educations, and more people trying to start new businesses, etc.
Of course, your claim that Americans realize ANYTHING other than who the next top model is, or what they think of the latest celebrity adoption story, is ridiculous. Americans realize nothing. They'll vote for another demagogue just like they always do, and the nation will keep crumbling and millions more people will die. There's no way around at this point. Modern Americans, in general, are virtually incapable of learning from their mistakes or behaving rationally.
The difference being that you do so without an end goal, without purpose, and without cause. You are nothing less than a Nazi sitting on a soap box.
Technically, Nazis have purpose, end goals, and causes. If I do, as you suggest, not have those things, then I'm pretty much the opposite of a Nazi. At worst, I'm an opinionated loudmouth -- which should warm your heart, as those are the traits that Americans are most fond of in people. More realistically, I'm a disillusioned westerner who cares more about the hundreds of thousands of people that are suffering and facing civil war because of America than I do about Americans. The poverty and economic ruin that America is facing would be a blessing compared to what the people in Iraq are facing on your account.
I'd say that your point actually exemplifies what I'm talking about -- if you're not mad enough to firebomb densely-populated cities (a la Berlin and Tokyo), then you're not mad enough to be at war in the first place.
The whole concept of "just warfare" exists solely to dupe the public into supporting a neverending series of stupid, indecisive, wasteful wars; ultimately it's a way for a group of politicians to take YOUR tax money and hand it over to the industrialists that supported those politicians' campaigns.
Ultimately, that's how you can tell whether a wrong is a mistake or not. If a war is truly necessary -- if that nation's interests are truly on the line -- then there is no such thing as a noncombatant. Every single man is a potential soldier, or a potential weapons-maker; every woman is a potential spy, a potential factory-worker, and a producer of new soldiers; and every child is a soldier-to-be. They all support their government. They all pay taxes that make the war effort possible. They all do the work that keeps the enemy's military infrastructure running. And every single one of them is a valid target.
Hence: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the countless other civilian massacres during WW2. Even the American civil war was ultimately won largely because once the Union adopted the Scorched Earth doctrine -- hardly a "just" way to wage to war.
I've said it before, and I'll no doubt have to say it many more times, but here it is: if the matter isn't serious enough to warrant a million civilian casualties on both sides, it's not worth waging war over. Because that what it takes to win in most cases. Only that level of annihilation can truly humble a people, and prove to them that they are the losers, and that if they don't surrender completely and totally, they'll be exterminated to the last man.
Actually, the papacy has consistently supported evolution and modern cosmology. They even brought Stephen Hawking in at one point as a consultant to help update and revise their offical stance on the physical nature of the universe.
It's funny that you mention Canada -- Canada has faced even less warfare than the United States. Canada didn't play much of a role in the pacific theatre in World War 2, avoided Vietnam and Iraq-II altogether, avoided the bloodshed of revolution or civil war, and has never deposed a democratic government in order to set up a military dictatorship in a South America OR the middle east. Canada even managed to not give money and weapons to the Taliban during the cold war, unlike the US. Canada is even more united the USA despite the fact that the last province joined just sixty years ago; competition within Canada is practically meaningless, and the population is just over 10% of what America's is. Yet Canadians love peace, have turned away from organized religion in great numbers, love capitalism and socialism and have generally avoided the fallacious notion that they are contradictory notions, etc. Decimation by warfare is NOT a requirement for a people to be reasonable.
Next you could consider Australia, which has probably faced even less warfare than Canada, has an even smaller population, has been a nation for even less time, and yet even they don't seem particularly inclined to invade Iraq or arrange coup d'etats in Iran or El Salvador. They didn't even give money or weapons to Saddam Hussain.
Then you could contrast them both with Japan, China, India, Europe, or Russia; various levels of warfare, competition, etc. But never in any of them do you never see quite that same level of irrationality, paranoia, delusion, and baseless pride that you see in Americans. You pretty much have to look to theocracies and despotisms to see anything that even compares, let alone outdoes it. And as has been pointed out, that's exactly what Americans seem to do when they need reassurance that America hasn't reached rock-bottom.
1.) Where, exactly, did I suggest that Europeans are good world citizens? I wouldn't even say that my own country (Canada) is a particularly good world citizen. We support WTO policies that impoverish third world nations. We are taking a very active role in mismanaging the war in Afghanistan, and our soldiers have an unusually high rate of killing civilians even by the standards of that conflict (although nowhere close to what goes in Iraq). We don't intervene when genocide is going on. We allow our own citizens to go homeless, in many cases because of factors that are beyond their control but are well within the capacity of society to solve -- like certain easily-treated psychiatric disorders, or simply being too disabled to work in a part of the country where even shared housing is too expensive to afford on a social-assistance cheque that hasn't seen a cost-of-living increase since the 80s. Our leaders almost never speak out against destructive American policies, despite being quite possibly the nation with the most capacity to influence America (enablers get no forgiveness).
