American hedonism closes its eyes to death, and has been
incapable of exorcising the destructive power of the moment
with a wisdom like that of the Epicureans of antiquity.

- Octavio Paz
Death is un-American, and an affront to every citizen's inalienable
right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

- Arnold Toynbee
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the_band_huge
"As long as such self-serving hypocrisy
motivates America's response, Ukraine will
only sink further into needless bloodshed,
and that blood will be on America's head."
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In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors,
since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors,
for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal
applies only upwards, not downwards.

― Bertrand Russell
Global Coke
Global Coke
"What those 'racists' are reflexively and rightly reacting
to is the soulless chill as the fire goes out beneath the
melting pot. Those who think America can thrive as a
'cultural mosaic' are worse than fools; they're Canadians."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
Global Coke
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe.
It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster,
in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe
have grown to appalling dimensions.

― Frantz Fanon
What the United States does best is understand itself.
What it does worst is understand others.

- Carlos Fuentes
Poor Mexico, so far from God
and so close to the United States.

- Porfirio Diaz
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the_band_huge
"Indeed, everything about the American southland was magical
and exotic to the young Canadian musicians, from the sights
and smells to the drawling manner of speech to, especially, the
central role that music played in people’s everyday lives."

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
America is a mistake, a giant mistake.
- Sigmund Freud
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
- Auguste Bartholdi
chimerica
chimerica
"This is the tone of the China Century, a subtle
mix of Nazi/Soviet bravado and 'oriental'
cunning -- easily misunderstood, and
never
heard before, in a real enemy, by the West."

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chimerica
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
"And for the others who argued for English-only
patriotism, I note that there are more than
57 million Americans (about 20% of the nation)
whose first-language is not English...."

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Coke and 'America the Beautiful'
predator-firing-missile4
predator-firing-missile4
"This is the behavior, and the fate, of paranoid
old-world tyrants like Hitler or Saddam, not liberal new-world democracies like America pretends to be."

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predator-firing-missile4
America is the only nation in history which
miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to
degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

- Georges Clemenceau
I found there a country with thirty-two religions and only one sauce.
- Charles–Maurice Talleyrand
A people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle,
and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood.

- Edmund Burke
America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.
- Marshall McLuhan
"The removal of racist sports nicknames (and mascots) seems outrageously belated
-- why, exactly, has this civil rights cause
taken so long to gain momentum?"

JOIN THE DISCUSSION
The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the
United States reactionaries use to scare people.
It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't.

- Mao Tse-tung
They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but
they kept only one; they promised to take our land, and they did.

- Red Cloud
In America sex is an obsession,
in other parts of the world it is a fact.

- Marlene Dietrich
I would rather have a nod from an American,
than a snuff-box from an emperor.

- Lord Byron
One day the United States discovered it was an empire.
But it didn’t know what an empire was.
It thought that an empire was merely the biggest of all corporations.

- Roberto Calasso
Americans are so enamored of equality, they would rather
be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.

- Alexis de Tocqueville
newtown
newtown
"No one, I thought, could watch those scenes, of young children slaughtered en masse, and so many parents grieving, without thinking that this, finally, would tip some kind of balance in the country."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
newtown
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams
then you must still regard America today with the same naive
enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.

- Jean Baudrillard
I am willing to love all mankind, except an American.
- Samuel Johnson
America, thou half brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.

- Philip Bailey
"What can be more powerful than disinformation in the Information Age?"
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
- Sir Walter Besant
Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by
posterity because he was the last to discover America.

- James Joyce
Now, from America, empty indifferent things
are pouring across, sham things, dummy life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
If the United States is to recover fortitude and lucidity,
it must recover itself, and to recover itself it must
recover the "others"- the outcasts of the Western world.
- Octavio Paz
The youth of America is their oldest tradition.
It has been going on now for three hundred years.

- Oscar Wilde
"America really is, for most Americans, all things considered, a good place to be, and all they really want is for everyone to enjoy the same privilege and pleasure."
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When good Americans die they go to Paris;
when bad Americans die they go to America.

