[quote]Big_Boss wrote:
Not to sway off subject…but have you lived in the US, Vroom? Just curious.[/quote]
Only for about a decade of my life including both coasts as well as Texas. I’ve also travelled “worldwide” for business, so I’ve been lucky enough to see a few things.
[quote]vroom wrote:
Big_Boss wrote:
Not to sway off subject…but have you lived in the US, Vroom? Just curious.
Only for about a decade of my life including both coasts as well as Texas. I’ve also travelled “worldwide” for business, so I’ve been lucky enough to see a few things.[/quote]
Cool, at least you have the perspective to have the opinions you do…unlike those who have never lived here.
[quote]thunderbolt23 wrote:
My way of looking at it - the fact that we have such rabid anti-American sniveling for the sake of sniveling shows how our robust self-audit system works. We should be proud of it. I will say that sooner or later, such radical garbage grinds on rational folks, and the “market” for such nonsense takes over and people move on to better conversations elsewhere - bad ideas die a natural death - but the silver lining is that we have such a market available to us.
[/quote]
Very perceptive statement.
[quote]vroom wrote:
You can’t sit and watch the news and decide what other cultures are like.
What a fucking idiot![/quote]
Then why do other countries compare our foreign policy to American film stars or fictional movie characters? John Wayne or Rambo come to mind.
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
Then why do other countries compare our foreign policy to American film stars or fictional movie characters? John Wayne or Rambo come to mind.[/quote]
The ones that do judge your foreign policy based on movies are, as Vroom put it out, fuckin’ idiots. That said, others rely on history books, government’s documents and journalists’ reports. Those deserve some credit.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Neuromancer wrote:
It has convinced me that there is more merit in societies that care about the less lucky and the downtrodden than there is those that don’t.
So those who bust ass don’t gather any concern? You see, there’s the trouble with non-capitalist cultures: they place value on failure.
Failure, lack, cannot be a value. Its an absence of something. It has no merit.
“Pity makes suffering contagious.”
— Aristotle
Note that this is different than compassion. Those who suffer and are abused, like most honest businessmen are in this world, get lots of compassion from me. However, I have no compassion for the lazy and incompetent.
[/quote]
Are the two concerns mutually exclusive?
And what is the measure of,and judgement criteria for,being incompetent?
I’m sure everyone on these boards have met or know many people that are incompetent as human beings.Probably most of those that read these boards,(myself included)are incompetent as human beings…
I don’t know about anyone else,but I would rather try to be a competent father,husband,son or friend and be perceived as lazy and incompetent in other areas than vice versa.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
If the McDonald’s had, as an axiom, that I could order what I wanted, but the other restaurants wanted to decide what I eat, that I can only eat what they give me, I would refuse to eat there, no matter how nutritiously the poor slaves and serfs prepared the dishes.
Do you realize the moral import of offering food in free exchange for money, btw? McDonald’s and I are free to trade as we wish. No Hugo Chavez or Robert Mugabe has any voice.
I’ll take the McDonald’s.
I suppose I could have used Burger King in my metaphor. McDonalds, with its “You Deserve a Break Today” could have represented your notion of the socialist rest of the world, and Burger King, with its axiom of “Have it Your Way” could have represented your idealized notion of America. This metaphor would have more closely aligned with what I imagine your worldview to be.
But in the real world, there is more variety than burgers and fries, and believe it or not, other restaurants really do have better food and service, and they’ll even let you order things that aren’t on the menu, if you know how to ask.
[/quote]
Hmmm…let’s play with another analogy…
In high school, you meet the absolutely most perfect woman for you — bright, funny, moral, just an all around magnificent person. You marry and are having a wonderful life together.
Then, one day, you decide that it’s a wide wonderful world and you want to experience all sorts of different women. You leave your wife and kids and decide to wander the world in search of something better. Afterall, how do you know your wife and kids are great if you don’t go out and have lots of women and lots of kids all around the world?
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
vroom wrote:
You can’t sit and watch the news and decide what other cultures are like.
What a fucking idiot!
Then why do other countries compare our foreign policy to American film stars or fictional movie characters? John Wayne or Rambo come to mind.[/quote]
When my wife and I adopted our little daughter from China, we had to get tested for HIV. The agency said that was a new rule since the Chinese judged all Americans as being sex crazed. They got that impression from our movies.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Headhunter, I don’t want to get on your case too much, because (unlike 99% of the other people on this board who disagree with you), I think you’re basically a good guy, if a bit provincial in your prejudices.
