FearlessFreep
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I'm not sure that many wars are actually caused by intolerance. They seem to be usually caused by internal social pressures that war becomes a way to release.
Six in Ten Americans Expect a New World War
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sgtmac_46
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Ask...lol. Now I understand, you're just clueless on the topic. You apparently don't even understand the concept of a dictatorship. We'll just ASK the people what they WANT?! Yeah, that's the point. They don't have the right under a dictator to decide what they want. How are you going to ask the people living in a totalitarian regime what they want? What they want is irrelavent under a dictator.Andrew Green said:
Intolerance for DESPOTS?! HAHAHAHAHA. Now you've gone over the deep end. We're supposed to more TOLERANT to DICTATORS?! I'd hate to hurt the feelings of a violent, sadistic dictator. You might want to get out more.Andrew Green said:
This discussion is giving me a headache. First, i've had to explain why people living in a dictatorship can't simply be asked what they want.
Then, i've been told I need to be more tolerant of dictators.
I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but the whole world doesn't think Democracy is such a good thing. In fact, many seem to see it as a BAD thing.
But this is like arguing religion, some people just can't accept that anyone would be better off following a different religion then they do. Can't wrap there mind around it, people that do so must be under the inluence of the devil and unable to freely choose.
Sorry, but not everyone thinks the same.
But this is like arguing religion, some people just can't accept that anyone would be better off following a different religion then they do. Can't wrap there mind around it, people that do so must be under the inluence of the devil and unable to freely choose.
Sorry, but not everyone thinks the same.
Flatlander
Grandmaster
Though I haven't had the opportunity to discuss this with a sufficient sample of humanity in order to claim statistical accuracy, I will go out on a limb here and suggest that the vast majority of people would prefer to live under a government that gives them:
* equality
* rule of law
* a vote
* freedoms of expression, mobility, press, etc.
Those of us living in free and democratic countries can sometimes take these rights for granted. Personally, I feel that access to these rights should be universal, and that the disallowing of them is inherent to non-democratic nations so as to provide their leadership with a measure of control. Any leader prepared to sacrifice the freedoms of their citizens for the protection of their own power has necessarily demonstrated their inability to act in the best interests of their citizenry, and therefore, is not fit to lead.
As we move through time, we should be witnessing an improvement of our respective circumstances. We should all be working toward positive change. Historically, non-democratic leaders have not demonstrated the ability to act in anybody's best interest except their own. Perhaps this is mainly due to human nature. Either way, democracy is the only system with adequate checks and balances to ensure that the leadership's self interest isn't abused (overly), (usually).
I have spoken to a large number of people who have emigrated from non-democratic nations. They all seem to be very happy to be here, and wouldn't choose return home unless there were a change in govenmental structure. That's been my experience, anyway.
* equality
* rule of law
* a vote
* freedoms of expression, mobility, press, etc.
Those of us living in free and democratic countries can sometimes take these rights for granted. Personally, I feel that access to these rights should be universal, and that the disallowing of them is inherent to non-democratic nations so as to provide their leadership with a measure of control. Any leader prepared to sacrifice the freedoms of their citizens for the protection of their own power has necessarily demonstrated their inability to act in the best interests of their citizenry, and therefore, is not fit to lead.
As we move through time, we should be witnessing an improvement of our respective circumstances. We should all be working toward positive change. Historically, non-democratic leaders have not demonstrated the ability to act in anybody's best interest except their own. Perhaps this is mainly due to human nature. Either way, democracy is the only system with adequate checks and balances to ensure that the leadership's self interest isn't abused (overly), (usually).
I have spoken to a large number of people who have emigrated from non-democratic nations. They all seem to be very happy to be here, and wouldn't choose return home unless there were a change in govenmental structure. That's been my experience, anyway.
still learning
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Hello, It will happen many more times - world wars!
The next most powerful country in the world will be the Chinese? Wanna bet?
watch in the next 25 years!
The next most powerful country in the world will be the Chinese? Wanna bet?
watch in the next 25 years!
still learning
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Hello, It will happen many more times - world wars! next 100 years
The next most powerful country in the world will be the Chinese? Wanna bet?
watch in the next 25 years!
1/5 of the world population now, and If they wanted an army, imagine if each parent raise more than one child to be a soldier in 18 years from now? ....Aloha
The next most powerful country in the world will be the Chinese? Wanna bet?
watch in the next 25 years!
1/5 of the world population now, and If they wanted an army, imagine if each parent raise more than one child to be a soldier in 18 years from now? ....Aloha
sgtmac_46
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Ok, here's a little test. Are you or anyone you know willing to give up your freedoms and democratic beliefs, to live in a totalitarian paradise?Andrew Green said:
Put more to the point, how many boat people are leaving FOR Cuba? Hundreds risk drowning every year to come to the US.
