Yes–and knowing where A appears in the alphabet as compared to C can help you navigate the world we live in. Knowing where Americans appear in the world as compared to other industrialized democracies can similarly help you navigate the world we live in.
Surely it’s also up to you? Or is Dio forcing you to debate this at gunpoint?
These damn conservatives, never willing to take any personal responsibility.
Instead of a hint, could we have a cite? I would like to get into the exact percentages, because while I’m aware that these loony theories have been embraced by some folks in France, I’ve never encountered the idea that they’ve been accepted on any level that would make your implied analogy (between French who believe the US was behind 9/11, and Americans who believe evolution shouldn’t be taught in schools) hold up. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but some actual footnoted numbers would make the analogy a lot stronger.
Sorry, the ‘A is A’ reference is from a rather long speech from John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. It was in for tongue in cheek purposes only (admittedly I probably over played it in this thread…sometimes I just can’t help myself, and what I find funny other people just find odd. :)).
Knowing where American’s stand in relations to other nations is a good thing…I’m all for it. When we are talking about dialogue between two nations, building bridges between peoples, forming relationships, trying to get laid in Germany or France, etc. We aren’t talking about that here. We are talking about our own internal system…and talking about outside systems brings zero into the discussion. In THAT light only our own internal spectrum matters…not some outside political spectrum. I really don’t understand why this is so hard to grasp but its obvious that its nearly impossible for some.
LOL!
Well, I usually feel compelled to reply when someone quotes me and then asks questions. Is he holding a gun to my head? DtC would probably faint if you handed him a gun. So the answer is, of course, no. However, he (and you) keep bringing it up so (so far) I’ve replied. Eventually if we keep going round and round I’ll just move on to other threads unless something new and interesting happens in this one. I’ve pretty much made all the points I wanted too…as always you can buy them or not as you choose. For me the fun is in the debate.
Well, I did a quick google search but didn’t find the poll I was looking for. I’ve seen it cited many times on this board though, and if I have time later I’ll do a more intensive search (I’m not a really good google searcher…I tend to get board or go off on tangents if some interesting link pops up). Basically, if I’m recalling correctly, there was a poll about half a year after 9/11 (either just before or during Afghanistan…again if I’m remembering correctly) that showed that something like 51% in Europe (I think it was something like 7 or 8 countries combined) felt the US government was directly responsible for 9/11…and in Germany (again, if memory serves) it was something like 60+%.
What I was getting at here though is that Europeans have some odd beliefs themselves as anyone who has spent any time over there very well knows. Their citizens are no ‘smarter’ than the average American…and I’m not even sure they are necessarily better informed either, except about European matters. Frankly its silly to call Americans the stupidest people of any Democracy (to paraphrase)…its fairly self evident that as a nation we aren’t. This is, of course, leaving aside the fact that many Europeans (as well as other folks from all over the world) immigrate to the US every year (fancy that)…which, if nothing else, should add a few percentage points to our collective intellegence.
-XT
Hmm…me, if everyone keeps arguing with me on a point, I figure maybe I’M the one missing something. Difference in style, I guess.
Anyway, maybe it’s not that we have trouble grasping anything–maybe it’s that we ARE talking about Democrats as liberal/conservative on an international, not national, scale. The fact that you don’t want to be talking about that doesn’t mean that’s not what some of us are talking about. Note my second post in the thread, in which I say that the OP should have qualified the parameters of the discussion: had that qualification happened, and had nobody jumped on Dio calling him silly and irrelevant and so forth, then this particular teapot would have no tempest.
I was just joshin’ with you.
Really? That’s appalling! I’d never heard that. (And I’d still like to see a cite if anyone can dig one up, just for my own edification). FWIW I disagree with Dio that Americans are especially stupid; instead, I think we live in a country in which propaganda (or persuasive rhetoric, if you prefer) has been refined to a state previously unknown in history. Aristotle got nothin on Madison Avenue.
Got nothin except integrity, of course. And what that means is that we live in a society uniquely misinformed by the folks who can afford to pay the best propagandists.
Other societies didn’t need the level of propaganda that folks need here: in Hussein’s Iraq, for example, nobody gave a shit what you thought. They just cared what you said. But here, what you think matters, since you can vote the bums out of office if you look at the evidence and decide that they’re bums.
So we’ve got incredibly developed propaganda, and we’ve got a citizenry who’s really not very good at deconstructing propaganda. And that leads to a lot of misinformed citizens. Not stupid. Just misinformed by the world’s most sophisticated set of misinformers.