But I would like to suggest yet another book to you. This one is called Adventure Capitalist, written a couple years ago by Jim Rogers (“The Indiana Jones of Finance”). This man, who started the Quantum Fund along with George Soros, took two epic journeys around the world, the first on a BMW motorcycle, the second in a custom-made 4-wheel-drive canary yellow Mercedes-Benz convertible. Both of these treks made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
His bike adventure is chronicled in Investment Biker, and is a good read of its own, but it is the second book that I recommend to you. You may be surprised at his pronouncements: Bolivia is among the most financially advanced countries in the world, for example. The country with the most active and innovative capitalists is no other than Communist China. And the country with the most technologically advanced internet and telecommunications infrastructure is, of all places, Mongolia.
There really is another world beyond Big Macs, Large Fries and Mac Shakes, my friend. And John Galt would tell you the same.[/quote]
That book really bothered me. He kept saying he “drove” his motorcycle.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Hmmm…let’s play with another analogy…
In high school, you meet the absolutely most perfect woman for you — bright, funny, moral, just an all around magnificent person. You marry and are having a wonderful life together.
Then, one day, you decide that it’s a wide wonderful world and you want to experience all sorts of different women. You leave your wife and kids and decide to wander the world in search of something better. Afterall, how do you know your wife and kids are great if you don’t go out and have lots of women and lots of kids all around the world?
[/quote]
Ah, but it wouldn’t be the case of me consciously choosing to marry this woman in high school, entering into the contract with fully informed consent.
Instead, it would be the case of me getting married to her in an arranged wedding only a few days after birth, and all throughout childhood was continually told what a wonderful, moral, bright, funny, perfect-in-every-way person she is, and how lucky I am to be her loving husband.
Having never experienced another woman, and therefore having no basis for comparison, I would naturally assume this to be the truth.
As the marriage progresses, however, and she becomes increasingly fatter, uglier, and more abusive, the increasingly shrill voices around me insisting that she is a fine woman, the cream of the crop, nobody in the world like her, et cetera et cetera start to ring less and less true in my ear.
And then when I meet someone who really lives up to all of the complimentary words I had heard all my life, and who genuinely seems to love me for my charming personality, and not for what I am able to provide her ever-increasing appetite, then perhaps you will forgive me for wanting a divorce.
And unless you are a Cherokee or an Inuit, Headhunter, your ancestors likely committed the same kind of adultery.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Hmmm…let’s play with another analogy…
In high school, you meet the absolutely most perfect woman for you — bright, funny, moral, just an all around magnificent person. You marry and are having a wonderful life together.
Then, one day, you decide that it’s a wide wonderful world and you want to experience all sorts of different women. You leave your wife and kids and decide to wander the world in search of something better. Afterall, how do you know your wife and kids are great if you don’t go out and have lots of women and lots of kids all around the world?
[/quote]
After that analogy with hamburgers this sounds very bad. Wifes and a hamburgers are not interchangeable.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
Hmmm…let’s play with another analogy…
In high school, you meet the absolutely most perfect woman for you — bright, funny, moral, just an all around magnificent person. You marry and are having a wonderful life together.
Then, one day, you decide that it’s a wide wonderful world and you want to experience all sorts of different women. You leave your wife and kids and decide to wander the world in search of something better. Afterall, how do you know your wife and kids are great if you don’t go out and have lots of women and lots of kids all around the world?
Ah, but it wouldn’t be the case of me consciously choosing to marry this woman in high school, entering into the contract with fully informed consent.
Instead, it would be the case of me getting married to her in an arranged wedding only a few days after birth, and all throughout childhood was continually told what a wonderful, moral, bright, funny, perfect-in-every-way person she is, and how lucky I am to be her loving husband.
Having never experienced another woman, and therefore having no basis for comparison, I would naturally assume this to be the truth.
As the marriage progresses, however, and she becomes increasingly fatter, uglier, and more abusive, the increasingly shrill voices around me insisting that she is a fine woman, the cream of the crop, nobody in the world like her, et cetera et cetera start to ring less and less true in my ear.
And then when I meet someone who really lives up to all of the complimentary words I had heard all my life, and who genuinely seems to love me for my charming personality, and not for what I am able to provide her ever-increasing appetite, then perhaps you will forgive me for wanting a divorce.
And unless you are a Cherokee or an Inuit, Headhunter, your ancestors likely committed the same kind of adultery.[/quote]
Sorry there, bud, ya lost me. Are you trying to say the America I love has become a shithole? I kind of can’t make head nor tail out of your post.
My judgments are based upon reading. For ex, the Japan where you live has a culture where, for hundreds or thousands of years, it would have been a joy for the natives to behead you (unless you are of Japanese ancestry).
