Don't Biatch Conservatives

[jnaujok]

I think that the US economy had a part in that as well... It is not so easy to separate things anymore.

I'm not sure how the US can be responsible for the utter sham that is the EU. It should have been a clue when England refused to join the economic portion of the EU (and adopt the Euro) that even member states were realizing that it wouldn't last.

YouTube is full of videos of EU delegates predicting the collapse of the EU and the EZ as early as 2003, yet you're going to claim the U.S. is responsible for it?

It amazes me how anything that goes bad in the world must be the fault of the Evil Americans, yet anything good must have happened in spite of us.

Remind me again which country (or "Union") it is that ships three times the aid around the world then the next closest? Which country is always the first one with boots on the ground in a natural disaster? Which country supplies food and medical supplies and rebuilds war-torn areas and never asks for the bill to be paid?

The U.S. could have walked away from Europe in 1945, and left it to rebuild itself. We could have taken all that money and built up our industry and infrastructure and flipped a big middle finger to Europe. Instead we spent hundreds of billions (inflation adjusted) dollars to come and fix your countries and feed your people.

People here are calling for reparations for deeds past? Maybe the U.S. should start demanding payback for all the good deeds we've done.

[ladajo]

GIT, you reiterated exactly what I said at first. I pointed out that although that may have been the case then, we have a chance to make amends for it now, but we don't. It's a blemish we pretend didn't happen much like slavery.

As per your Native American history, since I'm assuming here, you're full white, I'm willing to grant you don't really have any background in North American native traditions, cultures, or warring. Since I am part and registered (although identify white) I have taken the time to read up on histories of native peoples (admittedly mostly Eastern North American tribes) and can attest that what you have said is not true of them. They were a united peoples who rarely attacked one another and when they did it was over food sources, not land. This is verified repeatedly in any history book.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/07/ ... p=trending

[seedload]

A gross missrepresentation of my personality my intentions and my motives. You should not rip things out of context in order to use them for ad hominem attacks. And with THAT I do take offense!

Misrepresentations or misinterpretations? If the latter, is there any possibility that you are failing to consider your own comments about my countries morality from our context? You seem to want to be able to speak relentlessly negatively about my country unhindered by the context of your own. There is no indication that you intend to adjust that approach.

The fact is that I am most assuredly overreacting to you. That is something I can admit to. I have been tilted. I have no intention of remaining so.

So...

Please return to your regularly scheduled America bashing.

[Diogenes]

Do go on. What foreigners and what principles?

Your founding fathers, while many born her, does not make them native to the land nor their possession legal. As per their princicples they are largely those of various previous republics in history. There's a strong lack of originality, not that you can knock what works. Our country is founded on thievery, biased, and the desire to pay less than a tenth of a cent in taxes on imports.

You answer is not as funny as I had hoped. Still, it has a few knee slappers in it.


At the time of this nation's founding, all other forms of government were monarchies. The founders created something new. Something which had not existed before. Certainly there had been Republics before, but not like this one. This one worked, and went on to become the most successful one in History.


As for the founder's principles. If the principles of the founders were derived from any foreigners, they were men such as Locke, Vattel, Pufendorf, Grotius, Bynkershoek, Burlamaqui, Burke, et al. These men were thinkers on natural law, and they realized that certain knowable things could be derived if one postulated the assumption that individuals had rights, and that it was a good thing for society if men did have rights.

This is greatly in contrast to the monarchist view of government, which was that l'état, c'est moi, and everyone else was property.


As for stealing the land from the Indians, that was a product of the mindset of the times. The British would not hesitate to steal land from the French, or the Spanish, or anyone else for that matter, if they could convince themselves that they could take and hold it. As far as they were concerned, the Indians were just savages, little better than animals, and so were not entitled to even the basic rights they accepted for the common subject. It was the zeitgeist of that era, and it is not appropriate to judge people of olden times on the basis of a comparatively recent modern zeitgeist. It wasn't even until 1924 that the United States accepted Indians born here as citizens.

