Commie Paradise

Set!!!

Nice to see you, fellow. Now, please join us in NY. Free drugs.

What have I got to do to join you guys for free drugs? Vacuum? Drive? (oh well maybe not drive) Serve in some way ?

This is what America will look like if Bush and company get their way on environmental policies IMO.

bvt

Arrival is the minimal requirement.

No mon, no fun, hon.

You guys amaze me.

I mean, when you look at a picture of Pittsburgh in 47 you've got to realize that they were still winding down from the incredible effort of WW-II in which Pittsburgh had been producing the steel to build 100 aircraft carriers, battleships with 16" of steel armor plate all the way around, tanks, and everything else necessary to win that war.

Maybe what you really need to look at is a picture of what much of the United States might have looked like if we'd lost it:



I mean, Pittsburgh has been totally cleaned up since then and there is nothing in America which looks like that anymore. What the hell is North Korea's excuse for having the capital of their nation look like that in 2005?

it doesn't. north korea is an economically and morally bankrupt place. i don't see anyone defending it, though.

Gunga, quite the extemist there.

To gungasnake, anyone to the left of Ann Coulter is a Stalinist.

I thought this thread was going to lead to able2know being a commie paradise.

My second thought was a lead up to try and get a debate about fighting North Korea or something.

What is it leading to?

Yeah, they were still making steel for aircraft carriers in Downtown Pittsburgh in 1947. Sure, uh uh. yep, it must be true.. Gunga said it was...

Or maybe Pittsburgh was stuck in a weather inversion for 2 years. Yeah. that's it. The weather didn't change for 2 years in Pittsburgh. No winter or summer for 2 years.. just the same grey all that time.

I don't know what exactly they were doing with the steel in 47 but you don't wind down from something like that easily or in a week or a month. Aside from that WW-II left the United States in the position of being the only industrialized nation with its manufacturing infrastructure completely intact and whatever we WERE building with steel from Pittsburgh for the next several years, we were having to build for a lot of people and countries and not just for ourselves.

revel, my thought exactly. huh? pittsburg? pyong yang? what's this conversation supposed to be *really* about? communism? bring it! differences between conservatism, liberalism (in american sense), liberalism (in european sense), socialism, communism? i'm all for it. if it's about how communism in north korea is bad and wrong, well that's a futile thread then. not much to argue there.

I woulda said, just going on the first post, that that's pretty much what it was about: "here, picture I came across, from N-Korea, pretty shocking, look at it." Nothing much to argue with that, exactly, I wouldnt have thought. But people like to have something to argue about I guess, especially if someone particularly notorious brings a point - cant just agree with a guy like that. So an argument is started, tho nobody knows much what its supposed to be about - I mean, noone would be as crazy as to say N-Korea is not a dreadful place - but seein' how you also dont just want to consent with another episode in Gunga's obvious leftie-bashing you ... what? Relativate it anyway? Make some kind of far-fetched comparison (with Boston, Frisco) in order to defend something Gunga wasn't in this case attacking, but you know he would like to? Board dynamics are weird sometimes.

Now there is something to be said about the whole of what we here tend to call "typical East-European". With that, after all, we (still) mean someplace drab and grey and industrial or bureaucratic-looking, or some landscape of bombastic concrete, big empty boulevards down unimaginative highrises. Or those characteristically lived-through faces, worn out and individual, involved in some Balkanesque wheeling or dealing or bent on a bench. There is something to be said about all that because just the other week I was again browsing through a beautiful book of photos from Amsterdam in the 1950s, early 60s, and damn if it wasnt exactly like what I imagine East-Berlin muct have looked like up to the eighties. What we call(ed) 'typically Eastern Bloc' is as much about distance in time as about place.

But N-Korea, again, is a wholly different story, scope, dimension, I woulda said. This thread in any case I just took as an in fact really beautiful photo of something obviously deeply dismal. Quite affecting. Nothing much to say or do with that, at all - except d/l the photo.

If this board ends up being about about big city pollution, well other than some plants and things, being in southern kentucky and not really getting around anywhere else, I don't have much to add.

We did have coal mines that were pretty polluted but most of them have been shut down and now we are left with half way redone lands that have a weird beauty all on their own, I think anyway.

We also have a few power plants and other kinds of plants that I really don't have any knowledge of.

About a mile and half from us there is a power plant that used to be a coal mine. I have personally always felt it was never managed right as everyone around here has always had allergies and headaches. But then I always think too much sometimes without all the facts and just go on gut instincts.

Also I kind of see it from the other side in some cases when it comes to private personal land.

I mean I personally know a man who has been fighting the environmental agency for years just to be able to keep clearing his yard. They claim that it is a wet land when it was not originally but after all the coal mines it just kind of went in that direction. (don't really understand it) I wish they would let him clear it off because that swamp causes floods on the roads and a lot of bugs and things in the area.

I guess I did have a little to add.