Samurai would behead farmers and peasants FOR LOOKING AT THEM! It took a couple of atomic bombs and a sheer ass beating from America’s finest to civilise the bastards. Let’s see…a murderous feudal society for all its history up to 1945…then a peaceful democracy imposed by MacArthur…
I’ll take America.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Sorry there, bud, ya lost me. Are you trying to say the America I love has become a shithole? I kind of can’t make head nor tail out of your post.[/quote]
I was implying that the America I love has become fat, ugly and abusive, and that it is not the same country that it was when I fell in love with her.
You are a perceptive fellow, surely you have noticed it too, even if you won’t admit it.
I am not a total cad, however, so I won’t completely turn my back on my homeland. I believe that great nations have their ups and downs, and while the downs may last a few decades, I dearly want to believe that America is not yet out. So here I sit watching her from across the Pacific, waiting for a change in the weather. [quote]
My judgments are based upon reading. For ex, the Japan where you live has a culture where, for hundreds or thousands of years, it would have been a joy for the natives to behead you (unless you are of Japanese ancestry).
Samurai would behead farmers and peasants FOR LOOKING AT THEM! [/quote]
I see we’ve read the same book. A fine writer, James Clavell.
[quote]It took a couple of atomic bombs and a sheer ass beating from America’s finest to civilise the bastards.
[/quote]
Nah, much less than that. A couple of loud discharges of six-inch naval cannon by Commodore Perry’s flagship into Yokohama bay was all it took to do the job, and within two decades they were more civilized than we were. [quote]
Let’s see…a murderous feudal society for all its history up to 1945…[/quote]
Well, no. Feudalism lasted for only about seven hundred years (a bit longer, it’s true, than in England), and ended in 1886, not long after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853… at the very town where I now reside, by the way.
(It’s great, in 2003 they put up a life-size bronze statue of the man right near the harbor, and a plaque dedicated by President George W. Bush himself commemorates 150 years of American-Japanese friendship). [quote]
then a peaceful democracy imposed by MacArthur…[/quote]
Yeah, we could use a man like MacArthur in Iraq. Nobody seems to know how to successfully impose a peaceful democracy on anyone anymore.
[quote]I’ll take America.
[/quote]
And I’ll take the peaceful democracy. It’s a deal.
[quote]Varqanir wrote:
I am not a total cad, however, so I won’t completely turn my back on my homeland. I believe that great nations have their ups and downs, and while the downs may last a few decades, I dearly want to believe that America is not yet out. So here I sit watching her from across the Pacific, waiting for a change in the weather.
My judgments are based upon reading. For ex, the Japan where you live has a culture where, for hundreds or thousands of years, it would have been a joy for the natives to behead you (unless you are of Japanese ancestry).
Samurai would behead farmers and peasants FOR LOOKING AT THEM!
I see we’ve read the same book. A fine writer, James Clavell.
It took a couple of atomic bombs and a sheer ass beating from America’s finest to civilise the bastards.
Nah, much less than that. A couple of loud discharges of six-inch naval cannon by Commodore Perry’s flagship into Yokohama bay was all it took to do the job, and within two decades they were more civilized than we were.
Let’s see…a murderous feudal society for all its history up to 1945…
Well, no. Feudalism lasted for only about seven hundred years (a bit longer, it’s true, than in England), and ended in 1886, not long after the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853… at the very town where I now reside, by the way.
(It’s great, in 2003 they put up a life-size bronze statue of the man right near the harbor, and a plaque dedicated by President George W. Bush himself commemorates 150 years of American-Japanese friendship).
then a peaceful democracy imposed by MacArthur…
Yeah, we could use a man like MacArthur in Iraq. Nobody seems to know how to successfully impose a peaceful democracy on anyone anymore.
I’ll take America.
And I’ll take the peaceful democracy. It’s a deal.
[/quote]
One of my colleagues lived in Japan for 4 years and was married to a Japanese man. She spoke fluent Japanese and had 2 sons with him. She is blond and blue-eyed. In America, she is an attractive lady.
In Japan, she tells how Japanese who did not know her would cross the street to avoid her. The neighborhood moms would not let their children play with the GAI-JIN children. Once, in a minor traffic accident, a Japanese man who hit her car (she was sitting still in a traffic jam) began screaming racial insults at her, until she spoke Japanese. The cop who came assumed she was at fault.
Unless you are Japanese, they are smiling at you while wishing they could nail your guts to a tree and make you run around it.
I’ll take America. It’s a deal.
Headhunter, what I’d try to say, is that while America is great, so are many other places. They all have their features.
