EDIT: 13000 views! Thanks, guys!
This is something that I want to post in the lounge, but I'm hoping the thread will die on it's own. It's that "A thought occured to me today", which seemed to decay into the depressing "I hate america so much" pattern that seems to be fairly characteristic. I am not a crazy patriot, but the generalizations about the United States are hard to take, especially with such blatant anti-american sentiment that seems to take on a life of it's own outside legitiment criticism.
The blame game is easy to play, like blaming the US for problems in the middle east, but it's just as easy to blame European colonialism for drawing arbritary lines across the region to make countries. You could even blame the middle east situation on the crusades and christianity, or maybe you should go back further to Ramses II for letting those damn jews escape and starting the whole mess. Mistakes have always been made, and this is nothing new.
I think it boils down to people are people, and how people act is based upon their situation. Switch some of the babies of Europe and the US, and I can't imagine things being any different if they were raised in the new country. The United States is now making enormous mistakes, and gets rightfully(for the most part) tons of flak, and a lot of it is from voices in the United States. In fact, a large majority of americans dissaprove of the war in Iraq, and a little more than half think it's hopeless. With that in mind, I find it hard to blame the country as a whole for problems, but that we should still work for a better future.
Anyway, I was pissed, so I decided to use satire(aimed mostly at Zahlman, who was frothing at Trzy). I have not posted this, but I almost did, and I thinks it's reasonably hilarious(said the unbiased author):
Quote: post in this thread and I think that all americans are total jerks!! i mean, there are poor people in amercia, I havent ever seen a homless guy from england or france or iran, so therefore amercia takes worse care of people always.
Id way rather live in russia, i mean, if you can't go to college after high school the government automaticaly give you a job in the army!1 how cool is that? they even get to send you to chechnya to meet new ppeople, for free!! I remember once hearing that chechnya was like a war that russia was having, but I haven't seen it mentioned here or on russian TV(which is state owned, so if there was problems they would know and tell ppl), so i don't think its important
And i think china is way more democratic than the USA is, look, it's even in there name "The People's Republic of China" i hear it's run all by the communist party, but i bet they listen to the other guys, which must be why they are in government custody all the time
the us should take back all it's military and stop spending money on it so that it can spend money on the unemployed, which i think maybe there will be a lot of without the army or "defense" conttractors, but i think it wont lasthat long. the old soldiers are probably all baby killers and war crminals anyway
if we stopped having amilitary then terrorism will stop to, because the terrorism was made to stop the army(its against al qaedas religion to have an army, which is why they are so mad, iirc) then the whole world will be safe, i mean the islam terrorists will stop when the Us stops, i think the muslims got it out of there systems against europe when those guys lit al those cars on fire in france. im pretty sure the problem is totally solved now
we should also stop having american corporations go other places to exploit the poor people by giving them such bad jobs, even if they want them because they are so poor. Americans are too blame for them being poor, to, i'm pretty sure a lot of the colonalism in the world was the fault of the Us. c'mon, we were a COLONY(colony=colonialism!!!!~), duh, names dont lie
plus the us has ahistory of killing innocent ppl, remember when we gave those blankets with smallpox to native amercians then most of them died. i think maybe that the guys who did that were from england, but they were amercians when they did that im pretty sure
we also had concentration camps in ww2 in the desert, whcih i think were way worse than the concentraion camps in germany because there is no water
It is my personal and unbiased opinion that this is geniusly written, but please disuade me lest I do something silly(like post f'real).
Oh, and as bad as it is here, I don't think I'd want to live anywhere else.
Especially the fact that the president is telling you that a war here and there would stop terrorism, and the majority of you buys it each time. Replace the word terrorism with communism and you can go back 40 years and see almost exactly the same speeches proposing a war in Vietnam. And we all know how that went, even though some of us weren't born...
And the issue I personally have with the USA is that I won't ever live in a country where I may be wire-tapped, spied on and registered in a national database of "suppresionists" if I refuse to go to a war nobody understands, and at the same time hear my president preach about civil rights, morality and democracy.
Most people don't hate you, they hate the president, they just think you're pretty naive to be able to elect someone like him.
Those posts in the lounge are overreactions. There are several countries in the world that are worse then the USA. But the US thinks it is so much BETTER then them, which isn't true in my eyes...
Gotta go now, nice art in the previous posts [smile]