Who is editing wikipedia?

Happy to be and to stay incurious and uneducated. And he'll be finally laid to rest in the bosom of the Glorious Heroic Benevolent Homeland. American...North Korean...he could be happily either.

And there's this lovely bit...

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I like the U.S. culture. No apologies. I just like the U.S. culture.

That's gansta rap, of course, and the thriving US pornography industry, and blacks being dragged behind pickup trucks, and the Hell's Angels, and the tobacco industry hiding their own research on health matters related to their profitable products, and gay bath houses, and wife-swapping, and the Catholic Church protecting child molesters, where infant mortality rates are higher than 32 other nations including Cuba, Cypress and Portugal...etc

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I really have no interest in non-western cultures/religions/societies.

except of course, when picking a target for american weapons and occupation, naturally. who better to play armchair general than someone that doesn't even think the rest of the world is worth mention?

Happy to be and to stay incurious and uneducated. And he'll be finally laid to rest in the bosom of the Glorious Heroic Benevolent Homeland. American...North Korean...he could be happily either.

And there's this lovely bit...

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I like the U.S. culture. No apologies. I just like the U.S. culture.

That's gansta rap, of course, and the thriving US pornography industry, and blacks being dragged behind pickup trucks, and the Hell's Angels, and the tobacco industry hiding their own research on health matters related to their profitable products, and gay bath houses, and wife-swapping, and the Catholic Church protecting child molesters, where infant mortality rates are higher than 32 other nations including Cuba, Cypress and Portugal...etc

Where was I playing armchair general? I just don't criticize my country. That's not my job to criticize my country, nor should it be my job.

Your accusation is false, since I don't "pick any targets for American weapons or occupations." Don't empower me with false accusations.

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Where was I playing armchair general? I just don't criticize my country. That's not my job to criticize my country, nor should it be my job.

Your accusation is false, since I don't "pick any targets for American weapons or occupations." Don't empower me with false accusations.

and don't take me literally far past any point where it's obvious i'm not being literal.

do you or do you not defend the iraq war? if you agree with it and say nothing, that's one thing. if you actually defend it, and don't even care about the rest of the world it's being fought in, that's reprehensible. my apologies if you never make such arguments, and i imagined them. occasionally we only think we remember something. it happens.

on the one hand blatham, you're right. i have to think we have at least a small number of graces (i didn't say saving ones, yet) but we could use a lot more.

on the other hand, the main things that stop countries from being noble and great are nationalism and arrogance. get too caught up in how other nations are inferior to your standards, and in a couple centuries you'll be where we are (unless of course you just don't have the resources.)

but then your dollar is way up, isn't it? or is ours just down... we're told our economy is doing well, i'm quite skeptical.

good luck with it, i've always loved canada, even if we've both been known to drag a few american natives down without any just cause. also, despite my mild defense of "culture" here, i have to warn you not to force too much of it on yourself, or it'll be "as canadian as apple pie..."

then the only good thing will be that we can get your pie and i'm sure it will be excellent- you don't want canada to ever be: "like america, but slightly more polite."

That's not my job to criticize my country, nor should it be my job.

foofie said

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That's not my job to criticize my country, nor should it be my job.

That's an interesting understanding of the relationship between citizen and his/her government. I assume the principle would hold true for an Iranian or a North Korean or, a tg alluded, for a german citizen in 1935?

1935 wurde im Ressort des "Reichsforstmeisters" Hermann Göring das "Reichsnaturschutzgesetz" verabschiedet. Mit dem Gesetz sahen sich viele Naturschützer damals am Ziel ihrer Wünsche.....

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

You can sky-write your ridiculous comments in letters the size of a house and I would not understand them any better.

Pasting the dictionary definition of "fair" doesn't respond to my question (in other than a glib way).

No word is obscene unto itself. It is always the use and context that matters.

You indicated that America lost it's "fair" share of lives in WWII. Fair based on what? The extent of it's interests? The measure of it contribution to the cause of the war?