For what it's worth, my Grandfather (on my mother's side) is Half Cherokee, and we have Blackfoot on my Father's side. Also, my brother is married to a Full Bloodied Comanche Woman, and they currently live on Tribal land.


The only part of your comment that had any merit is the observation that
"Our country is founded on ... the desire to pay less than a tenth of a cent in taxes on imports."

Very right. Opposition to taxation was indeed a very prominent manifestation of the country's founding spirit, and one which I and others hope to rekindle as a modern spirit as well. Government is too big, and it spends too much, and the nation very much needs to reassert that revolutionary spirit exhibited at the founding.

As Mather Bylessaid "which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away, or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?"

The Tyranny of Washington D.C. is far Closer than King George III ever was, and it has become far more onerous than he ever did.

[Diogenes]

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. Clive Staples "CS" Lewis

America is full of moral busybodies. Democrats and Christian Democrats (Republicans).

Noticing that your neighbor leaves junk lying around in their yard will make of you a moral busybody if you bother them about it. Objecting to their setting their field on fire while it is adjacent to yours, is not moral busybodying, it's self defense.

You would blur the distinction between the two because you see no danger from what you advocate. I have seen far too much danger from it.

[Diogenes]

As far as I am concerned Skipjack your posts/comments are welcome. I am not so insecure in my own position that the idea of hearing a foreign perspective bothers me, whether I agree with it our not. Also anything that angers diogenes must have something good to be said about it.

Thanks, buddy!

Diogenes, I would love for my son to participate in the discussion, but he is only 15 months old.

Good! Put him on! He will make far more cognizant and intelligent arguments than have you. He would be a dramatic improvement! If he walked around on the keyboard he could not do so badly!

I apologize for me being concerned about his future. My wife is participating indirectly in the discussion. A lot of the positions that I take in my posts are actually hers. She just does not feel the urge to post them here.

It is not a far leap to believe you espouse the opinions of a Big City Liberal Democrat Woman. That is spot on as far as I can tell.

Also worth noting is that Diogenes and I do sometimes have the same opinion on matters (though often not). So really dont get why is he so hostile.

One never knows from day to day which one of my many split personalities will dominate. Some of them find you affable, but others regard you as tedious and annoying. It's easy to get disgusted when I'm trying to clean the street while you're following behind dropping horse-apples.

[Diogenes]

Personally I think Diogenes absorbed a little too much RF in his days. Now if consciousness could be transferred via RF, we'd have our selves a Dr. Who episode.

Or maybe he's just off his anti-psychotic meds. That "friend" sounds a little suspicious to me.

Most suspicious person I know.

[TDPerk]

"They were a united peoples who rarely attacked one another and when they did it was over food sources, not land. This is verified repeatedly in any history book."

What a stupendous own goal and logic fail. Any history book that contained such a fact is indicted by the fact you cite them.

Where do you think the food came from?

The Shawnee were driven out of the Greenbrier plateau when my ancestors went into the mountains in the late 1700's, not by my ancestors, but in the centuries prior by the trading/raiding parties of Cherokee vs. Iroquois moving along the Seneca trace.

The lies you take for true are as massive as your ignorance.

[palladin9479]

@TD

Their using the "Blame the EWEM" attack line (Evil White European Males). In that scenario all EWEM's are evil by definition and cause all the ills of the world. Without the EWEM's the world would be a happy place full of singing, dancing and candy for everyone!

It's a blame tactic used to shift people into defending against a made up attack on history.

People are people, regardless of their skin color or ethical background. Native Americans would raid each others tribes and even go so far as to declare war on each other. Raiding involved war bands attacking random villages of the enemy tribe, stealing their food and provisions and raping their women. Some tribes even took others as slaves. This is a pattern that we also see in the South American region amongst their tribes and civilizations. Lots of brutal death and dismemberment long before any EWEM's showed up.