I’m not sure of the relevence of this in respect to either the OP or the hijack, but I’ll answer it anyway. Who’s standards are we using? Ours of course…after all, we did win the war, and we did do the heavy lifting both during the war and afterwards too. Who ELSE’S standards would we use?? Now, if Europe had decided to get fully behind the US for the invasion, then they could rightfully claim a share in shaping how things go there. However, only a few European countries participated, and have any say at all…with the UK being the biggest supporter and the one who has the most influence on the US (as little as that is) in shaping the future of Iraq.
That answer your off the wall question?
Thats odd…because America was formed basically by Europeans meddling over here, squabbling among themselves, and trying to force the hodge podge of colonists that lived here to reside firmly under their boot. In fact, European history is rife with the overthrowing of other governments, the meddling in others affairs, etc etc ad nausium. Most of the ME mess we currently have to deal with in fact came directly from those same Europeans screwing around where they shouldn’t have. Heard of a country called Vietnam? Know WHY it was like it was…or do you only know the part where the US got sucked in?
Sorry, but Europe, while perhaps not the absolute font of ALL the woes of the world, certainly gets the lions share in the hows and whys of the current screwed up mess we call a planet.
As to your assertion of them coming over to ‘free’ us from Bush…I’d say the main reason for this is A) They can’t and B) The reason they can’t is because they slaughtered themselves wholesale instead of retail this past century, destroying each others economies and slaughtering whole generations of young men (not to mention killing off millions of their own citizens)…all in frankly stupid and meaningless European wars. Something they excelled at for centuries before this…they just learned to slaughter each other a bit too well and are still recovering…if they ever fully recover at all of course. THe only good thing that can be said about such slaughter is it finally broke the strangle hold they had on many of their 3rd world ‘colonies’, broke the backs of their various ‘empires’, and freed millions from being under their collective boot heels.
Perhaps now you understand a bit better why I don’t consider Europe a utopia or the font of all goodness…because I actually studied history instead of whitewashed it. Don’t get me wrong…I like Europe. Many of my friends live there and I love going back to see many of the great sights there are to see, to meet the people and enjoy the old world…but I also see them clearly for what and who they are.
And before you do the standard “But what about America and all ITS bad things!” rant I’ll say that we haven’t exactly been saints either…but nothing we’ve done is a patch on European history from a slaughter, oppression and outright conquest perspective.
You speak as if all of Europe is at fault. Sweden, Denmark, and France have not, to the best of my knowledge, instigated very many wars lately. In fact, if you take out Germany, Austria, Italy, and Spain, Western Europe has started precious few wars in the past century.
However, I agree that Europe’s history is not exactly utopic. I still vastly prefer their politics to ours, and if I didn’t have such a strong connection to my community here, I’d move to Europe in a heartbeat. The personal conflicts with the political.
I guess it depends on what you mean by lately…and I most certainly wouldn’t include France in that list. Remember that Vietnam place? Also, they had a huge hand in that second world war thingy (not to mention the first world war thingy) that happend 60 odd years ago. In addition they had a fairly hefty overseas empire of their own, you know? Who do you suppose they aquired that from…and how?
Both Sweden and Denmark also made their mark overseas…though granted not as big of a mark as many of the other larger European powers.
I think your view of European history needs some revisions and a look at root causes for things like WWI and WWII…not to mention incessant colonial wars, wars of agression against 3rd world nations as means to secure empire, extortion of local governments, gunboat diplomacy, etc.
Look closely at this century alone, and look at the ME…and then come back and tell me who gets the lions share for why things are the way they are there today.
Well, to each his own I always say. Myself, I prefer our system to any in the world that I’ve seen in my various travels. I think you’d be surprised if you ever moved to Europe (depending on which country you finally chose of course) as to how ‘good’ it would be…but maybe not. Perhaps you’ve visited and stayed there for long periods and you know exactly what you’d be getting into.
Sorry to continue this hijack, but I wanted to finish my train of thought here.
Maybe I didn’t phrase this quite clear enough.
Some here are saying that our ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” are what we, as Americans, view it and shouldn’t be compared to other countries (i.e. Europe) because we are, in fact, in America. But what about when we’re freeing other countries? Aren’t we in essence doing to them what you are so adamantly against here? Aren’t we telling them that their vision of government and social issues is screwed up according to the western world? Why should they listen to us? Why should we listen to the rest of the world?
Now obviously I’m over-generalizing for sake of the argument here, there are always little details and so forth, but isn’t the premise the same? Didn’t we invade Iraq because “we didn’t like the way they handled government and social issues”? Because our view of those issues was waaaaaay off kelter to what they viewed them as, so therefore THEY are wrong automatically?
