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America
- Thread starter TubaKing
- Start date
Well, United States GPS technology and map making industries are number one. So if we didn't continue to make ridiculously accurate maps for the rest of the world, they would end up getting lost. Just look at the recent invasion of Costa Rica, the Nicaraguans read Google map which had been incorrect and accidentally invaded another country, this is a prime example of the United States showing the way for other countries, even if in this case it was unfortunately incorrect.
Hey guys, I love the internet as well.
Additionally, for the health care debate, the US does have the best healthcare out there. Unfortunately, many people can't afford it, which is why the perceived rankings are lower.
Additionally, for the health care debate, the US does have the best healthcare out there. Unfortunately, many people can't afford it, which is why the perceived rankings are lower.
This pretty much sums up my thoughts.
Cooky
Banned deucer.
This is actually true, although it just goes to show that America are hard at work to bring general malaise into international alliances in order to strengthen their own position in relative terms, and assert themselves militarily as "peacekeepers" when war breaks out, profiting from the rubble.
go on DK punch me through the screen i dare you
correlation does not imply causality
Yeah that's a load of bullshit Cooky. You really think Google is in cahoots with the US government to make these maps for the purpose of allowing other countries to more easily plan attacks on one another, just so we can somehow profit from it?
If you're going to instigate something try using a legitimate argument. I'll give you a hint: wars cost us a lot of money. The very notion that we (as a nation) somehow profit from it is ridiculous.
If you're going to instigate something try using a legitimate argument. I'll give you a hint: wars cost us a lot of money. The very notion that we (as a nation) somehow profit from it is ridiculous.
Yes, clearly this was the United States' goal in this endeavor, which is why we invaded Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
P.S. - We didn't invade Costa Rica and Nicaragua, just in case you didn't know.
Cooky
Banned deucer.
No, actually, the thread was just turning into another Smogon "Bash the American pinata" thread. Serious discussion assumes there are two sides, not just an echo chamber for irreverent nonsense. Of course you thought the thread was going well: It was a non-serious bashfest that agreed with you!CaptKirby said:
So rather than another quotefest that'll stretch the thread I'll summarize:
jrrrrrrr: Every time you post about the south you make a bigoted post.
But more importantly here are two claims from the last thread I was talking about:
You don't have a leg to stand on when it comes to your posts. In the one referenced you use me as a proxy for "GOP rhetoric" in that post so by inference you are assuming about 50% of the people in America are morally unfit because they do not share your worldview. You are in short bigoted against anyone with a certain political ideology regardless of the actual positions of that ideology, and ascribe inferior characteristics to anyone who believes in such an ideology. I try to avoid ascribing anything to any individual liberal, but I do point out the negative end results of liberal policies. And yeah, I was trolling a little bit. with the Coincidence? You decide. stuff. Too bad everyone gets butthurt because trolling is apparently only supposed to go one way around here.jrrrrrrr said:
It's a common thread in pretty much every liberal and foreign-sourced post about America that we're ignorant, and the American south is usually the whipping post. They never actually state why a nation that is a) generally more diverse b) allows way more immigration c) has been so successful the entire world uses its currency as its reserve and d) manufactures large swaths of political, business, and cultural thought throughout the world and has for centuries can in any way be described as ignorant.
My observation is that it always seems America is considered ignorant to the world because of two primary characteristics: We don't like socialized medicine, we don't like gay marriage. For not "progressing" to these positions on social issues we get called out by every second and third tier nation on the planet. We get called out by nations where pretty much everyone looks the same and they only have to cover the health maladies endemic to the 90% of their homogeneous population. We get called out by nations who care so little about the family they can't even bother to reproduce at replacement rate. Following the so-called "progress" of these societal titans is madness for a country of America's population, ethnic diversity, and geographic scale.
The core of being American is that we don't have an ethnicity and we don't have a specific geographic cultural paradigm. Everyone is an American if they believe in the rule of law and self-governance. Everyone is expected to pay their own way, to learn the predominant language of our nation, and to in all cases avoid becoming a ward of the state. We are too large to have the "protections" of socialized medicine and broad-scale cradle-to-grave welfare. What entitlements we do have like that are bankrupting our nation, just as they are bankrupting every other nation on the planet. The Obama Administration signed a stimulus bill into law last year that dwarved spending over the last seven years in Iraq in a single stroke of a pen. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are financially insolvent yet are considered non-discretionary spending. They are the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. If our defense budget were the size of our unfunded liabilities we could stay at war in Iraq and Afghanistan approximately forever.