I said..

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WW2 is the ONE war that Americans actually lost a fair number of soldiers

Since "use and context" matter perhaps you should stick with my use and context and not some fictional use that you want to argue against. Your attempt to change what I said to "It's fair share" is nothing but an attempt to drastically change the meaning of what I actually said. You need only substitute the correct meaning for the word "fair" to understand what I said.

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Your comment also implies that America has lost other than its "fair" share of lives in other wars. I'm betting dollars to donuts that you don't believe America has lost more than it's "fair" share of lives in other wars.If this is so then you are implying America did not lose it's "fair" share of lives in WWI, Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq etc.

Since I never said the word "share" I don't see how you can even make your argument.

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If it is not so than we agree and why are you giving me grief?

Because you are arguing about something I never said, you deserve grief. If you keep it up you deserve more than grief, you deserve ridicule. (Adjectives only modify nouns in the sentence they are in. They don't modify words not used in the paragraph or words not used on the page.)

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What was America's "fair" share of lost lives in WWI? Considering that our country was not under attack and that we gained very little in comparison to the Brits and French by defeating The Axis, we should have "fairly" lost more lives?

I never said anything about "fair share".

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What is it with you folks?

"America has done some horrible things too!"

"America isn't perfect you know!"

"America isn't as great as you think it is!"

Do you tell your brother the same thing about your mother?

"Mom isn't perfect you know!

"Mom has done some lousy things too you know!"

It would be OK if you folks applied the same harsh light equally to all nations. In fact if you did, America would still come out ahead. But...you don't.

Cuba ain't so bad and neither is Hugo Chavez. Mao and Lenin were no Hitlers. Hell, for some of you they were no George Bushes!

That's a lovely strawman. Is your entire argument going to be against things I have never said?

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Obviously America is not perfect, and yes it has things of which it should be ashamed, but why is it so hard for you to give credit where credit is due?

Funny, you attacked me for saying almost the exact same thing you just said. I said it this way.

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Yes, that is true to some extent. But any time a country rationalizes its actions based on the premise that it can do no wrong it can't be too far from doing wrong.

and this

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The US has warts. Yes, it is better than some countries but it isn't somehow the best country that has ever been.

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Please don't give me the BS that is people like you, pointing America's problems that keeps it great. You like to point out it's problems. Admit it.

You just pointed to the fact that the US has things it should be ashamed of. Does that mean you like to point out the US's problems? I on more than one occassion agreed that the US is better as a superpower than many countries might be. But it seems you prefer to play "make believe" instead of dealing with reality.

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Why else would Foofie not simply accept your vague argument about your nationality?

There wasn't anything vague about it. It is simple grammar. "We" has a meaning that can't really be misconstrued and is hardly vague.

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Why can't you simply state you are American? While you're at it you might also say you are proud of it, but I suspect that's not the case at all

I see you absolutely refuse to discuss what I have said and instead want to make up an argument so you have something to argue against. Meanwhile as you went off on your tangent about what I didn't say you failed to discuss what YOU said in defense of a premise that you don't seem to even agree with.

One could go back through the several thousand posts I've written here or on a previous board and not find a single instance of Canadian flag-waving. I have almost zero use for, or respect for, nationalist fervor.

There is, I confess, a species of Canadian pride which relates to the earlier sentence...we tend to be proud of not being proud. It's an irony. But it seems to me the most benign sort of pride attainable.

I absolutely love most americans. But that's true with people I've met anywhere in the world I've been. Americans, as individuals, are unspecial.

blatham wrote:

foofie said

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That's not my job to criticize my country, nor should it be my job.

That's an interesting understanding of the relationship between citizen and his/her government. I assume the principle would hold true for an Iranian or a North Korean or, a tg alluded, for a german citizen in 1935?