Of course when the EWEM's did show up their had advanced their arts of death and dismemberment to be much more efficient then the locals.

Dealing death and causing strife is part of being human and is something that ALL human civilizations did, no exceptions. The USA has actually been fairly mild when looked at from a historical perspective. We haven't attempted to annex Mexico or Canada, even through we could easily crush their military and enslave their people. You didn't see an ominous US military marching through Europe crushing governments and enslaving those people, though we could of. Nor did you see the same with Asia, though by then the US had the bomb and could of forced any nation to bow and be enslaved. And while our historical predecessors have always been fast to conquer and enslave others, the USA has shown remarkable restraint.

[GIThruster]

Honestly the entire notion that Native American's were unified and didn't fight is just batty. The Comanche, the Apache, the Sioux, all killed on sight. The Lakota Sioux held all other tribes as enemies and killed anyone they came across for no reason except that they were on what they considered their hunting grounds.The Aztecs promoted violence throughout their culture through human sacrifice, and one can go on, and on, and on. . .

There is after all, a reason that we name attack helicopters after Native American tribes.

We are talking about people who were for the most part, 6,000 years less advanced than the Europeans who supplanted them. That is the striking issue. In Europe a single technological advance like the crossbow, longbow or even stirrups was enough to change the tide of battle. When the Europeans arrived, the natives hadn't ever seen a horse, let alone gunpowder, steam power and moveable type.

What I find most offensive about Scott's self-righterous attitude is that he's saying we need to be ashamed of the acts of someone else, when it's quite obvious if he were so ashamed he would not bring it up. This is all standard adolescent looney lefty lunacy.

[Skipjack]

I'm not sure how the US can be responsible for the utter sham that is the EU. It should have been a clue when England refused to join the economic portion of the EU (and adopt the Euro) that even member states were realizing that it wouldn't last.

Clarification: I am actually a big critic of the EU and the Euro zone experiment.
But, the near economic collapse in the US has affected the rest of the world negatively as well, whether you like it or not. This is a globalized world and local problems affect everyone at least to some extent.
Yes, we do have our own share of problems, but (and that was my point) it is hard to deny that problems in a market as large as the US, will affect the rest of the world negatively. Wouldn't you agree? So it is not like you can point fingers and say that it is all the fault of the EU (which was the point I was trying to make).

YouTube is full of videos of EU delegates predicting the collapse of the EU and the EZ as early as 2003,

Yeah and I am sure you can find just as many US delegates claiming the same about the US going even further back. Who cares? There will always be people crying "doom and gloom".

You seem to want to be able to speak relentlessly negatively about my country unhindered by the context of your own.

Am I really doing that or is that your interpretation of my words?
I have no reason to speak "relentlessly negatively" about the United States. In fact (and if you read my post history) I think that I am being equally critical of every country and also the EU. But I am also against being just negative about someone.
When I critizise someone or something that happens in the US, then it is not equal to critizising the US as a whole. But I guess it is very hard for you to separate critizism of a part from critizism of the whole, hu?

Where exactly was I bashing America? I think that my critizism is always very specific and usually caused by a certain event and a topic discussed here. Critizising a flaw in something and offering alternative point of views on something is IMHO not bashing.

Good! Put him on! He will make far more cognizant and intelligent arguments than have you. He would be a dramatic improvement! If he walked around on the keyboard he could not do so badly!

Now that is bashing...
I dont think I have ever done ad hominem attacks like that against your person, have I?

It is not a far leap to believe you espouse the opinions of a Big City Liberal Democrat Woman.

Actually my wife is not a liberal.

One never knows from day to day which one of my many split personalities will dominate. Some of them find you affable, but others regard you as tedious and annoying. It's easy to get disgusted when I'm trying to clean the street while you're following behind dropping horse-apples.

Sigh...

We are talking about people who were for the most part, 6,000 years less advanced than the Europeans who supplanted them. That is the striking issue. In Europe a single technological advance like the crossbow, longbow or even stirrups was enough to change the tide of battle. When the Europeans arrived, the natives hadn't ever seen a horse, let alone gunpowder, steam power and moveable type.