Maybe they liked the way things were. Maybe they don’t like “American Democracy”. How can we sit back and say we are right, regardless to what the majority of the WORLD thinks, and then impose our “American Views” on others?
To me it seems hypocritical and elitist. I hope you understand my POV here. I just think it’s bad to say “we don’t care what the rest of the world thinks” and in the same breath overthrow another county’s government because they weren’t doing it “our way”.
Can’t believe I forgot Vietnam. Knew I shouldn’t have put France on the list. My bad. However, I was deliberately limiting it to past century; I think that there’s nowhere on earth that can be held innocent of atrocity for longer than about one century.
By “this century” I assume you mean “since 1904,” right? From what I know, Britain did all manner of screwup there; did Sweden and Denmark engage in ME shenanigans that I’m unaware of? Portugal? Switzerland?
Possibly I’d be surprised, but the surprises I’ve had overseas have been mostly positive; the differences are ones that I wish we’d adopt at home. The US has a great deal going for it, but good politics aren’t at the top of the list for me.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear either. See, there was this war thing and we won. As the winner we get to set the rules for the defeated nation. Why should they listen to us? Well, because they were conquered of course and they HAVE to listen to us…we are the 800 lb gorrilla sitting on their chest. Now, you are probably saying to yourself that this isn’t fair…and I won’t say I necessarily disagree with you. But it is reality…for the history of human beings and civilization this has been the way its always been, up through and including modern times. When the allies defeated Germany in WWII, THEY set the terms of the defeat and basically forced democracy on the German people. Same with Japan. And the same is true in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, we can certainly TELL them they will have a democracy…but long term its really going to be up to them to make it work or to junk it and do something else. The US’s attention span isn’t up for us to occupy either nation indefinitely IMO.
Well, you left out the critical ‘there was a war and we won it, and the Afghani/Iraqi nations lost’ piece…something I wouldn’t say is a little detail but a major factor. As for why we invaded Iraq…well, I’m not opening THAT can of worms here, but I seriously doubt we invaded because ‘we didn’t like the way they handled government and social issues’ as the primary reason.
Well, some probably did, while others probably didn’t. I’m reasonably confident that the Iraqi people as a whole don’t really want ‘American Democracy’…nor are we forcing them to our system if you’ve been paying attention to events in Iraq. All we are insisting on is that they have SOME kind of Democracy…not necessarily the American model.
I’m also resonably sure a number of Germans and Japanese kind of liked how their system was too…and that a fair number, especially in Japan, did NOT want Democracy in any form at all. However, it was a moot point when they lost the war, no?
As to your point in all this, we aren’t sitting back and thinking we are right about everything reguardless of what The World™ thinks…and no one was saying that earlier in the thread. What was said, repeatedly, is that when we are talking about internal US politics its silly and meaningless to bring up other, outside, political systems. This doesn’t mean we are ‘right’ and they are ‘wrong’. You trying this tangent isn’t really changing that equation at all…its merely muddying the waters somewhat.
To me it shows you didn’t understand the points made in previous posts reguarding our own system and what we were actually debating about, and a level of naiveté about how internation politics works as far as your tangential gambits about the US and the Iraqi war goes.
One final time…no one in this thread is saying ‘we don’t care what the rest of the world thinks’…myself, I’m saying ‘what the rest of the world thinks doesn’t matter when we are talking about our own internal politics because frankly they don’t live here, and don’t have any say or direct input into our system…the POV that counts is that of our fellow citizens when we are talking about our own system and our own political spectrum.’ I seriously doubt I’m going to get through to you with this any more than I got through to you previously…but I had to take the shot anyway.
What the rest of the world thinks about our system is beside the point. I was only trying to point out that the US political electorate takes up very little space on the political spectrum, and the political spectrum doesn’t end at the water’s edge.
Well, even in this century the Europeans did plenty of damage from their various overseas escapades…not to mention the major world wars they basically sparked.
As for holding nations responsible for more than a century…well, again, we get into root causes of things. Certainly we don’t have to hold the present day Europeans responsible for things like the Crusades…but we have to realize that those things still have a tremendous impact on our world today. Also, many of the conquests for empire for the various European powers took place in the previous century (or the one previous to that)…and the waves from those colonial conquests are still being felt today. Not only that, many of the major European powers (UK, France, Belgium, Germany, Russia/Soviet Union, etc) gave up their empirial posessions kicking and screaming…THIS century. And mostly only because they were too weak to grasp them firmly anymore (ok, this is a HUGE oversimplification).