How many people in a democratic society YEARN for a totalitarian regime like Stalin's or Hitler's? How many people in totalitarian regimes yearn to live in a democratic society.
The answers are pretty clear. Liberal Democracy is by far the choice of the common man world wide. The fact that violent dictators use violent, repressive methods to squash dissent is NOT evidence of the people's choice to remain in chains. The fact that you think it does is nothing but evidence of your status as a spoiled child of our Liberal Democracies that has never (thank god) had first hand experience with things like the holocaust.
Talk with a holocaust survivor and ask them about the relative merits of totalitarian dictators. Tell them your theory about a dictatorship having an equal right to exist as a liberal democracy. Make sure to note the tattoo on their arm where they were marked like cattle for the slaughter.
sgtmac_46
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A liberal democracy has a vested interest in maintaining superior firepower in the face of a world occupied by violent dictators. Those who beat their swords in to plow shears often find themselves plowing under the yoke of those who kept their swords. In the face of superior numbers, we need to maintain superior weapons.Theban_Legion said:
Why? Because of the government, or because of the US immposed sanctions that keep the country in poverty?sgtmac_46 said:
Canadian churches have a hard time sending donations to Cuba, because the US won't let them bring it through there territory. But that sounds like the behaviour you are attributing to them.
Ok, so once again point to the extreme's and cry foul. Good job.
Ok, so when the US uses military power to crush smaller countries that oppose it that is ok? But when they use it to crush rebellions that is not ok? When the US had a civil war that was what had to happen, but when other countries have civil wars that is cause they are not democracies?
Well, I guess I could reply that the fact that you are incapable of seeing that other cultures might have other needs and yours is not always superior is a sign of your childish ignorance and sense of self-superiority... But why would we want this to start getting into personal attacks?
Again, viewing the extreme's. Not every non-democratic state is a Evil Totalitarian regime.
Ok, so keep them inline by threat of force... wait... isn't that one of the evil things you claimed anything but a liberal democracy did?
sgtmac_46
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Could be that Castro imprisons people for having banned books. It could be that Castro has put to death thousands of political prisoners. It could be a host of things that is apparently tabboo topics for the enlightented spoiled western leftists. I'll defer to the opinions of people who have lived under Castro. You can find a multitude of them in Miami. I wouldn't tell them you defend Castro too loudly, though, they might punch you in the mouth.Andrew Green said:
Here's a little about Castro and the renowned Che Guevara
"Promptly upon entering Havana on January 8, 1959 Fidel Castro abolished Habeas Corpus and appointed Che Guevara his main executioner. "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary," The Argentine Ernesto "Che" Guevara declared. "These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate. We must create the pedagogy of the paredon (the execution wall)""
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=18739
The above article was written by a cuban american.
How many churches do you think there are in Cuba?Andrew Green said:
EXTREMES?! Oh, so you think that most Totalitarian Dictators are GOOD?! Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Mao, Kim Sung Il, Ho Chi Minh, Saddam Hussein, etc, are just bad examples of good dictators?Andrew Green said:
Here's a little breakdown. http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm
And this http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html
"Ok" or "Not Ok" is a term for a perfect world. This one is occupied as much by violent dictators as Liberal Democracies.Andrew Green said:
Name one Liberal Democracy the US has used military power to crush. Totalitarian regimes are not kindly, paternalistic states, they are states ran by blood thirsty tyrants. This country was founded on the principle that no people should live under a tyrant. Sorry that you're willing to make a devil's bargain with a tyrant in the hopes that he'll leave you alone, but that's just your naivete in action.
Keep in mind the US civil war was to end the barbaric plague called Slavery. It had to happen because freedom and democracy must win out against totalitarianism (thanks for inadvertanly making my point).
You could say that, but I don't think it would have that much meaning, as it would simply sound an ignorant statement of someone who is obviously ignorant of the evils that some people on this planet are forced to live under. It's obvious that you're merely parroting someone else's politics without even the slightest basis for what they came from. No doubt you've simply been poisoned by the "Western Civilization is bad" bug. That's the one that believes that any enemy of the US is goooood. Even if that person tortures and murders his own subjects on an unimaginable scale. Ah, politics.Andrew Green said:
Of course by your relativistic thinking, you really don't have much room to judge the so called atrocities you claim the US has committed. I mean, if everythings ok, then you have nothing to ever complain about.