Massachusetts attempted to make a statewide health insurance program and our premiums are still the highest in the nation because (among other things) we are still giving illegals a free ride. They are still using the emergency room as their primary care physician, and regardless of how they feel about it no American will ever tell a hospital to shutter someone away because they don't have the right papers on them. The minimum mandates inflate the cost for every policy holder and the cost controls are non-existent. Bear in mind this is a state with one party rule and the person who initially concieved the system was the previous governor Republican Mitt Romney. If they wanted to fix it they've had opportunities and the political clout every day since the program's inception. They do not because "government health care" is never about health care, it's about government. America's health care costs are so high because just about everywhere you go they have a CATScan and an MRI machine, all of which were researched, funded, developed, and perfected by the American medical device industry. This stuff costs an absurd amout of money to imagine, develop, implement, and distibute and yet still people complain about what they're getting. It's the same way with medical pharmaceuticals, another massive R&D dump in our national healthcare expenditure.
Of course our health care costs are higher than Britian's. Britain is limited to what they spend on the NHS's annual budget. Since our health care system is not tied to and controlled in every facet by the federal government, we don't have a limit to what we can spend on health care on a national scale, and the makeup of our health care spending dollars is therefore different. Has the NHS ever come out with a new treatment or pharmaceutical? If British companies are still allowed to make them has any ever successfully gained government approval?
So in summary, yes, America is the best. Period. No one on earth believes that every country is equal to every other. Not a single person lambasting America would want to live in a nation in the Middle East. Not a single one would want to live under the thumb of the Chinese. Not a single one would prefer living anywhere under an oppressive dictator, from Cuba to North Korea to Venezuela. Not if they had a choice.
America allows around one million people to immigrate here legally every year, and we have a line for entry that goes out for decades. We have an even greater problems with illegal immigration. People clamor to get into America because when you're poor and oppressed you don't have the luxury to wax on about what the government is doing for you or about how the nuclear family is an outmoded paradigm. You want freedom, and you want the chance to make your own way. America has offered just such an opportunity since it's inception and continues to this day. We try to make laws that keep the burden of the government light and protect only our own citizens. In their guts the vast majority of the world has wanted to be American more than their own nationality for the last two centuries.
You are of course, free to disagree. The question is: If you agreed with me and stated it openly in your nation, for how long would your government let you do it? Not a problem where I come from.
If you do not believe America is the best nation on earth, rather than tearing it down why don't you bolster up your own nation instead? Everyone in a forum can make a shitty one-line post with absolutely zero value. It's what's made this place like an even worse version of Firebot since now the entire purpose is muddled into an amalgamated hole brought to you and maintained by the same people of the defunct parent forums. What I'm saying is to actually put some effort into your responses.
Back in September of '99 I switched jobs and new employer did not provide healthcare for the first 90 days of employment. I decided to roll the dice on cobra and go free style. Very near the end of the 90 days, I'm sitting down upstairs and hear bang bang thud and hear my daughter howl. I ran downstairs and looked at her, and she was holding an obviously broken arm (yeah, you could see the break, not compound). So I loaded her up and took her to the ER. No insurance. She was seen and taken care of. So were the follow up visits. Treatment was great and at the end of it I set up a payment plan and took care of it.
So I think it's probably ok for "poor people" to break bones.
Yeah cause porn sure sucks. lol
to be fair, people like DK are literally the reason why people hate America
It's a good thing I don't form my opinions of other countries based on the opinion of one of their residents. That would be kind of ignorant.
People like you and your above compatriot with your shitty, worthless one-line posts are the reason people hate a forum and avoid it at all costs. I hadn't posted here in a couple weeks previously and now I remember why: I'd much rather busy myself in a place that isn't infested by Smogon's worst wits. I disagree with jrrrrrrr but at least in the back and forth we can get some good serious posts going here and there. He has something of value to add, generally speaking. You do not. You never have. And you probably never will. Not if you keep doing what you're doing. Morm knew how to make decent short posts, you do not. Just stick to the physical fitness thread where your post quality is exponentially greater, probably because the few times you post more than a single line makes up for all your bandwagoning/snarky one-liners there.
Seriously, I cannot emphasize this enough: Every single one of your one-line posts sucks ass. Even in the threads where you have good posts that cogently offer advice. There's not a polite way to say this to you except to confront you. You need a damn intervention.
In fact, almost every single one-line post in a forum sucks ass. "Less is More" works for some things, but not for a social forum. This isn't irc which runs in real-time, one line usually doesn't cut it.
