Even if the US has made the world a better place, it's no longer making the world a better place. Our biggest export today is paper dollars and we have this tendency to treat 3rd world countries like children that are unable to rule themselves.

America is in decline. The country is bankrupt. Hyperinflation is coming.

Compared to the people from 1776, people have no backbone today. The citizens back in the 1760s and early 1770s went ballistic when Parliament tried to tax a few pennies on their tea. Contrast that to today when government tries to force people to buy health insurance and the vast majority of people go back to listening to their ipods. The founders and citizens back in 1776 would have fought this government that now occupies Washington DC to the death. I would argue that the nation that was created 235 years ago no longer exists. The "New World" has come to have most of the trappings of the old one. And the people across this "fruited plain" no longer have the zeal for economic and personal liberty that made them special.

So, I once thought the US was a force for good but no longer. We're never going to be a force for good again until we go back to our roots and rediscover what made the nation great in the first place.

You sound like the Tea Party.

America is a work in progress, like all nations, and more importantly all human beings. Every year of these past 235 years has been better than the year before.

The world is most definitely getting better every day not worse, and America has a lot to do with that progress.

If you could go back in time 50 years, 100 years, 200 years... meet the people of those time periods, i doubt you'd want to trade places with any of them.

Name any time in history that was better than now. I'd be interested in knowing which time in history you believe is better than now. Which period of history had less poverty? which period had less disease? which period had more equality? which period has less violence, less rape, less crime?

I can't think of any.

From what I've read and the general impressions I get the 1950s weren't too shabby. Back then people didn't have to work three jobs to support themselves and a family. One job usually sufficed and the wife didn't even have to work. Back then people actually saved their money instead of going into the red thousands of dollars. The education was better. Does that answer your question?

A Wife didn't "have" to work? so you think women only work now because they have to?? No, women work more because women WANT to work, women have way MORE opportunities. My mom was a working mom, and if she lived in the 50's she'd be miserable, she'd have no chance to excel in her field back then. She told me stories about how when she went to school back then, they told her she could only be a nurse, secretary, or a teacher. Women got paid literally pennies on the dollar back then.

I guess you don't watch Mad Men.

This debate we're having just criss-crosses so many broad areas. :shocked:

Before I respond to your latest post, let me ask out of idle curiousity: are a "dude or a dudette"? (I'm a dude, btw)


It's good that women want to work, I suppose, because that's what must happen if they are to support a family. However, the child will grow up to be smarter and more emotionally healthy when the mother is around. I view it as a perogative when the woman doesn't have to work and has the option of staying at home and raising the family. I'm a man and I must work. There's no way around that. And right now I'm determined and working towards getting a great job in the Actuarial field. You have to have some skills in mathematics (which I do :blush2: ) but there is a lot of money making potential. I want to get a job where the pay is so great that when I get married and have kids I want my wife to have the perogative of staying at home. Of course I would never forcefully push her to stay at home or even strongly push the idea but I trust that once she has a kid mother nature will kick in and she'll want to spend less time working and spend more time raising kids. That's how it was when my mother had me (she quit her business) and that's how it is right now with my older sister. My older sister had some very passionate feminist views when she was younger but now that she has a kid, she wants to quit her job as a lawyer (even though it is part time). She is still working, ironically enough, because her husband doesn't want her to quit.

Basically females are hard-wired to want to be close to and raise their kids. That's how it is and that's how it should be if we want to survive as a species. You can want to work and I believe you want to work but, at least my experience shows, once you have a kid, biology, hormones, whatever you call it, kick in. So I view it as a perogative when the woman has the option to stay at home and not work (which I'd love to give any wife of mine).

i can't even begin to respond to this overwhelmingly sexist post. First you assume that women arn't around if they are working mothers, and then the subtext is that it's okay for a child to grow up with a father not around as much as the mother??

Please provide us with this amazing new data you have that shows that a child needs a mother more than a father, cause you seem to be saying that it's more important for a mother to be around than a father..

I don't even know where to go with this, i feel like i'm talking to someone that's been in a coma for 50 years.

Wake up dude.

and to respond to your first question, i am a gay male. (though i'm not sure why that matters)

A child needs two happy healthy STRONG parents. of any gender, of any race, of any age.

I mentioned the Tea Party in jest earlier, but now i'm beginning to realize you actually are a neo-con.

My advise is don't. If you are not interested in other people's opinions, don't respond to their posts. And of course you're going to call what I have to say sexist. After conversing with you, I wouldn't expect something more sophisticated or less clique than the good ol' sexist label.

The mother is the most important person in the development of the child. That's explained in mainstream psychology classes and psychology books, lostalex. How do I know? Because I've been in a psychology class and that's what they teach. Having the man around is important and not to be diminished but he plays second fiddle to the mother. And that is totally consistent with reality. For whatever reason, for better or worse, nature decided to make the woman's body physically capable of feeding the child but not the man's.

I am awake. I'm more awake than you. The fact that you would call me a neocon shows me how quick you are to judge other people. Lostalex, I despised George Bush and hated his guts for years. As proof of that, I made a youtube video that trashes him (it currently has over a quarter of a million views). And I spent over a hundred dollars out of my pockets getting the video clips I needed to make that video.

sorry dude, but if you listen to old white men as your source for information about all women in the world, then NO, you are not awake.

You know they used to teach that the world is flat in school? sounds amazing right? they actually did.

If everyone just believed what they were taught in schools by old white men, then we would never have made any progress.

The whole point of progress is that you don't always believe what you've been told by old people.

Outstanding doublethink at work here. You admit he has a great amount of control over his country's oil prices yet you think corporations and NATO's member states have nothing to gain from this. Arab oil states could hold us to ransom if they so wanted. The OAPEC oil crisis of early 70's perfectly illusrates how much power you have when you control the supply of oil. We are now experiencing yet another supply shock in the wake of the Arab Spring. The Libyan intervention is cynical opportunism writ large. NATO are not doing this out any humanitarian concern. It is an act of damage limitation due to our current ciircumstance. If we don't intervene, rising oil prices will continue to affect our national interests together with the inevitable surge of North African refugees in Europe.

In both Yugoslavia and Libya, NATO took sides on a civil war which didn't concern them. The side they is the one which represents the interests of Western imperialism.

You're half-right. Neither scenario is possible. As soon as the conflict in the Middle East simmers down and some normality returns to oil trading in the region, oil supply will in a state of terminal decline. Mark my words.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...our-government

So then what is it about? What made Libya an urgent case for humanitarian intervention when people have gone on dying in North Korea, Zimbabwe, Somalia and Burma for years? What was so much more horrible about Gaddafi's war with local rebels than recent government crackdowns in Bahrain, Yemen and Syria? What other possible reason could we be there for?