- Oscar Wilde
jobs drug dealer
jobs drug dealer
They're nothing more than traffickers; and as the smart traffickers'll tell you, you don't use the merchandise. They are just inoculating their kids with a tech-drug serum, to immunize them against the very merchandise that put the **** bowling alley in their basement.
jobs drug dealer
America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that
lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

- Georg Friedrich Hegel
America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room.
Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

- Arnold Toynbee
Americans always try to do the right thing after they've tried everything else.
- Winston Churchill
The thing that impresses me most about Americans
is the way parents obey their children.

- Edward, Duke of Windsor
Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering
what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

- John Maynard Keynes
Europe was created by history.
America was created by philosophy.

- Margaret Thatcher
America is God's crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of
Europe are melting and reforming!... The real American has not yet arrived.
He is only in the crucible, I tell you - he will be the fusion of all races.

- Israel Zangwill
American dreams are strongest in the hearts of those
who have seen America only in their dreams.

- Pico Iyer
America: It's like Britain, only with buttons.
- Ringo Starr
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.

― D.H. Lawrence
I have two conflicting visions of America.
One is a kind of dream landscape and the other is a kind of black comedy.

― Bono
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror
of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis,
the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.

― Roberto Bolaño

April 19, 2024

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Author Topic: America and "Sh*thole Countries"


Geoff-
Hamilton
Administrator
Posts: 172
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America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 16, 2018, 16:53

I'm intrigued about the world's response to the President's (alleged -- though I take it this qualifier isn't quite necessary now) comments about Haiti and African countries as "sh*tholes."
How are such reports being received? Do they have a significant impact on America's global reputation?
The furor in the US seems, at least for the time being, to be escalating, as evidenced by Senator Booker's impassioned speech today...



Mike-
Langston
Veteran Their American
Posts: 42
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 17, 2018, 17:14

Booker is obviously grandstanding here (and beginning his 2020 presidential run), but he's right about the seriousness of the "amnesia" and attempts to excuse Trump's behavior. When white supremacists hear Trump make racist comments, they're empowered, and that makes the world much much more dangerous for people of color. No one should be covering for the President when he does this.



lentilnort-
hern
New Member
Posts: 1
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 18, 2018, 12:13

Here in Canada, Trump's reputation could hardly get much worse than it is now. He's considered a joke... well, a dangerous and really bad joke. The racist comments he makes are more or less expected now. I am hoping he gets caught on tape saying something really dispicable, so that finally he can be held responsible for his beliefs and actions.
A report in the Toronto Star today summed up Trump's global status...

A new global survey shows plummeting approval of the United States under Donald Trump — and it’s especially dramatic in Canada.
The Gallup polling company registered the lowest annual score for the U.S. in any of its annual global leadership surveys — with 30 per cent approval of U.S. leadership worldwide, down nearly 20 points in one year.
That leaves the U.S. well behind the new leader Germany, just behind China, and just ahead of Russia.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/01/18/approval-of-us-leadership-under-trump-plummets-globally-notably-in-canada-study-finds.html



Wyatt Dick
Veteran Their American
Posts: 42
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 27, 2018, 18:18

I have not followed much of the furor surrounding the 'shithole' remarks, other than to do a quick Google search to get the context as best (and as quickly) as I could.
Essentially, Trump--in his typically clumsy way--seemed to wonder why immigration from poorer countries was being encouraged or protected, and why we did not instead prioritize immigration from richer countries like Norway or the more developed Asian nations.
I'm not sure that Trump's comments were inherently 'racist' (I do hate that word, as it is unusably vague and general). I think Trump was essentially associating more highly developed nations with more highly skilled and educated immigrants, which is probably true on the whole. It's unclear whether he had issues with Harvard-trained doctors from Africa or El Salvador coming to America. And his support for Asian immigrants from selected countries tends to suggest Trump was not really focused on race per se.
It is possible that the President was implying a successful vs. unsuccessful culture argument, though I haven't read enough context to make that call; but such an argument is not inherently racist either.
At any rate, Booker's comments were simply unwatchable and cringe worthy--I didn't get through the entire clip. He is indeed grandstanding, but it's so much worse than that. His comments were manipulative and illogical (though indeed eminently logical if you intend to make a presidential run!).