2.) Why would I judge the behaviour and NOT judge the people that CHOOSE to engage in that behaviour? Behaviours is just a set of actions -- they have no moral value on their own. It's the PERSON who makes the choices that is good or evil, stupid or insightful, superstitious or rational Judging actions makes no sense. When someone molests a child, we don't put their behaviour in jail, we put THEM in jail. When Rush Limbaugh says that drug addicts should be given life sentences in jail, do you mock his hypocrisy or do you mock the fat blubbering crybaby himself? When people invade a sovereign nation, destroy its infrastructure, slaughter its people, and allow civil war to wage unchecked, you don't hang the strategy book for its warcrimes, you hang the people that made the decisions -- and if you get the chance, you hang the people that supported them.
3.) You still haven't suggested any way in which my contempt for Americans, even with millions of other people thinking the same way, can have any harmful affect on the world. In fact, you haven't even suggested a way that it can affect the US in any way. You haven't even suggested any reason why anyone would have even the slightest respect for America as a nation in any way. Europeans at least pay lip service to peace, freedom, and equality. England was the only one of the "coalition of the willing" nations to actually deliver more than a busload troops to Iraq, and even then it was against the wishes of nearly the entire population. Since world war 2, Europe has built up its infrastructure and invested in its people, while America has lets its cities collapse into huge ghettos and a few closed communities for the wealthy minority. Most Americans are at the point of considering "liberal" to be a slanderous and derogatory term, and think that the fear of change is a virtue. There is no way to put a positive spin on that kind of insanity.
Unfortunately, it's that small minority that run the country, and which present America's outward appearance to the world and inward appearance to itself.
The average American is almost indistinguishable from the average Canadian, and is only distinguishable from the average Australian or Brit because of the accent. But ask someone what Americans are like -- and you cna even ask an American this -- and they'll describe someone that is a bizarre and insane cross between Pat Roberston, Rambo, Richard Nixon, Eddy Veder, and... I'm trying to think of an ultraliberal flake, but unfortunately I don't know any by name (which is probably for the best, actually).
It's the same in most nations, of course. The average Afghani or Iranian just wants to live his life, look after his family, and not get shot. Many of the Nazis were the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and just wanted to make their country strong and whole. But shit always floats to the top... and the Taliban, the Reich, and the Union all seem to have forgotten to flush.
What on Earth does being advanced NOW have to do with wars that took place over half a century ago? Like it or not, Americans ARE falling behind in science, and they ARE falling behind in technology. And it has NOTHING to do with the Roman Empire, other than maybe in the sense that the Roman Empire collapsed and left its members states in the dark ages.
I'm suggesting that anyone who doesn't live in an Islamic Theocracy or a third world country is already superior to most Americans. Besides, did I claim that my home is the BEST nation on Earth, the home of the brave, the land of the free, or any other blatantly false pseudopatriotic drivel? Americans make precisely those claims with NOTHING to back them up... anymore. Back in the 50s people might not have laughed at that bullshit, but now it serves as nothing more than a mockery of what America used to be. And then American go and vote for an illiterate religious fanatic who repeatedly claims to speak the word of God... something that usually only Muslims are stupid enough to do. They allow their government to spend tax money on "faith-based initiatives". Yeah, THAT'LL balance the budgets. PRAYING. Prayer can't even cure the common cold, and yet Americans vote for a guy that thinks that prayer will keep the economy from crumbling further. They hand over their money to evangelists to secretly spend on male hookers and crystal meth. They send their children to camps that will supposedly stop them from being gay. They make their daughters sign "abstinence pledges" that statistically decrease the age at which those children will begin having sex. They buy SUVs in order to feel safer while driving, even though SUVs are more dangerous for the driver, and then have the GALL to whine about the price of gas; and they ignore the fact that those SUVS are extraordinarily dangerous to other people, particularly low-to-the-ground people like children (to be fair, my home country has been infested by SUVs too, although I've yet to catch anyone who drives one being crass enough to even mention gas prices).
The bottom line is that all this US-hating isn't doing any good either, but I guess you figure if you hate the US, you're doing good for the world. Nevertheless, you are part of the reason we're on a roller-coaster that likely ends in WW3.
That is possibly the most ridiculous suggestion that I've ever seen on Slashdot. My contempt for Americans (and other assorted religious fanatics, anti-intellectuals, warmongers, and basically anyone who use words that refer to liking freedom in the pejorative) is going to bring about WW3? I'd say that wars are more likely to be caused by people that are so blinded by naive patriotism that they regard any criticism of their country as a stepping stone to the apocalypse.
