One of these men is viewed as a political genius, his name synonymous with ruthless but pragmatic use of power. The other was the first Roman emperor to be assassinated. I’ll leave it to the reader to judge the relative merit of their views.
Oops. Should be Nicolo, not Nicoli.
Well, since one definition of Machiavellian is:
" being or acting in accordance with the principles of government analyzed in Machiavelli’s The Prince, in which political expediency is placed above morality and the use of craft and deceit to maintain the authority and carry out the policies of a ruler is described. "
(http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0524702.html)
I’ll choose the first.
As was so eloquently put elsewhere, the rest of the world will be firmly by our side the next time they need us.
I do think it’s an important issue, and I did vote against the dunderheads. They weren’t elected by me. I have stopped saying that Bush wasn’t elected at all, even though it was fun to watch the Bushies go apoplectic when I reminded them. 
My sig line is contained in a promo for the new liberal talk radio network, Air America Radio. As you can see above, it’s a much older gag. Anyway, it doesn’t refer to this thread.
Run for the hills, the French are coming!!! :rolleyes:
Think they could get past the beach before they drop their rifles?
I have to agree with ivylass, especially the last part. Jealousy is a very powerful emotion. On a different board this question came up recently and one of the posters asked “Why are the Yankees the most hated team in baseball?” to make this point. No one ever invested in a Broadway show called “Damn Orioles.”
I also agree with the posters who point out that the number of people who want to emigrate here is high and that is an important statistic. In fact, IIRC, one of the Iraqis who was interviewed after being mistreated and/or tortured in prison said that he wants to emigrate here. Can’t just discount things like that.
As for terrorist attacks, if they were caused by dislike Americans would have been linely up to set off bombs in Paris years ago.
As for the Jihadis, they’re never going to like us, unless we convert. So I’m happy if they fear us.
I am guessing that the people that don’t care about what people in other countries think are the same people that have never travelled outside of America.
They would prefer to remain clueless in their own little cocoon of ignorance.
The world is so much more than just Wal-Mart and McDonalds, but far too many would rather sit on their increasingly fatter ass, than get of America, and learn more about what is going on in the world.
What would you guys prefer? That if and when another 9/11 happens, that people in other countries care about what happens to us, and offer to help us ? Or would you prefer that their attitude be one of " to hell with them, they got what they deserved" ?
America is not a self-sufficient little island, it does NEED other countries in order to survive.
I find quite remarkable the degree to which you completely missed the point of my post.
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You’re choosing the greater evil. Caligula was one of the most despicable political leaders in all of history, and his utter disregard for the extent to which he was hated played no small part in his early demise.
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Machiavelli is saying that it is not politically expedient to allow oneself to be hated. Feared is good, better than being loved, even, but hated is bad. People love to quote the first part (better to be feared than loved), but rarely pay any attention to the second part. Get that? Not only is provoking people to hatred unlikely to be moral, it’s not even politically expedient.
Y’all are free to smugly pat yourselves on the back, think yourself indispensable to the world, or the objects of envy and jealousy everywhere. You will in all likelihood get away with it to a large extent. It’s just not the smart thing to do, is all, even if you don’t think that you have any moral obligations to avoid starting pointless wars or what have you.
Plan B wrote: " I also agree with the posters who point out that the number of people who want to emigrate here is high and that is an important statistic. "
The number one reason, and many times the only reason people want to emigrate to America is for money. Millions of people in this world earn only 1 or 2 dollars A DAY . They are not desiring to go to America because they think the people or the country is so great, they only want to go for the money.
An example would be the millions of Mexicans in America. Most of them do not learn English , or try to integrate into American society. They are proud to be Mexicans, they only go to America for the money. Most of the emigrants do not think you are such a swell person, they are only after the opportunity for money.
Well, as I would expect you guessed wrong. I’ve been to Europe and had enjoyed it immensely. I’ll probably be going again, but I won’t set foot in France, Germany or Spain.
Having traveled extensively in and out of the U.S. I have come to think less that the world is a “them and us” situation and more that it is a neighborhood thing.
Do I live my life according to my neighbors’ wishes. Of course not. But I do respect them and listen to them if they want to visit with me about a situation that involves the neighborhood. I don’t flip them off while driving by and play my stereo so loud that their windows rattle. If I did that I wouldn’t be much liked in my neighborhood. Of course I do know people who do that sort of thing. And I don’t much like them. I wouldn’t be surprised if those individuals also think that it is jealousy on my part that makes me dislikde them, but as much as they would like to think that, it really isn’t.
