Page 3 - The (Un)American Way (Political Thread - Danger! Danger!)

Dev Shed Forums Sponsor:

#31

October 18th, 2002, 07:09 PM

realnowhereman

Not there when you need me

Join Date: Oct 2001

Location: Berlin, Germany

Posts: 1,438

Time spent in forums: 17 m 46 sec
Reputation Power: 9

Neither of the words you have highlighted refer to "Yah". As for the separation of churches and state, it is implied by the structure defined in that constitution - since no power is given to any church, the churches are powerless and hence not part of the structure of political power, i. e. the state.

#32

October 18th, 2002, 07:15 PM

Ctb

An Ominous Coward

Join Date: Jan 2002

Posts: 4,425

Time spent in forums: 3 Weeks 10 h
Reputation Power: 0

I think this thread is lost...

Number of my threads to ever stay on topic in this forum to date: 0

Number of minutes left to begin RH 8.0 install process: ~ 12 (burning ISOs now)

#33

October 18th, 2002, 08:12 PM

riv

Contributing User

Join Date: May 2001

Posts: 464

Time spent in forums: 1 h 53 m 29 sec
Reputation Power: 8

Well it's just a slight deviation but still on-topic.

Hey, does your clown has 4 eyes?!

__________________
Words must be weighed, not counted.

#34

October 18th, 2002, 08:23 PM

jpenn

Contributing User

Join Date: Jun 2002

Location: Washington, DC

Posts: 2,693

Time spent in forums: 5 h 41 m 10 sec
Reputation Power: 16

Quote:

I think this thread is lost...

Number of my threads to ever stay on topic in this forum to date: 0

Number of minutes left to begin RH 8.0 install process: ~ 12 (burning ISOs now)

Hey, my replies were on topic.......

__________________
~ Joe Penn

#35

October 18th, 2002, 09:44 PM

Eclipce

Contributing User

Join Date: Sep 2000

Posts: 763

Time spent in forums: 1 Day 5 h 48 m 41 sec
Reputation Power: 0

Show me where "separation of churches and state" is "implied". To fully explain those highlights you have to go back and read our founding fathers writings. I would recommend Original Intent by David Barton.

__________________
Baptism By The Scriptures | Fifty Objections to Baptism Answered | HTML Bible | God's Salvation Plan

Lifetime Residual Income

Last edited by Eclipce : October 21st, 2002 at 05:21 PM.

#36

October 18th, 2002, 09:57 PM

Sepodati

Banned

Dev Shed God 19th Plane (14000 - 14499 posts)

Join Date: Dec 1999

Location: Afghanistan

Posts: 14,401

Folding Points: 79571 Folding Title: Intermediate Folder

Time spent in forums: 2 Months 4 Weeks 1 Day 14 h 32 m 22 sec
Reputation Power: 2089

Quote:

Originally posted by roninblade
the world is run by crooks, thats why its all going to hell.

I'm driving the bus, ya'll can ride with me if you want. It's free...just let me know...

---John Holmes...

#37

October 18th, 2002, 10:41 PM

Ted Striker

Contributing User

Join Date: Jan 2002

Posts: 409

Time spent in forums: < 1 sec
Reputation Power: 7

Quote:

The psychology of weakness is easy enough to understand. A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger, inasmuch as the alternative — hunting the bear armed only with a knife — is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes a tolerable risk. Why should he risk being mauled to death if he doesn’t need to?

This perfectly normal human psychology is helping to drive a wedge between the United States and Europe today. Europeans have concluded, reasonably enough, that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is more tolerable for them than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, have reasonably enough developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction, especially after September 11. Europeans like to say that Americans are obsessed with fixing problems, but it is generally true that those with a greater capacity to fix problems are more likely to try to fix them than those who have no such capability. Americans can imagine successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore more than 70 percent of Americans apparently favor such action. Europeans, not surprisingly, find the prospect both unimaginable and frightening.

Europeans often point to American insularity and parochialism. But Europeans themselves have turned intensely introspective.

But many Europeans, including many in positions of power, routinely apply Europe’s experience to the rest of the world. The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice.

Nor should we forget that the Europe of today is very much the product of American foreign policy stretching back over six decades. European integration was an American project, too, after World War II.

In the late 1930s the common conviction of Americans was that “the European system was basically rotten, that war was endemic on that continent, and the Europeans had only themselves to blame for their plight.” By the early 1940s Europe appeared to be nothing more than the overheated incubator of world wars that cost America dearly.

The presence of American forces as a security guarantee in Europe was, as it was intended to be, the critical ingredient to begin the process of European integration.