Besides, you're doing exactly what I pointed out in my original post. You've noted that there is at least one country on the whole planet that is worse than America in some particular way, and somehow conclude that America is the greatest nation on Earth, rather than the more reasonable conclusion that America is simply not the worst. I don't know about you, but when I was in school, knowing that there were a few kids in the class who got worse marks than I did was NOT enough to make me feel good about my grades. Being in the top five? Sure, that felt great. Being smarter than the boy who eats paste? Not so much. Only losers take pride in outdoing the kid who eats paste. But if that works for you, why not go down to the bad part of town and take pride in the fact that you're not a homeless drug addict, or in jail getting rammed? I mean, you're not the WORST citizen in the entire union, right? That must make you the best.
So you're trying to compare the efficiency of fluorescent bulbs versus incandescent to... what? The idea here is mostly to power things that are running on batteries now. Anytime that you can replace batteries with grid power, even at low efficiencies, you're already ahead. And of course, all the devices that are simply impractical if they have to be plugged in or loaded up with bulky batteries.
Besides, no one ever said that environmentalism and conservation meant that you have to live a shitty life without any conveniences. Actually, some people do say that, but that's because they're ignorant white trash that fear change (ie: conservatives). Conservation is about make the best use of resources, not living in a cave and trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist. One of the big reasons that it's so important to look for ways to save power is so that there will be power there for new uses like this. Save a few watts by replacing your incandescents and you'll have that much more power available when you want to run an mp3 player the size of a matchbook that drives wireless earbud headphones... or a headphone implant that lives in your skull. But if you've squandered all of the world's energy resources in order to power your conventional SUV just so that you wont have to face the indignity of buying an electric one that's cheaper, more reliable, and more powerful... well, then you deserve what you'll get, which will be to have to walk to the commuter trainstation (once you can no longer afford to power a personal vehicle at all) and wait with no mp3 player implant in your skull, for a ride to a shitty job that is barely worth doing because there are no natural resources left to drive the economy and so everyone has to work in the service industry for the two dozen or so people that own all the land and are masters of a new feudal system.
Is it really relevant? I'm not from an Islamic theocracy, and I'm not from a third world country.
I'm from a country where most people are more worried about dying of cancer than they are of terrorism... because they're not stupid enough to have failed to notice that cancer kills 10,000 times as many people as terrorism does. Even war kills 100x times as many people as terrorism, which is why my people have worked diligently to avoid war whenever possible. And questioning evolution is considered to be such a laughably stupid thing to do that I've only met one person in my entire life with the audacity to do so... and even he seemed rather embarassed about it, as if he knew how ridiculous he sounded. Our government does very little spying on its people. We aren't running a 3 trillion dollar deficit; in fact, our government has been CUTTING taxes and INCREASING spending ever year to make up for regular budget surpluses... mostly thanks to the fact that we don't elect people that we know will deliberately mismanage the economy for personal gain.
So yes, I look down my nose at Americans. Sure, at one time they were world leaders. They produced some great thinkers, and some great ideas came out of the US. Americans even stood up for freedom a couple of times. Then around 1960 or 1970, as the baby-boomers came into their own, Americans turned into lazy, spoiled, stupid, irrational, cowards. They no longer add anything of value to the world. America has to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, just to get any work done at all -- particularly in scientific and technical fields. I mean, come on. Where is even the tiniest hint of greatness in modern America? The freedom is gone, the courage is gone, the innovation is gone, and even the democracy is pretty tarnished when Americans can't even go a single election without levels of fraud that make the worst Banana republics look like utopian.
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That's exactly the problem with the bible. If you don't take it literally, then it becomes meaningless, and you can simply ascribe ANY set of morals and ethics to christianity. There are enough contradictions and disparities in the bible to support both sides of almost any issue. And if people are just using their own ideas about what morality to determine how they interpret the bible, why bother with the bible at all? People in our society now accept homosexuals, so we focus on the "love thy neighbour" stuff and not on the stuff about stoning women who lie with each other. Many people are uncomfortable with pornography, so everyone ignores the fact that an entire chapter of sex stories was deemed important enough to put into the bible. The bible even says that to add or remove from the bible is an unforgivable sin; yet how many "Children's Bibles" include the violent massacres of Numbers or sexuality of The Song of Solomon?
The reverse is even worse of course. If you want to know what happens to someone who actually reads the bible and takes every single word to heart, just look at the Westboro Baptist Church. Other Christians hate those people even more than homosexuals do, because deep down they know that they can't argue with them. Those psychos know the bible backwards and forwards. They know every word, and they believe it all. Their behaviour is the direct result of that.