I cannot emphasize this enough: you are blaming minorities for education and crime problems in the US, you claim that US Healthcare is the best because rich people come to the US for treatment, you blame liberal teachers for poor education in the US while conservatives try to make fucking creationism a subject in school, among so many other things it's disgusting. People who have these ideologies, like you, are literally the reason why american politics is so fucking backwards and we continually regress into a state of shit.
And then you try to talk about my posting
amazing
No, I am stating the actual fact that higher percentages of minorities statistically raise crime rates and dropout rates alike. That's not "blame," it's simply using facts compiled by the government to explain statistical differences between states. If we want to get to the underlying problems then I believe I made a post about that to vonFielder (though that may have been the Illuminati thread) going into detail about the social patholigies that tend to plague minorities and the political sources of such continuous, relatively new problems.
That was just one claim that is also factually accurate, and I predicated it based on the fact it was not mere rich people, but foreign leaders whose own countries have socialized systems. Why did those leaders fly to America for treatment if the standing argument is that our healthcare is inferior? Other claims involve America's massive investment in new health care technologies rather than just long-term treatments. Our cancer-treatments are top-notch, our medical devices are excellent. Our baseline for care far exceeds many other nations, and it's payment for it that is the primary gripe of detractors.
I was mildly trolling on the liberal schoolteachers bit, but I can assert that liberals assert equally stupid subjects like "age-approriate sexual education" for schools where kids aren't even proficient in math and english. Both are indications of poor school priorities. Incidentally, I oppose teaching creationism in schools since it is, again, superfluous to the function of a school. Schools shouldn't be hostile to open prayer, but unless it's a religious school there isn't a need for a religion subject.
If America is regressing into a state of shit it's because our priorities are all fucked up. We're in debt up to our ass and our government from 2008-2010 tried to fix it by creating a brand new unfunded entitlement meant to bring us socilized medicine like the non-regressed industrial nations. They pulled out every trick in the book and spent all their time, effort, and energy to pass what has been ruled an unconstitutional bill. They were subsequently swept out of office in the US House and State Houses all across the nation in 2010 because they were fundamentally unserious about solving America's fiscal problems. American politics isn't backwards at all; the American people are perfectly calibrated to both give people who dream big and speak well like Obama a chance at the Oval Office and then punish them when they fail to deliver on their promises.
I repeat, there is a line out the door for people who want to be Americans that goes out for decades. Clearly whatever negative aspects that our majority center-right nation (40% conservative, 40% moderate, 20% liberal) possesses, it is not sufficient to keep people from violating our own laws on a daily basis just to get their feet in the door.
So you are free to suggest that at least 60% (40% of conservatives and 20% of right-leaning moderates combined) of America is regressing America to shit. It doesn't seem to have stopped anyone from coming here, nor stopped them from seeking our help in international crises, nor done much of anything but produce a whole lot of whining from the other 40% (20% of left-leaning moderates and liberals) of the country and their international compatriots that we don't all think the same as they do. My ideology happens to align more commonly with the average American than much of Smogon, and I'm willing to stand up and defend it. If it's the fault of my ideology and similar people, then America has been "going to shit" since roughly since its inception.
See, now we can have a discussion back and forth. Excellent work.
There were people on both sides of the argument, except in your mind apparently. Also no matter how many times you repeat your coincidence sound byte, it will never become clever, I promise you. Also, blaming other people for a lack of conversation when you overload your posts with bigoted, specious, irreverently anti-intelligent typical republican diversionary screeds (the exact type Glenn Beck uses, except his are blatantly insane; but nice try trying to disavow him earlier when you are him) is pretty silly. If you want conversation, you can start by engaging issues on an honest level, like how America is not the greatest country in the world, but is not a bad place to live either. I do assume your overt fawning was simple trolling though, not serious...it just goes hand in hand with what I am talking about with discussion.