BTW, if we are only talking about THIS century the US gets off even lighter compared to those pesky Europeans. Even with Iraq/Afghanistan under our belt.
Britain and France mostly as far as the ME mess goes (I think there were a few other with a toe in the mix but I can’t recall off the top of my head…and if we are being honest the US isn’t blameless either, though we didn’t help in dividing out the spoils after WWI from the Turks which set the mood). You are right though…this century wasn’t big for shenanigans from Sweden, Denmark or Portugal.
The beauty of Democracy is that its changable…IF enough of your fellow citizens feel the same way and want to change things. And perhaps after 4 more years of Bush people will be ready for a change. I’m unsure if this will be the case…but its always possible. I wouldn’t hold my breath though for the US to go the way the Europeans have gone though. Personally I think that eventually they will come to their senses and come back to the dark side…I already think I’ve seen indications that the UK might. (I’m mostly kidding about that last btw…just in case it wasn’t obvious).
Universal health care liberates people from the common assumption that it’s your own damn problem if you get sick. And it’s not so much they “want more taxes”, they just want it to be free. Some liberal might say, “take it from the military” or challenge some other notion about where money should and should not go.
My position on taxes is that it’s un-liberal to raise them beyond moderate levels or to make them more regressive…
OK, classical liberalism, I’ll go along with that. Lib lib.
xtisme:
What the hell is a political spectrum made up of if not issues like civil rights, economic policy, religion, etc?
Not neccessarily, but often they are. The right is the existing inequality-based economic power structure and conservatism is the belief that the rich are your “betters” and the poor “deserve it”. Liberalism is the belief that those and other assumptions ain’t necessarily so and the left is the movement to implement equality by re-distributing wealth.
Yes, damn straight. Liberating your mind from being told how to think or what to believe. Liberating your body from sexual repression. Liberating minorities from prejudice and discrimination. The civil rights movement exemplifies liberalism like nothing else.
Okay, I have a nit to pick here. We, as in the American forces in Iraq, have “won” nothing. I am utterly against this war and everything it stands for. I believe that is the fundamental difference in our POV’s here. I think we are sorely losing this, just as we lost Vietnam. But I am not speaking of the battle when I refer to Iraq, I am referring to the premise of the war: to overthrow another government to put our version in place . . . because we think we are correct.
I understand the point you are making for the most part, I just think you and I FUNDAMENTALLY view the situation in two different ways (in which I will not go any further into to avoid even further hijacking this thread!). We will have to respectfully agree to disagree on this one, honey!
Maybe you’re right, maybe I don’t understand enough. I still have a little bit of innocence left in my worldly views. I’m young, but still interested, and I think that’s a good sign. I’m just a peace-loving hippie who really hates war, especially when the premise of it is purely for financial gain masked in questionable morals. Oh, and when it’s MY generation who’s dying for this, kinda puts a personal light on it.
I’m not for the war either PM…but to say that we’ve ‘won nothing’ is willful disreguard of the facts. We most certainly conquered the nation and are in control of it to the extent that we can dictate the initial direction its government will take. We achieved our goal of deposing Saddam and his regime, and we now have the basing presence we desired in the ME.
Now, this isn’t to say that there isn’t a heated insurgency going on…but just because there is an insurgency going on doesn’t mean we ‘won nothing’. Long term perhaps you are right and we will be forced out. But thats far from a forgone conclusion at this point, and the converse could also be true…that long term the Iraqi’s could have SOME kind of stable government, whether that be a Democracy or something else is still to be seen.
Iraq is not Vietnam…it doesn’t resemble it in any way except the fact the the American’s are fighting an insurgency there. Nor are we ‘sorely losing’ except in the fevered minds of some of the more vocal anti-war/anti-Bush crowd. Things aren’t going spectacularly…but we are far from losing at this point. We are equally far from winning of course.
As for the premise for the war in Iraq, you are still wrong when you say (to paraphrase) that we went to war with Iraq because we didn’t like their political system. We went to war in Iraq for geopolitical reasons ranging from wanting a larger presence in the ME because of the threat of terrorism to the pedestrian fact that we COULD go to war with Iraq because we had a fig leaf of an excuse, helped along by that idiot Saddam. Its a much more complex issue than you appearently think it was…and one that there are myriad threads on in this forum if you are interested in hashing back through them all.
I can certainly accept that. As I said, for me the fun is in the debate.