There is no way around it -- Christianity itself is fundamentally stupid. It's either meaningless and little more than a weak way to justify one's beliefs, or it's a source of hatred, bigotry, and violence.
This poor risk analysis by Americans at the heart of why Americans are so destructive and horrible. The rest of us look at the world, identify real threats, and try to resolve them. The flu is one of the biggest killers in any society. So we give seniors and children free flu shots. Car accidents are right up there, so we pass seatbelt laws and have strict driver's license requirements (which will actually become meaningful once all the seniors who got their licenses back in the 50s finally die). And the thing is, once we've done that, we don't need to worry. We're actually safe, or relatively so.
Americans identify minor risks that can't be prevented. Then they waste their time and money trying to prevent them. Naturally they fail, and remain afraid. Then they need to stock their house with guns, form militias, vote for a Republican police-state, go to war, etc, all because they need some way to address their imaginary threats. I mean, that's half the problem right there. The rest of the problem is that the government (particularly Republican governments) go to extraordinary lengths to increase those fears. "Threat Level"? "We don't know what the terrorists are doin', but they're doin' something!" It's called fearmongering, and most nations would try to recall any government official that engaged in it. Americans just assume that their leaders are telling the truth ... which is so stupid that it staggers the imagination. I mean, they're politicians -- anyone who trusts a politician is doomed.
Typical American misconceptions. Europeans don't want GM foods banned, they want them LABELLED. So that they can make free, informed choices. They want to KNOW what they are buying, rather than simply getting mysterious chunks of edible material that could healthy, or could be a mixture of mercury-laden corn protien and mad-cow bone-grindings. Only an American could be so psychotically evil and stupid as to think that knowing what you are buying is a bad thing.
As for labour economi
Everyone respects the Americans of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the half of twentieth century. Nowadays though, you'd have trouble finding enough honesty, compassion, integrity, intelligence, honour, creativity, or even basic human decency in the entire nation to fill a thimble. Americans produce very little of worth (most Americans work in the service industry or in management, both fields that produce no value of any kind), and what they do produce is grossly overshadowed by the destruction that America wreaks all over the world.
When you get down to brass tacks, the US is little better than places like Iran and Syria -- full of irrational, violent, stupid, cowardly, close-minded religious zealots. And the handful of good people that America has left are despised by the rest for being "liberal elitists" (no matter how humble or conservative they might actually be).
Incidentally, the French TOLD America that they should stay out of Vietnam, that there was no way they could win without millions of troops and a willingness to massacre a large fraction of the population. You see, the French LEARN from their mistakes. The vietnam war proved that America can't learn from other peoples' mistakes, and the Iraq war (and Bush's re-election) demonstrate that Americans can't even learn from their own mistakes.
Besides, we're talking about America's behaviour RIGHT NOW. Europe, right now, is NOT holding people without trial and torturing them into giving false confessions. They're NOT planning to deliberately disrupt two of their most important trading links and potentially cause a recession across all of North America. Other than England, they're NOT waging an unwinnable war of attrition against people with nothing to lose. And their heads of state DON'T say that God personally told them to invade other countries and kill certain people. So RIGHT NOW, Europe is looking really good, and America is looking like a nation of insipid bullies with paranoid schizophrenia.
Once you start looking at other countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and MODERN Europe, you start to see just how good things can be by contrast. Imagine paying nearly the same taxes, and getting a social support network with universal health coverage, instead of thousands flag-draped coffins that the government censors images of (so much for freedom of the press or of expression, loser) and crippled veterans who are denied any kind of disability benefits or medical support after they're discharged (so much for supporting the troops). I know which one I prefer, and it's the one with fewer crippled people rather than more.
What I personally think America needs, as an outsider, is the Libertarians. Granted, they're completely insane and their ideas are, like Marxism, based on completely inaccurate views of Human nature that have no applicability to the real world. But when the foundation of a house is bad, sometimes the only choice is to rebuild. Scrapping most of what the government's programs and gradually re-establishing the most important ones according to modern organizational and managerial principles would go a long towards making America a reasonable place to be. People could actually see the programs working, see what they do, and how they benefit society (or fail to do so, as the case may be). Maybe even try to take the separation of state and federal powers seriously this time.
But that's my whole point -- the dysfunction starts with Americans being incapable of selecting their leaders sanely. Nearly every other democratic nation does better in this regard. The exceptions are particularly quite notable since most of them subsequently ceased to be democratic, and the most prominent two later became known as the "Axis". Another one of the major gaffs in leader selection led to a formerly strong nation ending up a backwards third-world nation rules by Clerics who are still patting themselves on the back for successfully ridding their land of educated women and people that think freedom is something other than a sin against Allah.
