You might hate to hear the truth but the American government is the American people and vice versa. Whom are you kidding with you guerilla chatter? You collectively voted for your government and it represents you and your citizens. If you have an issue with democracy then you should aim for a career as revolutionary in Central America. You are becoming more and more bizarre with each post. So your government is only the one that represents your political view? It sounds more like you cannot deal with losing. What a jackaxx. Seriously, you have no issue to convict Germans collectively as Nazis but reject Obama to be your president and the US government your democratically elected representative?
it was a follow to volpunter's post I politely agree. The US literally has ZERO business in injecting themselves into this discussion. THey could not prevent the biggest financial crises in this and the last century and are the last to lecture others which actions cause financial contagion and which not. But in terms of security and international cooperation the US and Europe should work closely together and I even would love to see Germany (unless of course its European neighbors get freaked out) and France and other European nations take a more constructive role in international shared responsibilities. Europe has very little right to weigh in on Israel and Palestine given they are hardly invested in the region, neither financially nor otherwise. <http://www.elitetrader.com/et/index...-absolutely-no-such-thing-as-failure.292797/>
Bankrupts never change. Another bailout means money thrown into the furnace to keep the Greeks warm another few months. Let them collapse. It's the only way any of us will learn.
I am not sure I understand all of these comments. But I want to say that people are not their government: not in the US, and not in Greece. We cannot always influence what our leaders will do once they are voted in. For example, I did not vote for George W Bush, but clearly a lot of people did. He spent billions upon billions of this country's wealth in a futile war. We will probably never reattain the economic position we had before that. We are maligned by the world for our barbaric actions and interference in the affairs of others. We have thousands of mentally and physically maimed soldiers struggling to fit into society, a situation that is positively criminal. The American people did not vote for that. I admit that Obama has not helped matters, but Bush is where the problem started. I do not think people in America anticipated those problems. We have been lied to, manipulated, and brutalized. Things are not different in Greece. Their leaders have lied to them in the past and they are now in a very tough situation. There is no easy way out for the Greek people. They do not deserve this, although some of their previous leaders may deserve punishment. People are the same everywhere: all people. Regardless of what some of the people on this forum are constantly saying about Jews and other groups of people, all people are the same. They love their children, their families, their countrymen. They want freedom, peace, economic opportunity, and something better for their children than they had for themselves. You may say that terrorists are different, but collectively, they are not. People who hold violent religious beliefs and blow themselves and others up do not often hail from countries that are famous for economic opportunities, human rights, equality, and religious tolerance. And if their perspectives are very different from ours, it may be that we do not really see the set of circumstances they are living in or the way they view our actions. I suspect there would be far fewer terrorists abroad (and far fewer prisoners here) if young men had a better set of opportunities: education, jobs, wives, freedom.
The truth is that it is very common for Americans to feel that they and the government are very different things. The leftists thought this when Republicans were in power and now it is rather common among the right. And the truth is that the American people truly do not care about Greece or Germany or the EU. We do care about former Olympic stars getting sex change operations, whether the old rebel flag (of the Democrat party) should be used in government and what's going to happen next on TV. If we were in Greece's shoes we'd pay a lot more attention to economics but things are not so bad over here. This place is at least approaching business as usual, albeit with a lot fewer people working. Oh well, I guess there's nothing to do now but wait and see what happens on Sunday. Somehow I suspect that the Greeks knew all along that a deal would take place. Otherwise I'd be reading about printing presses making mounds of new drachma notes. But closing their banks for a couple of weeks? Anyone who thinks that's going to make Greece more attractive for business growth and new businesses has never run one (which I think accurately describes the people in power in Greece right now).
Again , you voted you had your free vote. Everyone else had and you made a free choice who you wanted to be represented by. It was a fair democratic process. The majority wins and rule of the game is that even the losers respect , accept, and support the winner. You can't just say that everything the US did has nothing to do with you because you did not support the leaders. In that I cannot possibly disagree more with you.