TV
Moving this to Great Debates.
Great analogy TV Time, thanks 
We know! I’d say that more than 99% of the hundreds of Americans I’ve known have been lovely people: usually way more accommodating than English people like me, and possibly even more friendly than the Irish. The jerky Americans I’ve met have borne certain characteristics that are stereotypically American, but that doesn’t make them any more jerkish than, say, British jerks, who have their own stereotypically jerkish characteristics (in the case of my fellow countrymen, this would be boorish, drunken, disrespectful, racist).
Forgive me for saying, but that’s a sad attitude. If one were to avoid countries purely because one disagreed with their foreign policy, one would never go anywhere! If I were to have taken that position, I’d have never been to China, Russia, India, France, Vietnam, nor the US. It would have been a terrible shame to have missed out on those experiences.
To those who continue to say it’s jealousy: sorry, but you really don’t get it. It isn’t. It’s foreign and corporate policy, plus the actions of a tiny number of jerkoid fellow-citizens.
The trouble with the “better to be feared than loved” argument is that the people who need to fear the US actually don’t:-
'We also believe that our battle against America is much simpler than the war against the Soviet Union, because some of our Mujahideen who fought here in Afghanistan also participated in operations against the Americans in Somalia - and they were surprised at the collapse of American morale. This convinced us that Americans are a paper tiger."
Osama bin Laden
And if the US pulls out of Iraq (unfortunately not unlikely now), America is going to look pretty vulnerable.
If there’s one thing worse than being seen as a bully, it’s being seen as a weak bully
It’s not “being liked” or “not being liked” that is important.
Any nation that repeatedly acts with utter contempt and disregard of it’s allies is asking to lose those allies.
To say that the world is more a complicated and dangerous place than ever before is an obvious understatement. A band of terrorists from the third world have demonstrated that they have the capacity (with a little luck) to instill a blow with the magnitude of 9/11.
Given the extremity of these times, it is not just selfish of a nation to consider only it’s own interests, but dangerously shortsighted as well.
I humbly ask my fellow Americans to give a shit about the opinions and concerns of the rest of the world, which, just for the record, outnumbers us by a factor of 21:1.
I’m turning forty next week and remember staring, shocked, at my first flag-burning on TV when I was ten.
It’s always been like this, the names of the countries just change. Yawn.
I’m not going around mad at Israelis for electing Sharon or the French for Chirac or the Russians for Putin, all guys who I wish hadn’t won their races, but I don’t get a vote and I trust that my friends know what they’re doing.
The world’s opinion is so flaky and changeable that we’d all go crazy here if we tried to take everyone into account. There’s no one world voice out there, there’s a bunch of nations yelling different things at varying volumes. We hafta tune them out to a degree, don’t we?
Actually, I’ve been to France and Germany already…
I’m envious of your visit to Russia. I’ve always had a great admiration for the Russian people if not their various governments. It boggles my mind that they could suffer such horrendous losses during the Great Patriotic War and keep fighting.
Obviously, we HAVE to care what the rest of the world thinks of us. But the rest of the world can’t and won’t get veto power over our policies.
It’s worth noting, however, that the rest of the world LOVED us on September 12th, but despised us as soon as we started taking action against the people responsible for it. (Yes, yes, I know Saddam Hussein was not behind the attacks on the World Trade Center- but European sympathy for the U.S. had vanished long before we went to war with Iraq.)
What that tells me is, we’re loved when we’re pathetic victims, and hated when we stand up for ourselves.
Attention, world: I don’t blame you for hating aspects of American culture (I hate some aspects of it, too), opr for hating some of our policies (I hate some of them, too). And if you hate individual Americans for acting like jerks when they visit your countries, I understand, and I apologize on their behalf.
But if the price of your love is for us to be doormats, the price is way too high.
This isn’t true at all. The global community strongly supported action in Afghanistan, and many countries that refused to participate in Iraq are still active in Afghanistan. Sympathy began waning with crap like Guantanamo, and only began to out and out vanish with the shift in emphasis to Iraq (which happened long before you actually went to war there, of course).