Well actually they would have kicked the butts of the arriving Europeans if it was not for a few very nice deseases that the Europeans brought with them. These did most of the dirty work among the native population...
They had never seen a horse, because they did not exist there, not even in the wild. It is like saying that Europeans were primitive because they had never seen a buffalo before coming to america...

That said, you are right and the native american tribes were not just friendly with each other. They fought wars and killed each other, took each others scalps for medicine and performed plenty of cruelties against each other. The myth of the all noble and peaceful native american is a myth. All in all, one could say they were just humans, like all of us, nothing more, nothing less.

[GIThruster]

It is like saying that Europeans were primitive because they had never seen a buffalo before coming to america...

That's seriously pathetic. There were a couple copper mines on the continent when the Europeans arrived but before then and for many centuries afterward, the vast majority of Native Americans were stone age peoples. I think there were 2 tribes mining copper but they did not even qualify as bronze age. The Europeans were not being overly critical when they termed them "savages". They were overly self-serving to think killing savages was okay, but they were correct to call them savages.

[Skipjack]

There were a couple copper mines on the continent when the Europeans arrived but before then and for many centuries afterward, the vast majority of Native Americans were stone age peoples. I think there were 2 tribes mining copper but they did not even qualify as bronze age.

They did have a great deal of gold mining and crafts in central and south america, but generally you are correct. I was simply contradicting the notion that not having known horses before made them any less civilized than the Europeans. The rest still remains valid.

[choff]

The book 'Guns Germs and Steel' gives a good account of the why to it all. Basically, the natives had advanced about as far as they could with the resources available. No farm animals and no resistance to the diseases carried by them, fewer staple crops.

[GIThruster]

I'd be interested to hear the argument for that. I'd guess the opposite is true.

Native Americans weren't blocked from progressing but rather, because North America is so bountiful, they never bothered to progress. Most never became agriculturalists because hunting and gathering was sufficient. They didn't domesticate animals but they certainly could have in abundance. They had access to higher quality grain than Europeans chiefly maize, but most often didn't plant them. Tomatoes, potatoes, onions. . . They had access to wild peccaries they could have domesticated, wild turkeys, etc. Instead, they merely hunted and gathered because that was all that was required to feed themselves.

In central America, we see the Aztecs, Incas and Mayans, all developed food storage which is one of the first technological developments to thwart harsh winters and droughts that disturb food production. (It was when the barbarian hordes learned to store food in silos from the Romans, that their numbers exploded sufficiently for them to overwhelm the Roman Empire.) All three developed some pictographic writing, irrigation and basic metallurgy. All three built in stone. These were true agricultural societies but they were still stone age. Because they worked harder and produced more, they became the prime targets early during the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, full of gold and emeralds as they were. Their numbers had specialized and they were all producing fine art. That never occurred in the hunter/gatherer societies to their North.

In both cases however, we are talking about stone age cultures and they seem to have had limitless resources so far as I can see. After all, the moment the Europeans settled an area they managed to survive on what they found, and they had access to precisely the same resources. The Europeans mastered the continent because they were not stone age peoples. They had steel, and steam power, and literacy and mathematics and the ability to build sawmills, which then led to building everything else.

The Native Americans and those who displaced them had the same resources, but very different levels of technological development. Note too, that it was this imbalance between backward peoples and their displacers that provoked the Monroe Doctrine. Once the New World Europeans had begun to take possession, they refused others to continue to do likewise, because that would have created symmetric rather than asymmetric conflicts. The same thing happened in Ireland when the Tuatha De Danann displaced the Firbolg and when the Milesians displaced the De Danann. One can point across all the globe and throughout all recorded history this displacement of peoples by other peoples, based upon technological superiority. By contrast, the argument that Native Americans had grown as much as they could because of limited resources makes very little sense to me.