True, more or less. Absolutely not true. Never has been even close to true (at least in the US). Likely never will be true. Maybe it's true in Germany? If so, wow! How do you get that to happen? Only exception I can think of is that during wartime, the US typically pulls together and supports the election winners. But the last war the US was involved in ended in 1945. Everything since then has been the usual "police action", i.e. limited, undeclared war that the US has been constantly involved in for most of 200 years. This is not some feature of modern US. The first president was Washington and was too widely respected to be insulted much. So the other side went after his cabinet. Alexander Hamilton was his Secretary of the Treasury (started the US banking system, more or less, and is pictured on the US $10). His life ended when he was shot dead in a duel with Jefferson's Vice President Aaron Burr. Eventually the two sides went at it in a shooting war. In terms of number of US dead, this is the worst war the US has ever been in; about 60% worse than the second world war, and at a time when the US was much much smaller. It lasted from 1861 to 1865 and ended with a victory by the north (Republicans) over the south (Democrats). By the way, the Democrats are just now getting around to getting rid of official use of their battle flag from that rebellion as it is now an embarrassment to them.[/QUOTE]
I did not say yoy have to agree with all the policies of your government. But you respect the government to be your leadership. Whether you like them or not. If you cannot then you have a problem with authority and should maybe consider living in a lawless state ruled by different clans and infights. That is exactly what Afghanistan is struggling with and what makes a democracy more special and more functional than any other political construct. I understand that we human beings have a right to hold and defend our own opinion but in the end of the day if we sign up for democracy that means that we accept our political leadership given it was democratically chosen. This is not my opinion but the basic precept of a democracy You are hopefully not serious in comparing a functional democracy with the crazy gunslinger and dual culture of the early Americas where everything was permissible and the law was made by those with the bigger guns and canons. If the US South won the civil war you would have slavery even today. How democratic is that? Democracy is the guarantee of personal freedom within the limit that it does not hurt others. And it is the acceptance of what the majority of the people decide. Unfortunately that was not even the case in the US in the 1960s and the federal army had to move into parts of the south to restore law and order and to guarantee the implementation of decisions made my a majority of the American people. [/QUOTE]
This is a logical fallacy, a "false dichotomy". There are situations other than "respect government" and a "lawless state". The fact that the US exists proves the existence. No, my point is that the disagreement with elected authority dates to the earliest days of the Republic. It is not anything new at all. It is present throughout US history from earliest time to the present. Before the US existed, it also existed in British history. The English speaking peoples have never been ones to keep their mouths shut about government they disagree with. And I should note that the US has been totally free of military dictatorship these 239 years and this applies in peacetime as well as wartime. Britain has also been free of military dictatorship for an even longer time. History shows that we are the world experts on maintaining long-lived more or less fair rule of law and elections, certainly not Germany. First, this is a mysterious change of subject for a purpose unknown. Second, it is patently false. Slavery was dying away all over the new world and would have died away in the South probably before mechanized farming made it obsolete. Slavery was originally present throughout the US; it was decreasing faster in the North than the South. You might as well say that the US would never have gay marriage except for the recent Supreme Court ruling. Or that we would have never have had an equivalent to the Environmental Protection Agency except that Nixon signed it into law by presidential decree. Saying that the south would still have had slavery in 2015 without the existence of a war in 1861 is as stupid as saying that Germany would still be ruled by Nazis if it were not for a war in 1937. No. Again, your logical failure is one of "false dichotomy". The world is more complicated than that. Things change whether there is war or not. Franco's fascist regime in Spain ended without any war. And the USSR fell with no war involved. If there had been no war, the Nazis would probably have slowly mellowed out similar to Franco's Spain, or Stalin's USSR, and Germany would have eventually evolved to be something not too different from what it is now. People find excuses for war because they cannot otherwise accept the sadness of the death and destruction.