Hey, I'd love it if America could clean up it's act. I just accept that it's impossible. It takes a disaster of truly epic proportions to change people. It takes firebombings of their cities, it takes holocaust, it takes the complete collapse of society. America's military is pretty scary NOW, but when the money's all gone? Not so much. The American government doesn't have the fiscal sense to run a popsicle stand without a trillion dollar budget. With a weakened economy, they'll be lucky if they can successfully operate a fleet of inflatable rafts to defend the coastline. And the nukes are irrelevant, since nothing has changed the politics of mutual annihilation. Americans still wont want to be exterminated like ants by a Russian or Chinese nuclear bombardment.
US invades Iraq : Iran gives weapons to Iraqi resistors.
USSR invades Afghanistan : America gives weapons to Afghani resitors.
These scenarios are exactly the same. The use gave weapons to the TALIBAN. The Taliban did and still do kill Afghani civilians... not to mention arming and helping out Al'Quaeda.
Sorry man, but the US is JUST LIKE IRAN on this one. America supported terrorism -- and more specifically, Americans PAID for terrorism through their taxes. And America IS the unprovoked aggressor is the Iraq conflict, and Iran is the one giving weapons to militants to use "against an invading military force". They DO attack American soldiers, and the pupppet government's soldiers. The genocide and murder of civilians pales in comparison to the stuff that the Taliban did. Deal with it. It's precisely this kind of naive stupidity that makes people hate Americans. You don't acknowledge simple truths about what your country has done, and that's why you keep getting stuck with this bullshit. That's why America will just do this again and again, arming terrorists one decade and then fighting them the next. And you'll be stuck paying for it, and you'll have to watch as those terrorists try to attack your country. You'll have to watch as they very effectively turn entire nations of muslims (or whoever else you manage to alienate) against the West. And you'll have to face the fact that you CHOOSE this path, deliberately.
But to answer your point, the US actually is remarkably lockstep. Individuals may differ, but individuals are not society. In American society as a whole, you'll be shouted down if you suggest that, say, American soldiers who die in Iraq deserve what they get for agreeing to fight in a war that they KNEW was being started based on lies (frankly, they deserve it for having voted for the Brownshirts in the first place). You'll be shouted down if you observe that the American did every single thing in its power to provoke an attack like 9/11, and is still completely unrepentent about its role in making the middle east a horrible place to live. You'll be shouted down if you suggest that maybe, just maybe, voting for a third party is okay, since there's no functional difference between the two principal parties (thanks to the GOP of course, this is no longer true; I'm surprised that more Republicans haven't started trying to take down the GOP for derailing the more legitimate politics of the republican party). American society, thanks to homogenous capitalist media sources and a completely out-of-control political system that fosters and rewards corruption at every turn, is completely in of the hands of the very worst idiots that the American genepool has to offer -- not to mention the most greedy and evil people, the most power hungry, and so on.
Deep down, you know that people who "fearfully from cheeseburger to church to the couch to watch Fox News" are the vast majority. After all, if you shaved a chimpanzee and gave it the capacity to ignore reality in favour of delusional beliefs, that's what it would be doing, right? And most people are no better than paranoid, delusional, shaved chimpanzees. Luckily, most people live somewhere that has folks who know how to take care of chimpanzees and keep them relatively calm and safe. Those shaved chimpanzees have the sense to allow whichever of the keepers does the best job to be the one that they allow to manage them. America is the place where the shaved chimpanzees killed the keepers and started letting the chimp with the loudest howl to lead. And predictable, most Americans behave -- both individually and en-masse -- precisely the way you would expect 300 million paranoid shaved schizoid chimpanzees to behave.
My country was actually founded by people willing to slaughter cute fluffy animals and sell their skins to rich suckers. To this day, our economy and indeed, most of our society, is based on selling stuff to idiots (mostly Americans now rather than Europeans). Somehow, that works out to being a very pacifist and liberal society that simultaneously embraces capitalism and socialism, balancing them (not always skillfully) as the needs of the moment demand. But I can certainly see how being founded by the puritans, or indeed any group of violent and murderous religious extremists, could have negative reprecussions. It's like if Al'Quaeda got to form their own country and run it however they liked.
In order to be racist against Americans ... well, let's just say that it would be more work than even the most bigoted asshole could handle. The sheer number of races and mixed races required would be staggering. That would be a level of hatred so extreme that the racist in question would probably collapse into a singularity of bitterness and selfishness so dense that hate speech can not escape its surface.
