When They say "I hate America", what do you think They mean?

caprice, As an active member of A2K, dry reading is a necessary evil.

Well, I think I am a good guy too. I think you are as well (perhaps just a smidgeon less...)

There is a difference between disagreement over specific issues and criticism of the nature or character of your interlocutor. The latter seems to be (here at least) the special province of our critics, especially the Canadian ones. America and Americans have many defects, perhaps some among those being cited here. I have no doubt we can sometimes be annoying to others, just as they can have a similar effect on us. We however seem to be a good deal less fixated on these things than do our critics.

Your example of U.S. attempts to persuade Cadada to spend more on defense presents a good example. We each have treaty obligations to come to one another's defense if necessary. We have for some time expressed concerns about Canada's ability to back up the bargain it made with us. Canada's defense spending has long been among the lowest in NATO, and by a wide margin. We don't complain that Canada or Canadians have some kind of character defect, or that Canada is in the grip of pot smoking evangelicals from BC: instead we express disagreement over a specific issue. That is certainly our right, and, it seems to me, is far less intrusive and presumptious than making sweeping judgements about your national character.

Blatham
I was going to go do a search for the information stating that certain amounts of marijuana is already decriminalized in some states in the US, but you beat me to it. Thanks for doing the leg work ;-)

george
Canada was talking about decriminalizing much less amounts of marijuana that are already decriminalized in some of your states and the laws were not going to change on amounts larger than the very small amount and on cultivation of marijuana, so your arguement on how strict they would have to become at the US borders falls apart there. Canada was not talking about making it legal and was simply trying to prevent people from jamming up the courts and giving people criminal records over a small about of pot.

Now I have to go find an article that mentions Cellucci's threat to Canada for refusing to back the US in their invasion on Iraq, since you've been dancing around that one.

Montana,

I'll readily confess I have no knowledge of either who Cellucci is (I infer from your posts that he may be our Ambassador) or what he may have said and in what context. I think the subject we are discussing here goes well beyond that matter.

We see the ambassadors of France, Germany and other nations on our news medi quite frequently explaining their disagreements with our policies and outlining the expected actions their governments will take to oppose them. The French have gotten to many Americans (even that is a passing thing now), but otherwise we tend to deal with issues as they arise, and not the actors who raise them.

Yes it "can be said" to be that way. Only if you engage in semantics yourself.

There is a clear precendent for "pre-emption". In the past it was just "kill them first". Pre-emption and "kill them first" are a horse of a different colour.

To equate the two is to compare modern execution to primitive lynchings. While comparable in the act it ignores the criterias and procedures established with civilization.

This is hardly a semantic issue George. Any more so than ignoring law is.

I doin't follow you Craven. Civilization is several millenia old now and armed attacks by one nation, state, or tribe upon another have been going on all that time. How do you term the group that initiates hostilities? Did they preempt? Or are there some factors that can justify an initial attack and make it somehow not a "preemption"? If so what are those factors, and what is yoiur basis for asserting them? Don't just trot ot recent notions of the proximate danger of grevious injury. There is little basis in history, recent or otherwise to support that standard. Moreover one must deal with the questions of just what constitutes proximate and what constitutes grevious injury. Did the UK and France preempt at Suez in 1956? Did France preempt in their recent intervention in the Ivory Coast? Did the Soviet Union preempt in Hungary and Czechoslovakia? Did the Sandanista government of Nicaragua which supplied and directed the revolutionary movement in El Salvador preempt? Did either India or China preempt in their Himalayan war of a few decades ago? Pakistan and India? Zimbabwe in the Congo? etc.etc.

Found this and thought it explains a whole lot about why a lot of Canadians feel the way we do.

It's a long read, but well worth it.

george
If you really want to know what our beef is, please read this.

http://www.canadianactionparty.ca/MainPages/News.asp?Type=secNonParty%20OR%20secParty&ID=257&Language=English

Ok, her's the short version. I don't really want to get into this discussion so this'll be my last word on it here.

Yes, nations have always "pre-empted" each other.

Just like execution has always existed.

But in modern civilization there are precedents and guidelines.

So while in the past a neighbourhood lynching was, indeed, an execution, it is not comparable to modern executions with law, criteria and procedures specifying how it should be carried out.

The same is the case in "pre-emption". In the past nations did not care a whit about the justifications for it. In modern civilization there are precedents and criteria to follow.

What I'm saying is that justifications for anticipatory defense and the very notion of "pre-emption" in modern society comes from the 1800s.

Before that it was just "let's kill them first" with no concern for the justification of "anticipatory defence".

And if you disagree, I'm perfectly fine with that. I don't want to pick nits right now. And if I get into it later it'll be on the thread about that I liked to above.

Jesus, I can't believe he printed that. Mel Hurtig is the leader of a political party, he is/was the publisher of a small printer, i'm not sure how you say it, he published books, but the company has been in and out of the red for years. He is a wing-nut.
Please, while some of his statistics and information is basically correct on some level, it's a pretty skewed, narrow minded view of the Canadian - American relationship. His opinion may mirror a small percentage of the population, but you'd be hard pressed to hear this shite out of anyone's mouth.
I think the article is a valuable lesson on what 'hate' can do to a mind...................