Bernie - pick another year! In 1935 the Nazis passed new laws for the protection of the environment and protection of animals

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1935 wurde im Ressort des "Reichsforstmeisters" Hermann Göring das "Reichsnaturschutzgesetz" verabschiedet. Mit dem Gesetz sahen sich viele Naturschützer damals am Ziel ihrer Wünsche.....

http://www.grueneliga-berlin.de/rabe_ralf/rabe_archiv_2002/10_11_2002/nationalsozialismus.html

anyway, no worries- i was just making a point, if either of us remembers what it was it's not a big deal. if we took more pride in not being proud, we might be better off. what it would take to make us special? i don't know. america is special as far as i can tell, but it's too proud when it shouldn't be, and probably not proud enough when it should.

For those who think I'm wrong, just using arithmetic, count up this country's losses during all the wars we've been in (many for the benefit of others). We've earned our superpower position, and our economic hegemony in the world. [..]

What I meant in my earlier post, about the number of losses of U.S. military, was that many of these wars the U.S. was sacrificing its own people for the benefit of other nations. Yes, those other nations lost more people, but they had no choice as to whether to be in a war or not. The U.S. joined wars to save other nations, and in effect sacrificed its own people.

Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together.

Fred's Sense Of History

Friday, September 7th, 2007

During his appearance on The Tonight Show, Fred said something that is rather stunningly and obviously untrue:

"Our people have shed more blood for the liberty and freedom of other peoples … than all the other countries put together."

There's nothing terribly edifying in this kind of claim of national nobility-through-high body counts, but you have to wonder what the man could possibly have been thinking that would cause him to say this. Even leaving aside WWI, where the claims to fighting for liberty are a bit more strained (and where all other belligerents lost far more people than America), this claim is demonstrably false. It requires either an amazing ignorance about the past or contempt for American allies in WWII.

Britain and France entered WWII at least officially to safeguard the independence of Poland, which I think gives them some right to claim that they suffered their losses for the sake of the "liberty" of other peoples. In 1940 alone in a war fought on behalf of Poland, the French lost 90,000 KIA, and the British lost over 68,000. The British, Commonwealth and Free French soldiers who died during the war were certainly fighting at least in part for "the liberty and freedom of other peoples," and the number of their fatalities and casualities was necessarily higher than that of the United States. Our casualties were on the order of 600,000 killed and wounded, while British and Commonwealth casualties (not including India's 100,000) were approximately 915,000, which does not include civilian deaths in Britain and France. If we were to judge these losses according to the size of the populations of the different countries, the disparity would be even greater. Given how much smaller its population was, Britain's losses were proportionally over three times as great as ours.

None of this is to minimise the sacrifices that Americans have made. But leave it to some showboating politician to take something noble and admirable and distort it as part of his talking points, insulting the war dead of our best allies in the process. This claim of Thompson's is just the sort of nationalist mythologising that we could stand to have much less of nowadays. It doesn't speak well for the management of foreign relations in any future Thompson Administration that the man has no idea how much the rest of the Allied nations sacrificed in WWII.

P.S. It might also be noted that Americans, like all other nations, did not enter the wars of the 20th century primarily because they were interested in fighting for the "liberty and freedom of other peoples." Those justifications followed once the country was already involved. In the process of fighting for our own national interests, we also happened to be defending the cause of the "liberty and freedom of other peoples," but had we not been provoked and had our government not already been so eager to intervene America would not have done much in the way of fighting on behalf of others' freedom. The reasons given for our involvement in the world wars were those of self-defense and retaliation, just as other nations were technically fulfilling their treaty obligations to allied states or fighting in self-defense as well.

Permit me to recommend Anatol Lieven's "America, Right or Wrong...An Anatomy of American Nationalism". I think you'd appreciate the fellow's work.

foofie said

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That's not my job to criticize my country, nor should it be my job.

That's an interesting understanding of the relationship between citizen and his/her government. I assume the principle would hold true for an Iranian or a North Korean or, a tg alluded, for a german citizen in 1935?