Well, I can respect that worldview even if I don’t agree with it. I think sometimes war is the right and even the moral thing to do. I think THIS war in Iraq was a very stupid and wasteful thing to do (its one of the top reasons I didn’t vote for Bush in fact), though I think our war in Afghanistan was the right thing to do…and done in the right way as well.
Well, as for ‘your generation’ fighting this war, you are right to a certain extent…I was in the Navy in the last Gulf War, so I’m a bit long in the tooth for this one. However, my son is a US Marine who will probably be shipped out to Iraq sometime next year, and I have several dear cousins who are currently stationed in Iraq…so its not exactly a complete intellectual excersize for me either.
First of all, can we agree that “political spectrum” is a pretty nonsensical idea?
The idea that Americans are “right wing” compared to Europe only makes sense if you can define “right wing”.
As BrainGlutton has pointed out repeatedly in other threads, the American right wing is very different than the right wing in other countries.
Are low taxes liberal or conservative?
Is having an established state church liberal or conservative?
Is subsidizing important industries liberal or conservative?
Is state ownership of key industries liberal or conservative?
Is having a mobile workforce and a dynamic economy liberal or conservative?
Are communitarian policies liberal or conservative?
Is the possession of firearms by private citizens liberal or conservative?
Is the existance of a titled hereditary aristocracy liberal or conservative?
Is economic mobility (the tendancy for people born in one economic quartile to move to another economic quartile during their lifetime) liberal or conservative?
Is christian belief liberal or conservative?
Is the existance of an offical language liberal or conservative?
Is state ownership of radio and TV stations liberal or conservative?
Is the creation of state parks, wildlife sanctuaries, and environmental protection liberal or conservative?
Is allowing immigration liberal or conservative?
Is unfettered capitalism liberal or conservative?
The fact that in the US some of these positions are associated with one party or the other, or one political philsophical label or the other, is not very meaningful, since in other parts of the world the opposite views are associated with different wings.
Mainly, in Europe public health care, skepticism of capitalism, high levels of social welfare spending, and lack of religiousity are consensus positions. But what exactly makes those positions conservative or liberal? If Le Pen in France supports maintaining public health care, does that make him less conservative?
The Soviet Union was a profoundly illiberal state. It wasn’t anywhere on a supposed continuum from leftist to liberal to centrist to conservative to right-winger. And the fascist states of the 30s were profoundly unconservative, they sought to smash the old ways and bring about a new type of person, to remake society from the ground up.
I mainly object to the notion that support for capitalism is an essentially conservative position. It most certainly is not. Your typical conservative hates capitalism (see Pat Buchanan) because it destroys traditional social arrangements. Support for capitalism is a liberal position. The fact that most of the world is less capitalist than the US makes the US more liberal in many ways.
I would agree that an authoritarian approach to capitalism (whether through cronyism, state capitalism, or socialism,) is a more conservative approach in most of the world. However, whenever I see a thread on US politics, I answer using the definitions most seem to use when referring to US politics, despite the fact that they make no sense.
Furthermore, on that point about liberal capitalism, since in America, relatively unfettered capitalism* was rife until the 1930s, capitalistic conservatism can look to the pre-New Deal era to define their conservatism.
*Despite subsidies to railways, government assisstance in strikebreaking, and meager attempts at breaking up monopolies, I’d still say that the “gilded age” and “jazz age” 's were better examples of unfettered capitalism than now.
No, no, no. There is no significant left wing in the leadership of our two major parties or among our elected officials. There is a left wing in the electorate, that is, the people at large, although its numbers are hard to estimate. Where do you think Howard Dean’s support came from? And Nader’s support in 2000?
Leftists don’t get elected, in part, because of our single-member-district, winner-take-all political system which squeezes out third-party alternatives (left, right and otherwise) and forces the major parties to follow a center-seeking electoral strategy. But the hard-left vote is definitely there – and extremely frustrated, having to make choices like that between throwing their votes away on Nader or helping a prowar “liberal” like Kerry get elected.
I understand all the words, but together they don’t lead me to comprehension. If they’re “all liberals” wouldn’t that mean people were correct to complain that only liberals were nominated? It seems that if we can come up with examples of non-liberal democrats we’d be disproving the cry of “only liberals are nominated” far more than the other way around.
Anyway… Joe Lieberman. I keep hoping he’ll come out before the next election, because he’s in denial about his repressed Republican-ness.
Sorry, the ‘A is A’ reference is from a rather long speech from John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. It was in for tongue in cheek purposes only (admittedly I probably over played it in this thread…sometimes I just can’t help myself, and what I find funny other people just find odd. :)).