Europe’s evolution to its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and such internal threats as may have been posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the solution of the German problem and perhaps still is. Germany’s Fischer, in the Humboldt University speech, noted two “historic decisions” that made the new Europe possible: “the usa’s decision to stay in Europe” and “France’s and Germany’s commitment to the principle of integration, beginning with economic links.” But of course the latter could never have occurred without the former.

But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it.

The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that United States military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, are outmoded and dangerous.

What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others.

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html

__________________
PostgreSQL -- the power of Oracle without the $15,000 pricetag.

FreeBSD powers Yahoo!

Last edited by Ted Striker : October 18th, 2002 at 10:47 PM.

#38

October 18th, 2002, 11:31 PM

jpenn

Contributing User

Join Date: Jun 2002

Location: Washington, DC

Posts: 2,693

Time spent in forums: 5 h 41 m 10 sec
Reputation Power: 16

Good good thread Ted, but an even better one. This one here was a radio address that went highly publicized in 1973, the year I was born. Oh, the kicker, it wasn't even by us, it was by the Canadians. So, for all the non believers that do not believe in our culture or way of life, take some notes from this article also.....

Quote:

Gordon Sinclair
Radio Station CFBR 1010
2 St. Clair Avenue West
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

"LET'S BE PERSONAL"
Broadcast June 5, 1973
CFRB, Toronto, Ontario
Topic: "The Americans"

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany. It has declined there by 41% since 1971 and this Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least-appreciated people in all the earth.

As long as sixty years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of floods on the Yellow River and the Yangtse. Who rushed in with men and money to help? The Americans did.

They have helped control floods on the Nile, the Amazon, the Ganges and the Niger. Today, the rich bottom land of the Misssissippi is under water and no foreign land has sent a dollar to help. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy, were lifted out of the debris of war by the Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. None of those countries is today paying even the interest on its remaining debts to the United States.

When the franc was in danger of collapsing in 1956, it was the Americans who propped it up and their reward was to be insulted and swindled on the streets of Paris. I was there. I saw it.

When distant cities are hit by earthquakes, it is the United States that hurries into help... Managua Nicaragua is one of the most recent examples. So far this spring, 59 American communities have been flattened by tornadoes. Nobody has helped.

The Marshall Plan .. the Truman Policy .. all pumped billions upon billions of dollars into discouraged countries. Now, newspapers in those countries are writing about the decadent war-mongering Americans.

I'd like to see one of those countries that is gloating over the erosion of the United States dollar build its own airplanes.

Come on... let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 107? If so, why don't they fly them? Why do all international lines except Russia fly American planes? Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon?

You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find men on the moon, not once, but several times ... and safely home again. You talk about scandals and the Americans put theirs right in the store window for everyone to look at. Even the draft dodgers are not pursued and hounded. They are here on our streets, most of them ... unless they are breaking Canadian laws .. are getting American dollars from Ma and Pa at home to spend here.

When the Americans get out of this bind ... as they will... who could blame them if they said 'the hell with the rest of the world'. Let someone else buy the Israel bonds, Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won't shake apart in earthquakes.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. When the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central went broke, nobody loaned them an old caboose. Both are still broke. I can name to you 5,000 times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble.

Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble? I don't think there was outside help even during the San Francisco earthquake.

Our neighbours have faced it alone and I am one Canadian who is damned tired of hearing them kicked around. They will come out of this thing with their flag high. And when they do, they are entitled to thumb their nose at the lands that are gloating over their present troubles.

I hope Canada is not one of these. But there are many smug, self-righteous Canadians. And finally, the American Red Cross was told at its 48th Annual meeting in New Orleans this morning that it was broke.

This year's disasters .. with the year less than half-over… has taken it all and nobody...but nobody... has helped.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ORIGINAL SCRIPT
COURTESY STANDARD BROADCASTING CORPORATION LTD.
(c) 1973 BY GORDON SINCLAIR
PUBLISHED BY STAR QUALITY MUSIC (SOCAN)
A DIVISION OF UNIDISC MUSIC INC.
578 HYMUS BOULEVARD
POINTE-CLAIRE, QUEBEC,
CANADA, H9R 4T2

As I bolded that one statement, it is true for the present time. It don't matter who is with us or who isn't with us, it don't matter, our current president will go down in history as the key contributor of ridding this world of global terrorism and in helping making the world a better place to live.....

#39

October 19th, 2002, 08:23 AM

realnowhereman

Not there when you need me

Join Date: Oct 2001

Location: Berlin, Germany

Posts: 1,438

Time spent in forums: 17 m 46 sec
Reputation Power: 9

Eclipce:

Quote:

Show me where "separation of churches and state" is "implied".

As explained, it is implied by granting no power to any churches.