Canadians are in the midst of trying to decriminalize posession of small amounts marijuana. We still bust the growers and the dealers. But why should a person have a criminal record or spend time in jail for a joint?
For example, Al Gore's son was recently busted for a very small amount. He will always have a record, if not in court documents but in the public memory.
Imagine the paper work, the costs; police, courts, lawyers, judges, jailers, ect...all for less than $30 of weed. Seems silly doesn't it?

Ceili, Seems downright criminal......for the government to spend so much for so little. We have "three strikes" law in California, and it's not a matter of a "little." We spend over $35,000 a year to house a prisoner with three strikes for I don't know how many years.....

Ceili
That is the first thing I've seen written by him, but I agree with everything he said in that article. I am not trying to push hate, but I do enjoy seeing anyone put Cellucci in his place. Before I moved to Canada from Mass, Cellucci was the governor of Massachusetts and he almost started a riot there before he was appointed ambassador by Bush. If Gore had become president, he said that Cellucci would be all done. After finally moving to Canada, I was relieved to be away from Cellucci the nut case and my heart dropped when I learned that he was coming to Canada as well. The man is insane and has no business being in the positions he's been in.

Paul Cellucci: Shut Up!

Taken from the link, "Where Mr. Cellucci went wrong, of course, is in his implication that Canada failed to come to the aid of the United States in its time of peril. There wasn't one; they were under no threat from Iraq, it was quite the opposite. The United States was not in peril; the United States WAS the peril."

This says it best; but we must remember that it's this president and the neo-cons that have brought this to our detriment. If we don't replace this group of thugs in November, I cry not only for our neighbors, but for the whole world.

Montana,

I read your link. Who is Mel Hurtig? Evidently he does represent some aspects of Canadian opinion. Generally I would say that much venom and anger is more apt to pollute the minds and spirits of those who entertain it than those to whom it is supposedly addressed. A pity.

He also has some rather odd ideas about economics. There is a well-developed international market for oil, and worldwide reserves have been growing at a rate equal to demand for over 50 years. There are plenty of alternate sources for petroleum. Canada enjoys a large trade surplus with the U.S., and any disruption of it would hurt Canada severely, and have only a very small effect on the much larger U.S. economy. I say this not at all as a threat, but merely to point out that Hurtig is a bit delusional.

The bits about our late entry into WWI and WWII were a little over the top. The U.S. escaped its colonial obligations to the UK a long time ago, and had nothing at all to do with the European stupidity and perfidy that created WWI and sowed the seeds for WWII - events that by overwhelming margins were the greatest disasters of the last century, and the reasons the U.S. is so dominant today.

His rage seems out of proportion even to the somewhat odd reasons he cites. Nice neighborly types you grow up there.

Caprice
LOL. More lovely thoughts about Paul Cellucci.

CI
Ditto!

george
That persons thoughts are not the thoughts of the majority of Canadians, although, some of it is. These are my thoughts because I was born and raised an American and have seen both sides of the street. I left the country because I was abused by my own government, so I lived it and got as far away from it as I could. Yes, those are my thoughts because I'm angry as hell after going through what I went through, but that's just me and I certainly don't speak for the Canadian people.

I don't hear Canadians badmouthing America in my neck of the woods, so please don't think that I speak for anyone but myself.

Do you have any links to prove what you're saying is true?

I read the relatively more restrained piece by Paul Harris. Certainly more in the mainstream of normal human disagreements and dispute.

However even there I noted a remarkably intense reaction to a speech, criticcal of some actions of the Canadian government, delivered to a group of businessmen in Toronto by the U.S. Ambassador. Even the somewhat restrained fury of Mr Harris seems to me a bit disproportionate compared to the many deliberate insults your previous Premier and his aides regularly delivered against our government over the last several years.

We often see reports in our media of similar speeches in the U.S. by the Ambassadors of France and occasionally Germany (although they are usually more circumspect and polite). They are reported but almost never ignite a reaction here.

What is the source of this - to me- very neurotic sensitivity?

george
You obviously have never been to Canada to see how very friendly and neighborly the people are here.

Peace is our middle name george.

Links don't necessarily constitute proof - lots of trash and misinformation on the web.

However for details on the amounts and classes of goods traded by Canada and the U.S. and on some details of the economys of each country, see the CIA World Fact Book at;

http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/index.html

For details of the history leading up to WWI and WWII see any of the many histories of the 20th century. I recommend "Modern Times" by Paul Johnson (an Englishman) and (for WWI) "The Guns of August" by the late American historian Barbara Tuchman.

george
You obviousy don't get any of the Canadian channels where you are because we not only see what's going on on our end, but we also see what's going on in your neck of the woods and what we see is obviously edited for American veiwing on your end. Did you see Bush in the news with all his blaming and finger pointing towards Canada after 9/11 up to this day? Well, we have seen it and we are getting a bit tired of it.