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
the_band_huge
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."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
the_band_huge
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
the_band_huge
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."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
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...."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
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."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
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."
JOIN THE DISCUSSION
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 26, 2024

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Pages: 1
Author Topic: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera


Jared-
Danton
New Member
Posts: 3
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Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 15, 2013, 23:47

America, let me just say... how on earth can you presume to lead the free world when you can't even keep your own government running? When you let extremists hold you hostage? When your feeble attempts to catch up to the rest of the developed world on health care and gun control and capital punishment are stymied by heartless plutocrats? When your 1% grow richer every year? Yes, America, you're exceptionally flawed, and what you need is another revolution, this time turning toward Europe, not away.



Sara Black
New Member
Posts: 1
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Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 15, 2013, 23:51

I'm _in_ America but not _of_ it (like the Outsiders page says) but I agree, Jared -- and your writing reminded me of Ginsberg's great poem about the country he too was in but not really of... 😎

America by Allen Ginsberg

[...]
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I'm not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there's going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I'm perfectly right.
I won't say the Lord's Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven't told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.

I'm addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I'm obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It's always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody's serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

Asia is rising against me.
I haven't got a chinaman's chance.
I'd better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.


Wyatt Dick
Veteran Their American
Posts: 42
Avatar photo
Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 16, 2013, 09:29

The government shut down and debt ceiling debates are embarrassing. And I agree that the need for gun control seems obvious. Health care and capital punishment, however, seem to be somewhat more complex issues than the original post would suggest.
I feel that problems arising from the basic structures set out in the US Constitution underlie a lot of this mess. It seems to me that it was a brilliant system for the 18th Century, when the primary concern was avoiding tyranny. But it does not seem to have aged well. I find it interesting that the vast majority of liberal democracies have adopted systems more akin to the British parliamentary configuration than the American congressional system, with its rigidly enforced separation of powers. Granted, the current bifurcation of American politics is the more proximate cause of recent problems--America has, in the past, managed to govern itself fairly efficiently even under its constitution. But I think there is a good chance that had the United States adopted a parliamentary system of some sort, it would be weathering its current problems with much less gridlock.


Brian-
Jones
Veteran Their American
Posts: 25
Avatar photo
Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 17, 2013, 02:15

Quote from Wyatt Dick on October 16, 2013, 09:29

I feel that problems arising from the basic structures set out in the US Constitution underlie a lot of this mess.

Weak on operation, strong on inspiration (much like the presidency).

(What does 'toward Europe' mean, Jared?)


Nick Ferns
Novice Their American
Posts: 7
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Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 17, 2013, 04:30

'Turning toward Europe' is a curious suggestion, seeing as many countries in Europe are going through significant issues of their own. Spain, Greece, Italy - Far from inspirational examples right now.

Wyatt, I agree that the issues stem from the US constitution, but as is often the case throughout US history, the battle is over its interpretation.


Wyatt Dick
Veteran Their American
Posts: 42
Avatar photo
Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 17, 2013, 05:38

That might be true with respect to say gun control, but I was thinking of something more fundamental: the division of powers structure. And that isn't really open to interpretation. With the executive separated from the legislative, it makes it much easier to just say "no" without any consequences. In Canada or the UK, even with a minority government, this get done because an impasse like this will force an election. Saying "no" typically means toppling the government, something not to be done lightly.


Jared-
Danton
New Member
Posts: 3
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Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 17, 2013, 21:36

Re: Toward Europe
I mean its progressive qualities, which invert all the American retrograde stuff (fundamentalism, capital punishment, gun rights, weak social safety nets and low taxation on the rich). Sure, the financial health of much of Europe is in question, but the ideological movement is in the right direction. America seems, to me anyway, stuck in the past, and committed to letting its uber-wealthy bleed the country (and much of the world) dry.



Wyatt Dick
Veteran Their American
Posts: 42
Avatar photo
Re: Govt Shutdown Et Cetera
on: October 18, 2013, 01:27

Jared, which European nations do you think are the best models for the successful implementation of progressive principals and policies, while maintaining budgetary sustainablity? Perhaps we should exclude Norway, though, because everything is a bit easier to do when one is swimming in oil revenues.

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