Interestingly, getting pissy about generalizations is an almost uniquely American quality. In most other cultures, people understand that generalizations have exceptions, and that those exceptions don't detract from the quality of the generalization. I can say that Humans have livers in their chests, without hassled about the very small number of people that don't. I can say that Humans prefer to not be murdered, and that's a perfectly okay analogy despite the very small number of people that want to be killed by someone else. I can say that Americans live in America, without any bitching about a few expats residing here and there. And I can generalize about Americans being dull, irrational, stupid, cowards, without having to get guff about the handful Mark Twains, Truman Capotes, Brian Warners, and other exceptional people. The whole point, in fact, is that those people are exceptional -- they're not normal, and they don't represent their society at all.
So what attitude exactly was it that Europeans tried? World War 2 was caused by the fact that Germany was imposed with crippling war reparations after World War 1, and suffered under terms of surrender that were destroying their entire society. That's why the US had the sense to help rebuild Germany and the rest of Europe after WW2 (that, and the fact that it served as a form of workfare to keep Americans employed, since Marshall plan dollars had to be spent on American goods).
have never caused anything more serious than a civil protest or a rally. War is about economics -- period. There are no exceptions. Religion, race, nationalism, and all those things are nothing more than ways to trick people into supporting the war. And people will always be stupid enough to be tricked into suppporting a war by some means. The world wars were caused by economic conditions in Europe (Germany's lack of natural resources / Germany's crippling war reparations), just like the Iraq war is being caused by economic conditions in America (specifically, Halliburton's need for money, and Bush and Cheney's need for kickbacks and benefits from Halliburton).You just don't get it -- you think the war in Iraq was caused by Americans hating Iraq or something. That's ludicrous. It's caused by the fact that Americans are a) stupid, b) gullible, and c) religious zealots. So when people like the GOP want to raid the public coffers (in the form of no-bid contracts for reconstruction projects in Iraq), they can always trick the people into supporting them -- particularly by playing to their religion. Even for the most reasonable people, religion creates a chink in their mental armor through which stupidity and irrationality can enter.
It's odd how, despite the fact that I CLEARLY condemn Iran and other Islamic Theocracies, you seem convinced that I think they're great. I hate America for the same reason that I hate Iran. So Iran gives explosives to terrorists in Iraq -- that's bad, right? Of course. But somehow you can defend America giving explosive to terrorists in Afghanistan so that they can fight the USSR? Or giving weapons to Iraq so that they can invade Iran? Or supporting genocidal regimes in South America? America and Iran DESERVE a war with each other. They have the same religious fundamentalism, the same tendency to encourage and support terrorism, the same pointless belligerence. Seriously, I hope you're looking forward to that war as much as I am, since you're going to be footing the bill. Plus, you'll probably get to pay to have Iran rebuilt, although Halliburton will keep most of the money and do very little actual reconstruction (funny how Iraq doesn't seem to have any of that awesome reconstruction going on, despite billions of dollars in public spending...).
Pat Robertson is a personal advisor to the current administration. That's ALMOST as bad as the Reagans consulting with astrologers ... almost.
- "Don't use the word 'gay' unless it's an acronym for 'Got Aids Yet'". -- Bob Dornan (Rep. R-CA).
- "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." -- George Walker Bush (President).
- "We don't have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand." -- James Watt (Secretary of the Interior).
- "The New York Times and Washington Post are both infested with homosexuals themselves. Just about every person down there is a homosexual or lesbian."
... "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction." ... "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade-school classes that teach our children that cannibalism, wife-swapping and murder of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior." ... "Homosexuals are weak, morally sick wretches." -- Jesse Helms (Sen. R-NC).
- "Civilized people - Muslims, Christians, and Jews - all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator." -- John Ashcroft (Attorney General).
- "I'm an old-fashioned woman. Men should take care of women, and if men were taking care of women today, we wouldn't have to vote." -- Kay O'Connor (Kansas Senate Republican).
- "George Bush was not elected by a majority of the voters in the United States, he was appointed by God." -- Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin.
- "For the first time ever, everything is in place for the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ." -- Ronald Reagan (President of the United States).
Americans VOTED for these people and for their political parties (except for William G. Boykin, he's in the military, which is even scarier). The kinds of claims I make are NOT exaggerated, not one bit. Americans are happily following evil, terrifying people, and giving the power of life and death over everyone on Earth.The whole concept of "just warfare" exists solely to dupe the public into supporting a neverending series of stupid, indecisive, wasteful wars; ultimately it's a way for a group of politicians to take YOUR tax money and hand it over to the industrialists that supported those politicians' campaigns.