Victor Lim
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Posts: 2
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 27, 2018, 21:37

I agree with much of what you say, Wyatt. I think the term "racist" is used too loosely (genocidal maniacs and people who don't like hip hop are both described with the same word). With Trump, an additional difficulty presents itself, since it's hard to know how much thought he puts into anything he says. There is a chameleon-like quality to him: his attitudes shift with his audience, and he adopts whatever opinions will please the people he wants to impress. It does seem, though, that he believes, like many white men his age, in a sense of racial hierarchy (I recall he was quoted saying that he likes his lawyers to wear yarmulkes, and he has a history of discriminatory practices in hiring blacks). My feeling is that the profanity revealed a little of his "audience-pleasing" tendencies, and a little of his own prejudices.
Mike Langston is also right, I believe, in that the actual consequences of voicing these attitudes in the way Trump did is very dangerous -- Booker is too dramatic (and as Wyatt says, making a calculated decision about his own political career), but essentially correct about the seriousness of these remarks.



GOgbunna
New Member
Posts: 1
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 30, 2018, 13:11

Wyatt, I don’t really care whether Booker is sincere or not. I’m not really sure even Booker knows if he’s sincere or not! That’s how politics goes, especially in a media world. But I feel he is speaking from his heart, whatever his mind may be saying, and he is certainly speaking from my heart, and the hearts of my friends. If there is a hole, we know who dug it.



EliC
New Member
Posts: 1
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 30, 2018, 13:39

One of the many amusing things about Americans is the way they reverence the office of the President (unlike us Jews, who are still sadly burdened by the first commandment; sorry Bibi). By implication, anybody, anything, that holds that office, whether it’s Donald “grab them by the p*ssy” Trump, George “David Cop a Feel” Bush, Bill “I didn’t inhale” Clinton, Richard “I am not a crook” Nixon -- everybody going back all the way to Teddy Roosevelt and beyond, have all shot off their god-like mouths. So what’s different about Trump? Mostly just the frequency and the freedom with which he does so. He understands, perhaps better than any president besides Obama, who just played it differently, that this is effectively just a reality show, as far as the show goes. The underlying question here, and perhaps the only really interesting question, is where the show stops. And that’s what Americans are having the most trouble with, as they keep shooting at the fat, slow target. For Trump, the show always goes on.
- Eli



AbdulM
New Member
Posts: 1
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: January 30, 2018, 13:55

It’s all fine to say that it’s just “talking”, that it’s just “saying.” But if what you say amounts to an action, then it’s not just speech anymore. And unfortunately, in this world, when an American President says something, especially something “big”, no matter how stupid it is, it’s like an action. It has a ripple effect that runs out into the world and causes things to happen – as if you’ve dropped a bomb or assassinated someone. So you can’t say that it’s just “talk”, unless the world takes it as just talk.



Reza
Novice Their American
Posts: 5
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Re: America and "Sh*thole Countries"
on: March 1, 2018, 16:39

Donald Trump's comments as President has been a result of discord and controversy among many. He dangerously crosses the line with very little or no caution. The racist comments that he makes are almost always predictable. In this case, there is a possibility that President Trump might have been arguing between developed and undeveloped countries, however, he still manages to provoke the public, the media and society in general. I would like to quote Mark Twain his literary work of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that “the average man don't like trouble and danger.” Trump is not an average man but a businessman, the President of the United States. This quotation does not excuse Trump of his comments but in my opinion validates his behaviour. The average person will try as hard to steer away from trouble and danger while a more authoritarian person will run toward it. To be in in a position of higher power will allow for this sort of behaviour.

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