Ted Striker:

Yeah, nice text. But the obvious problem is that the author, while admitting that it is the readiness/reluctance to use brute force and the difference in political instruments that makes the gap between the USA and the EU, goes on to argue solely on the basis of military power, which, as he himself points out, is of another importance to the EU than to the USA.

Btw, it is an interesting aspect of both US and EU ignorance that when they - or their people - say "Europe" they actually mean the EC territory, give or take a few neutral states, whereas Europe may well start in the Atlantic, but ends in the Ural mountains.

jpenn:

Quote:

Come on... let's hear it! Does any other country in the world have a plane to equal the Boeing Jumbo Jet, the Lockheed Tristar or the Douglas 107?

Yes, we do.

Quote:

Why does no other land on earth even consider putting a man or women on the moon?

Because it was clear even before the first man went to space (a Soviet Armed Air Forces pilot, btw - the first man in space did not eat hamburgers) that there was nothing to be found on the moon.

Btw, Korea war, Vietnam war, the Cold War. All these US in(ter)ventions forced other countries to use people and money on these issues which could have been used better (e. g. for building Communism).

Quote:

It don't matter who is with us or who isn't with us, it don't matter, our current president will go down in history as the key contributor of ridding this world of global terrorism and in helping making the world a better place to live.

In your history books, maybe. Over here he'll be remembered as the cowboy who would have found it difficult to talk about international treaties for five minutes.

#40

October 19th, 2002, 09:04 AM

rod k

Apprentice Deity

Join Date: Jul 1999

Location: Niagara Falls (On the wrong side of the gorge)

Posts: 3,237

Time spent in forums: 4 m 8 sec
Reputation Power: 13

Quote:

Yes, we do.

In case you missed it, the article was written in 1973. Airbus was an infant at the time and hadn't made anything past a prototype yet.

Quote:

Because it was clear even before the first man went to space (a Soviet Armed Air Forces pilot, btw - the first man in space did not eat hamburgers) that there was nothing to be found on the moon.

"The journey is more important than the destination." The things learned in the attempt have enriched lives, even if "there was nothing to be found on the moon."

Quote:

which could have been used better (e. g. for building Communism).

I see, the communists were justified in spending those resources to expand communism by force.

Quote:

Over here he'll be remembered as the cowboy who would have found it difficult to talk about international treaties for five minutes.

I have problems with Dubya, but this jab annoys the hell out of me. He's not an eloquent speaker, big friggin deal. Not being eloquent does not mean incapable. Being eloquent doesn't make you a good decision maker. Hitler was eloquent.

__________________
FSBO (For Sale By Owner) Realty

#41

October 19th, 2002, 10:05 AM

Eclipce

Contributing User

Join Date: Sep 2000

Posts: 763

Time spent in forums: 1 Day 5 h 48 m 41 sec
Reputation Power: 0

*taps foot* I am still waiting for that proof about the "separation of churches and state" being "implied".

Last edited by Eclipce : October 19th, 2002 at 10:08 AM.

#42

October 19th, 2002, 11:20 AM

realnowhereman

Not there when you need me

Join Date: Oct 2001

Location: Berlin, Germany

Posts: 1,438

Time spent in forums: 17 m 46 sec
Reputation Power: 9

rod k:

Quote:

Originally posted by rod k
In case you missed it, the article was written in 1973.

I did not miss it. However, the point is that even if (western) Europe did not have such aircraft in '73, it has now. By the way, iirc the Tornado - a quite effective bomber - was built in the 70s and, to name another example, the Vulcan was built in 50s. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Curtain (but still in Europe), many other masterpieces have been produced. (I'd rather not try to name even the most important, since this would be too OT.)

Quote:

"The journey is more important than the destination." The things learned in the attempt have enriched lives, even if "there was nothing to be found on the moon."

Almost all aspects of that journey were already described by Tziolkovsky.

Quote:

I see, the communists were justified in spending those resources to expand communism by force.

Definitely not. However, if they were to survive the hostility of the USA, they had to secure ground - after all, having nukes at one's front door is not exactly a situation in which one is able to live in peace.

Quote:

The problem is that he does not seem to be an able politician in the international community. Other US presidents at least made clear that they were aware of violations of international laws and treaties. Bush acts as if they don't exist. Whether eloquently or not, Bush should try to respect other nations, not just to consider them either friends, foes or just in the way. The USA make so few friends out there because they consider themselves special in comparison to everyone else. From the Chinese or Russian point of view, there is - apart from the threat of mutual destruction - no good reason to accept that.

Eclipce:

The proof is that no power is given to any church. Can you prove the contrary? Btw, I'm still waiting for those "words of god" which you mentioned which say that the USA should be a republic, not a democracy.