Ultimately, that's how you can tell whether a wrong is a mistake or not. If a war is truly necessary -- if that nation's interests are truly on the line -- then there is no such thing as a noncombatant. Every single man is a potential soldier, or a potential weapons-maker; every woman is a potential spy, a potential factory-worker, and a producer of new soldiers; and every child is a soldier-to-be. They all support their government. They all pay taxes that make the war effort possible. They all do the work that keeps the enemy's military infrastructure running. And every single one of them is a valid target.
Hence: Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the countless other civilian massacres during WW2. Even the American civil war was ultimately won largely because once the Union adopted the Scorched Earth doctrine -- hardly a "just" way to wage to war.
I've said it before, and I'll no doubt have to say it many more times, but here it is: if the matter isn't serious enough to warrant a million civilian casualties on both sides, it's not worth waging war over. Because that what it takes to win in most cases. Only that level of annihilation can truly humble a people, and prove to them that they are the losers, and that if they don't surrender completely and totally, they'll be exterminated to the last man.
It's funny that you mention Canada -- Canada has faced even less warfare than the United States. Canada didn't play much of a role in the pacific theatre in World War 2, avoided Vietnam and Iraq-II altogether, avoided the bloodshed of revolution or civil war, and has never deposed a democratic government in order to set up a military dictatorship in a South America OR the middle east. Canada even managed to not give money and weapons to the Taliban during the cold war, unlike the US. Canada is even more united the USA despite the fact that the last province joined just sixty years ago; competition within Canada is practically meaningless, and the population is just over 10% of what America's is. Yet Canadians love peace, have turned away from organized religion in great numbers, love capitalism and socialism and have generally avoided the fallacious notion that they are contradictory notions, etc. Decimation by warfare is NOT a requirement for a people to be reasonable.
Next you could consider Australia, which has probably faced even less warfare than Canada, has an even smaller population, has been a nation for even less time, and yet even they don't seem particularly inclined to invade Iraq or arrange coup d'etats in Iran or El Salvador. They didn't even give money or weapons to Saddam Hussain.
Then you could contrast them both with Japan, China, India, Europe, or Russia; various levels of warfare, competition, etc. But never in any of them do you never see quite that same level of irrationality, paranoia, delusion, and baseless pride that you see in Americans. You pretty much have to look to theocracies and despotisms to see anything that even compares, let alone outdoes it. And as has been pointed out, that's exactly what Americans seem to do when they need reassurance that America hasn't reached rock-bottom.
2.) Why would I judge the behaviour and NOT judge the people that CHOOSE to engage in that behaviour? Behaviours is just a set of actions -- they have no moral value on their own. It's the PERSON who makes the choices that is good or evil, stupid or insightful, superstitious or rational Judging actions makes no sense. When someone molests a child, we don't put their behaviour in jail, we put THEM in jail. When Rush Limbaugh says that drug addicts should be given life sentences in jail, do you mock his hypocrisy or do you mock the fat blubbering crybaby himself? When people invade a sovereign nation, destroy its infrastructure, slaughter its people, and allow civil war to wage unchecked, you don't hang the strategy book for its warcrimes, you hang the people that made the decisions -- and if you get the chance, you hang the people that supported them.
3.) You still haven't suggested any way in which my contempt for Americans, even with millions of other people thinking the same way, can have any harmful affect on the world. In fact, you haven't even suggested a way that it can affect the US in any way. You haven't even suggested any reason why anyone would have even the slightest respect for America as a nation in any way. Europeans at least pay lip service to peace, freedom, and equality. England was the only one of the "coalition of the willing" nations to actually deliver more than a busload troops to Iraq, and even then it was against the wishes of nearly the entire population. Since world war 2, Europe has built up its infrastructure and invested in its people, while America has lets its cities collapse into huge ghettos and a few closed communities for the wealthy minority. Most Americans are at the point of considering "liberal" to be a slanderous and derogatory term, and think that the fear of change is a virtue. There is no way to put a positive spin on that kind of insanity.
The average American is almost indistinguishable from the average Canadian, and is only distinguishable from the average Australian or Brit because of the accent. But ask someone what Americans are like -- and you cna even ask an American this -- and they'll describe someone that is a bizarre and insane cross between Pat Roberston, Rambo, Richard Nixon, Eddy Veder, and ... I'm trying to think of an ultraliberal flake, but unfortunately I don't know any by name (which is probably for the best, actually).
It's the same in most nations, of course. The average Afghani or Iranian just wants to live his life, look after his family, and not get shot. Many of the Nazis were the nicest people you could ever hope to meet, and just wanted to make their country strong and whole. But shit always floats to the top... and the Taliban, the Reich, and the Union all seem to have forgotten to flush.
What on Earth does being advanced NOW have to do with wars that took place over half a century ago? Like it or not, Americans ARE falling behind in science, and they ARE falling behind in technology. And it has NOTHING to do with the Roman Empire, other than maybe in the sense that the Roman Empire collapsed and left its members states in the dark ages.