Really, name a benevolent totalitarian dictator.Andrew Green said:
Keep who in-line? Dictators? No they should be rooted out and destroyed. Force of arms protects us from the dictators. A free people decides what their arms are used for. A dictator decides what his are used for. That's the difference. Democracies take responsibility for their governments and it's actions.Andrew Green said:
As long as violence is the tool of the dictator, it shall be a tool we reserve the right to wield. You don't appease a dictator to death. Because this is the mindset of the dictator we are facing. This is what one of the founders of that Cuban paradise you believe exists, had to say:
"Hatred as an element of struggle; unbending hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine. This is what our soldiers must become " Che Guevara
http://slate.msn.com/id/2107100/
Here's what's going on in your Cuban paradise
"Right now a tremendous social struggle is taking place in Cuba. Dissident liberals have demanded fundamental human rights, and the dictatorship has rounded up all but one or two of the dissident leaders and sentenced them to many years in prison. Among those imprisoned leaders is an important Cuban poet and journalist, Raúl Rivero, who is serving a 20-year sentence. In the last couple of years the dissident movement has sprung up in yet another form in Cuba, as a campaign to establish independent libraries, free of state control; and state repression has fallen on this campaign, too."
With the outcome being the imprisonment of librarians for the crime of....possession of unauthorized books!!!!
So this is what you are defending? This is the will of the people?! I still say you should get out more often. I really can't see how you have the nerve to sit in the middle of Canada and pontificate about how dictators have the right to hold an entire people in their hands, and crush them at will.
To sit in a nation like Canada, which values freedoms so much, and to claim that it would be just as well to live in a nation where the secret police can rip you out of your home and torture you for no other reason than possession of an unauthorized copy of a book, boggles my mind. I can only assume that you've simply come to take your freedoms for granted, that you have a heard time really grasping what it's like to live otherwise.
I too am not sure the whole world wants democracy. I continue to be surprised by the number of monarchs in the world, however diluted their power!
As to most of the world wanting equality, the vote, and freedom of expression...yes, but only for themselves in many cases. Would your average Afghan male accept those for all Afghanis, or just for males? In some Islamic countries, even the women oppose giving women the right to vote. (I'm referring to surveys from this year.) Do they really think that or are they just saying it? Maybe it's hard to say, but I'm not so sure.
It's just not as simple as it "should" be. Many countries severely limit freedom of expression and point to the benefits of that--guarding official secrets, no libel, no having offensive speech forced on others, etc.
As to most of the world wanting equality, the vote, and freedom of expression...yes, but only for themselves in many cases. Would your average Afghan male accept those for all Afghanis, or just for males? In some Islamic countries, even the women oppose giving women the right to vote. (I'm referring to surveys from this year.) Do they really think that or are they just saying it? Maybe it's hard to say, but I'm not so sure.
It's just not as simple as it "should" be. Many countries severely limit freedom of expression and point to the benefits of that--guarding official secrets, no libel, no having offensive speech forced on others, etc.
Marshal Jozef Pilsudski of Poland - 1925 - 1935 was surprisingly decent as military rulers go.sgtmac_46 said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jozef_Pilsudski
http://www.polandsholocaust.org/1917-1938.html
This doesn't really rebutt your arguments - he was arguably ahead of his time and forcing through a liberal agenda for an independent Poland by any means possible. He was arguably not a true totalitarian either (depending on your point of view of course). Interesting character anyway.
I just can't resist trying to answer a question...
Dan:asian:
Tgace
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So the Iraqis really wanted this stuff to happen to their fellow countrymen and who are we to do anything about it? Hey it worked for them....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_situation_in_Saddam's_Iraq
http://www.state.gov/s/wci/fs/19352.htm
http://defendamerica.mil/specials/june2003/atrocities.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_situation_in_Saddam's_Iraq
http://www.state.gov/s/wci/fs/19352.htm
http://defendamerica.mil/specials/june2003/atrocities.html
ginshun
2nd Black Belt
Andrew Green said:
Didn't the recent elections in Iraq have a higher % of voter turnout than the recent election here in the states? And that in the midst of terrorists threatening to blow up polling places and kill people who were trying to vote.
I don't know what that tells you, but it tells me that the people in Iraq want democracy more than they want Saddam or the Taliban runnig their country.
Tell me again how democracy is no good over there because the people don't want it.
arnisador said:
I just wanted to point out that there were, and still are, many women in this country who oppose universal sufferage. I have personally spoken to women in this day and age who continue to argue that women should not have the right to vote. One arguement I've heard is that men are the head of household, and as such carry the burden of responsibility for the decisions made by the country for better or for worse.
Just for the record, I think all adults are responsible for their own decisions and lives, and as such, should have both the right and the responsibility to vote.
-Rob
I think we're in agreement about how things are, and about how they should be!
And probably a good many that think God should decide who is in charge, not the people. Choosing someone other then the person God appoints is a violation of his will.Thesemindz said:
In fact, MANY cultures have thought like that over the years, far more then have believed everyone should vote.
I'd also imagine that a good many people might believe that there should be some requirements to vote, not let the mob decide the fate of the country.
Different cultures, different values...