I would like to first say that I am an american. I was born here and I love this country, if for no other reason that it's the only one I've got. I can assure you that the United States are far inferior to many other countries because of our inability to change and our absurdly convoluted and bureaucratic government populated primarily by those who would rather spout sound bytes and remain solely on the side of their party even when a chance to make the most obvious change for the better is presented. I would like to bring to mind the bill that proposed to give free medical services to 9/11 first responders. This bill was designed to aid in the ailments of those who risked their lives saving innocents. How more just cna yoiu get? Yet it was not passed, a symptom of a certain party's proclamation that no bills would be passed until a certain tax cut was extended. This tax cut was said to be an economy-booster, for those without money will obviously buy more, right? Of course, the best way to fix things is always to KEEP THEM THE SAME. These cuts were in place all throughout the recession, for what reason were they theorized to be such a boost to the economy. I would also like to point out the viewership of the Fox News network, which is the highest among all "news" stations, and is populated by people like Glenn Beck, who is Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly, whose argument for God was: "The tide goes in, the tide goes out, never a miscommunication." When the intelligentsia countered with the fact that the moon controls the tides, he referred to them as pinheads, asked them how the moon got there, and asked why Mars doesn't have a moon (Mars has two moons). At the same time, a simple healthcare bill was passed to create something of a public option to ease the pressures put on the poor, and what managed to get through was a wreckage of a law, torn to threads by a party deathly afraid of socialism and its "evils." Might I point out that many of the world's strongest and most economically sound nations possess socialized medicine, such as Britain, France, and a little country called Finland which is currently rated the best country in the world. Our government's inane fear of any significant change, coupled with the corrupting influence of lobbyists, money, and a fierce desire to preserve one's political career prevents this country from achieving significant bounds and does not appear to be slackening its grip anytime soon. I hope to give this country its time, and stick with it through its foreseeable failings in hopes that one day it may mature enough to accept that there are more well-off, more prosperous, and more moral nations out there that it might do well to emulate.
One more thing:
Did you know the rates of ice cream sold and drownings both increase at around the same time and the same rate? Yet this does not mean ice cream causes drowning, it means summer exists. Correlation does not equate to causality.
My brother tore his ACL and MCL and broke his knee at the same time because he fell off of his bike the wrong way (they had to grow cartilage from some of his cells to replace it, thanks evolution!) and needed a solid year of physical therapy so that he didn't walk with a limp for the rest of his life, and we almost had to sell our house to afford the procedure. Emergency room care is excellent assuming they aren't full, but health care covers more than just emergency situation.
Uh....How is that post bigoted at all? My posts aren't bigoted, I thought I did a decent job explaining why I disagree with most of your baseless correlations and socially backwards positions you espouse during your inane rants.
Here, let me help explain why they're perceived as ignorant: They have a history of making laws openly persecuting minorities, they have a history of being obscenely stubborn when adopting progressive measures like equality, they are largely Christian and therefore have a book they call holy guiding them into refusing other peoples worldviews (while treating others in a way that would make Jesus cry), the social views they vote for bring this country back decades, they lobby for creationism to be taught in schools but throw a tantrum when sex-ed is brought up, they lobby against "big government" when in reality all of the tax money comes from the north and goes to them, they shut down school proms rather than let a lesbian student couple attend, etc etc.
For you to sit there and wonder why the southern US is labelled ignorant is baffling.
Our "defense" budget is already 3 times larger than the next highest country, and we already have more nuclear weapons than all of our enemies combined. And by the looks of it, we probably will be in Iraq and Afghanistan forever.
Not a single one would want to live under the horrible socialistic conditions of Canada and Western Europe. Oh, wait.
You say this like other countries can't offer the same opportunities, which is why you come off as ignorant. Have you ever been out of this country? The US is actually a shithole because we don't invest in infrastructure anymore.
In most nations, indefinitely. Contrary to your belief, the world outside of America isn't filled with insane Naziesque dictators.
And disagreeing with you would actually be a problem in the US. Have you ever heard of a "free speech zone"?
That's a correlation at best, and since race is generally a touchy subject you shouldn't be acting surprised at the responses you're getting. You're saying it like it's an established fact that if you surround yourself with enough minorities, your community is going into the shitter. And that from both experience and common sense isn't true.
You keep parroting cancer research as if that's the only ailment people get. And nobody is arguing that rich people can't get good health care in America, we're arguing that most Americans can't get good health care in America (and that treatments they can afford could be gotten cheaper in other countries)
Imagine that, kids learning two things at once. Maybe if you supported sex-ed you wouldn't have to complain about the abortions teenage girls have to get.
You mean, they created a system that forces every American to be exploited by insurance companies instead of just most of us. I don't like it just as much as you, but for wayyyy different reasons.
And we probably wouldn't be in a state of shit if your boy GB didn't start two wars while passing trillion dollar tax cuts (only for the wealthy) without cutting spending.
If teenagers can't handle Sexual Education, Maths, Science and English at the same time then they're pretty much fucked - good teachers or bad, school isn't exactly difficult for anyone who actually goes with the intent of learning anything.