I'm suggesting that anyone who doesn't live in an Islamic Theocracy or a third world country is already superior to most Americans. Besides, did I claim that my home is the BEST nation on Earth, the home of the brave, the land of the free, or any other blatantly false pseudopatriotic drivel? Americans make precisely those claims with NOTHING to back them up ... anymore. Back in the 50s people might not have laughed at that bullshit, but now it serves as nothing more than a mockery of what America used to be. And then American go and vote for an illiterate religious fanatic who repeatedly claims to speak the word of God ... something that usually only Muslims are stupid enough to do. They allow their government to spend tax money on "faith-based initiatives". Yeah, THAT'LL balance the budgets. PRAYING. Prayer can't even cure the common cold, and yet Americans vote for a guy that thinks that prayer will keep the economy from crumbling further. They hand over their money to evangelists to secretly spend on male hookers and crystal meth. They send their children to camps that will supposedly stop them from being gay. They make their daughters sign "abstinence pledges" that statistically decrease the age at which those children will begin having sex. They buy SUVs in order to feel safer while driving, even though SUVs are more dangerous for the driver, and then have the GALL to whine about the price of gas; and they ignore the fact that those SUVS are extraordinarily dangerous to other people, particularly low-to-the-ground people like children (to be fair, my home country has been infested by SUVs too, although I've yet to catch anyone who drives one being crass enough to even mention gas prices).
Besides, you're doing exactly what I pointed out in my original post. You've noted that there is at least one country on the whole planet that is worse than America in some particular way, and somehow conclude that America is the greatest nation on Earth, rather than the more reasonable conclusion that America is simply not the worst. I don't know about you, but when I was in school, knowing that there were a few kids in the class who got worse marks than I did was NOT enough to make me feel good about my grades. Being in the top five? Sure, that felt great. Being smarter than the boy who eats paste? Not so much. Only losers take pride in outdoing the kid who eats paste. But if that works for you, why not go down to the bad part of town and take pride in the fact that you're not a homeless drug addict, or in jail getting rammed? I mean, you're not the WORST citizen in the entire union, right? That must make you the best.
Besides, no one ever said that environmentalism and conservation meant that you have to live a shitty life without any conveniences. Actually, some people do say that, but that's because they're ignorant white trash that fear change (ie: conservatives). Conservation is about make the best use of resources, not living in a cave and trying to pretend that technology doesn't exist. One of the big reasons that it's so important to look for ways to save power is so that there will be power there for new uses like this. Save a few watts by replacing your incandescents and you'll have that much more power available when you want to run an mp3 player the size of a matchbook that drives wireless earbud headphones... or a headphone implant that lives in your skull. But if you've squandered all of the world's energy resources in order to power your conventional SUV just so that you wont have to face the indignity of buying an electric one that's cheaper, more reliable, and more powerful ... well, then you deserve what you'll get, which will be to have to walk to the commuter trainstation (once you can no longer afford to power a personal vehicle at all) and wait with no mp3 player implant in your skull, for a ride to a shitty job that is barely worth doing because there are no natural resources left to drive the economy and so everyone has to work in the service industry for the two dozen or so people that own all the land and are masters of a new feudal system.
I'm from a country where most people are more worried about dying of cancer than they are of terrorism ... because they're not stupid enough to have failed to notice that cancer kills 10,000 times as many people as terrorism does. Even war kills 100x times as many people as terrorism, which is why my people have worked diligently to avoid war whenever possible. And questioning evolution is considered to be such a laughably stupid thing to do that I've only met one person in my entire life with the audacity to do so... and even he seemed rather embarassed about it, as if he knew how ridiculous he sounded. Our government does very little spying on its people. We aren't running a 3 trillion dollar deficit; in fact, our government has been CUTTING taxes and INCREASING spending ever year to make up for regular budget surpluses ... mostly thanks to the fact that we don't elect people that we know will deliberately mismanage the economy for personal gain.
So yes, I look down my nose at Americans. Sure, at one time they were world leaders. They produced some great thinkers, and some great ideas came out of the US. Americans even stood up for freedom a couple of times. Then around 1960 or 1970, as the baby-boomers came into their own, Americans turned into lazy, spoiled, stupid, irrational, cowards. They no longer add anything of value to the world. America has to bring in hundreds of thousands of immigrants, just to get any work done at all -- particularly in scientific and technical fields. I mean, come on. Where is even the tiniest hint of greatness in modern America? The freedom is gone, the courage is gone, the innovation is gone, and even the democracy is pretty tarnished when Americans can't even go a single election without levels of fraud that make the worst Banana republics look like utopian.