Bellyaching about perceived policies as reported by your media as reasons your country is “better” is a fools game.
Also, looking backwards to find attrocities is a fools game. Any great power has committed plenty, including the US, and generally we don’t sit around condemning them.
The further back you go the more things were different - the decisions made were more reflective of those times. This is also true in the US. It’s the way the world works.
Fact is that 90% of bloggers and forum respondants are there to complain rather than point out a positive or create a fair “debate”.
It’s like the unsatified customer who tells 20 people about their negative experience, yet when he has a positive one, does he ever yell to the world how good it was? Nope.
Wow… You lot are mean 
I post lots of stuff about America. Not about Americans but about its Government, sure. I post about mine too when it pisses me off. Doesn’t make me anti-British or Anti-American. That said, it winds me up somewhat when people here latch on to such outmoded stereotypes (although to be honest it terrifies me when I start reading some of the gun worship threads, but different cultures I guess) and use them to pigeonhole tens or hundreds of millions of people. I don’t care if you’re an American, a Brit, an Iraqi, a Christian, a Hindu a homosexual or a sheep-shagger.
Ya gotta take each person as they come. This is one of the reasons it drives me insane when people refer to me as a liberal. Nope! I’m a person who has his own ideas about right and wrong and good and bad. I don’t support a political party like a football team. But straight away I get called a liberal and am lumped in with others as though I had chosen a ‘side’. To clarify - In essence I think they are all a waste of space and all liars. But if I had to choose a liar, I’m gonna go with the one who is at least lying about stuff that is important to me.
Back on subject - All these labels and appellations are meaningless. The world is very clearly, and much more simply, divided into pricks and non-pricks. End of story.
However, the problem stems from the fact that these demarcations (spelling?) are like shifting sands, as many people straddle the divide and constantly move from one camp to another. For me, the answer is to weed out the pricks, make friends with some of the non-pricks, and pick and choose the right times with the sometimes pricks.
Also for anyone being mean about my home - London is currently regarded as the home of the world’s best restaurants. I may be off here, but I believe the UK currently has more Michelin Star establishments than anywhere else, no? Or it did until recently. But yes, we do like some really shitty fast food - not that we have the monopoly on that!
I’m sure I had a point. Oh yeah… The REASON I might post on here, about contentious subjects like politics or war or religion, is because as it is a totally international forum (despite its origins), it’s makeup all has different experiences and opinions that I might otherwise never be made privy to, and as such for the brief periods when polite, if heated, debate wins out over mindless name calling - it can indeed be fascinating and occasionally - enlightening.
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
One of my colleagues lived in Japan for 4 years and was married to a Japanese man. She spoke fluent Japanese and had 2 sons with him. She is blond and blue-eyed. In America, she is an attractive lady.
In Japan, she tells how Japanese who did not know her would cross the street to avoid her. The neighborhood moms would not let their children play with the GAI-JIN children. Once, in a minor traffic accident, a Japanese man who hit her car (she was sitting still in a traffic jam) began screaming racial insults at her, until she spoke Japanese. The cop who came assumed she was at fault.
Unless you are Japanese, they are smiling at you while wishing they could nail your guts to a tree and make you run around it.
I’ll take America. It’s a deal.
[/quote]
Something tells me that in an accident involving an American driver and an Asian driver in the US, most Americans will assume the Asian driver to be at fault.
As much lip service as To Kill A Mockingbird may ever get, white Americans are never so shocked or morally outraged by the reality of racism as when they finally get a taste of it for themselves, attractive blonde females in particular.
[quote]Valentinius wrote:
How bout Lixy buys something, then they release his info, and I stomp a mudhole in his ass?
[/quote]
Ahahahahahahahahahaha!
[quote]Sabrina wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
One of my colleagues lived in Japan for 4 years and was married to a Japanese man. She spoke fluent Japanese and had 2 sons with him. She is blond and blue-eyed. In America, she is an attractive lady.
In Japan, she tells how Japanese who did not know her would cross the street to avoid her. The neighborhood moms would not let their children play with the GAI-JIN children. Once, in a minor traffic accident, a Japanese man who hit her car (she was sitting still in a traffic jam) began screaming racial insults at her, until she spoke Japanese. The cop who came assumed she was at fault.
Unless you are Japanese, they are smiling at you while wishing they could nail your guts to a tree and make you run around it.
I’ll take America. It’s a deal.
Something tells me that in an accident involving an American driver and an Asian driver in the US, most Americans will assume the Asian driver to be at fault.
[/quote]
Probably not if she’s an attractive blond.