Jesus Appalled By Americans?
POSTED BY: Mavourneen
UPDATED: Monday, April 9, 2007 23:32
VIEWED: 11915
PAGE 5 of 15
Yes Khyron. That is exactly what I'm saying. I don't care if I'm labled racist or not, because I know I'm not. We've ruined the public school system with the VERY expensive "No Child Left Behind" act which NOBODY I know approved of in the first place. Yup.... that's our money going to fund that collosal waste of resources and future minds. All they've managed to do since it's started is lower the bar for everyone. Oh... let's not forget free healthcare for anybody fast enough to jump the border with their kids. I don't know of anybody here that approves of that either, but we're building water fountains in Mexico so the border jumpers have something to drink while they sneak over here. I could go on about this all night, but my posts are already 5 times longer than most people in here as it is. I will leave that alone for now and label it forced charity.
Signym -
Well, I see a bunch of numbers, but they don't mean anything to me. No disrespect to Mr. Drezner, but I have no clue who he is and I don't recognize his statistics here, nor do I believe them.
Now... let's just say that I bought these statistics at face value for shits and giggles. When you count all 300,000,000+ people in America also take into account all of our own poor and destitute, and we have A LOT of them, who drastically skew any numbers. I don't even see any aid going to them or the effects their negative incomes have on a list like this mentioned in your article. Ywould also need to have lists of other factors such as this to get a true picture of the way things really are, or else you're not doing anything different than somebody quoting passages from the Bible out of context to prove a point.
Upon further reading of your article, this forign relief aid isn't mentioned to be either private donations or Government aid. I'm assuming it's both, so this just strengthens my stance about "forced" charity as well.
And to take a quote right from it:
Quote:
U.N. Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland suggested that the United States and other Western nations were being "stingy" with relief funds, saying there would be more available if taxes were raised.
Are you proposing more forced charity? Who the F
k are you Jan? Go Fk yourself. This is just more Communist bullshit to make people in America feel even worse about themselves then they already do.I'm sorry, but I'm still not buying it.
(***EDIT: Upon further evaluation of your article, this "charity" seems ONLY to consist of Government aid, and a debate about whether or not we are paying enough taxes, and if whether or not Americans in general want to pay more taxes for Communist programs like they do in europe. It seems the Europeans don't even understand the concept of private charity anymore, and who can blame them with the amount of money is stolen from them by their government? I'm not sure what point you were trying to proove with this other article other than prooving my first point.)
I personally don't give money to charity. It's a dirty and lazy thing in my eyes. The corporations behind them take a lot of money to operate so your buying power is drastically cut after the bottom line has been met first. You want to really help people then go out and volunteer and help the underprivelaged here, in your own country. I don't see any reason why the Tsunamis were any more our busniess than this bullshit war we find ourselves in. (For the record, I don't know anybody who supports that either).
I have been known to pick up hitch-hikers and other people who aren't even hitchhiking when it's cold or rainy out and they look like they need a hand. I'm not saying you all should do it and I understand your reservations. I picked up a crackhead once who turned out to be pretty dangerous once (long, but interesting story), and I've also picked up another guy who robbed a 7-11 earlier in the evening so I had quite a bit of explaining to do to the police afterwards, so even though I've got some coo
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6Six- A few self-contradictions on your post. You seem so insistenet that America be recognized as THE MOST GENEROUS nation on the planet .... Americans donate more money to charity than ALL THE OTHER NATIONS on Earth combined. And yet, giving to charity is (to you) a "dirty and lazy thing". So what you've just said is that Americans are the dirtiest and laziest people in the world.
FINALLY! YOUR TRUE OPINION OF AMERICANS COMES THRU!
And if we're so generous, the MOST generous in the world in fact (!) and so intent on income redistribution, why do we have so many of our own poor and destitute... A LOT of them, who drastically skew any numbers?
You know, when I put some of your ideas next to other ideas of yours they go poof!. So OOC what ARE you trying to say?
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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GEEZER
Quote:While Edwards could have described his moral underpinnings w/o referring to Jesus, I don't get the idea that he was speaking "for" Jesus. As Rue pointed out, the qualifier "I think" makes Edwards' statement a personally referenced opinion, not a "speaking for Jesus" statement. And for all I know, Edwards' reference to Jesus may be sincere and not at all dishonest or cynical. So IMHO he doesn't lose any points for dishonesty on that account.
Politics, especially the fund raising part, is at least as much theater as trial law. Putting words in either Jesus' mouth or a dead child's mouth to convince someone you're in the right seems manipulative and somewhat dishonest to me, and Mr. Edwards seems to have used it more than once.
The "speaking for the child" thing? Hokey at best and manipulative as well.
I personally don't have much opinion of Edwards' fundamental honesty or dishonesty because I haven't looked at his record substantively, and these two instances aren't enough to condemn or redeem anyone. I like the fact that he represents ordinary people against corporations and government (altho I know that some ppl on this board regard that as anathema) which seems to give some weight ot his "two Americas" campaign, but I have no clue whether his voting record is consistent with that. I know that he has undergone some family tragedy in the past few years (death of his son and wife's cancer) which I think tends to "season" people, and that he's facing more in the near future.
I expect that his decision to continue with his campaign in the face of his wife's cancer recurrence was made either out of out of naivete or out of a desire to affect the primaries. I don't think it's possible to truly understand how gruesome it is to care for someone with metastacized cancer unless you've gone through it, and my guess is that some time in the next two to four years he will be fully involved with his wife dying.
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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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Random points:
- US citizens do not pay much in taxes, and they are nothing like a communism.
- Other countries who pay more in taxes tend to have a much higher standard of living.
- The U.S. does not pay much in aid in relative terms -- taking the E.U. as if it were one country, the US and the EU have roughly the same GDP. But the EU gives more than the US on just about every indicator that I know of. (It was claimed that the EU doesn't do private charity, but that's just false.)
- Communism is demonized because Russia did it immorally. If you ever bother to read Marx's Das Kapital, you'll notice that it's much more of a passive consequence of people interacting with capitalism. Marx's big mistake was that he thought a revolution was necessary; but the socialist progress in both the US and the EU has gone remarkably naturally -- and both have done incredibly well. By contrast, what Russia called communism was much more a beast of capitalism than anybody could have anticipated.
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Quote:
Originally posted by SignyM:
6Six- A few self-contradictions on your post. You seem so insistenet that America be recognized as THE MOST GENEROUS nation on the planet .... Americans donate more money to charity than ALL THE OTHER NATIONS on Earth combined. And yet, giving to charity is (to you) a "dirty and lazy thing". So what you've just said is that Americans are the dirtiest and laziest people in the world.
FINALLY! YOUR TRUE OPINION OF AMERICANS COMES THRU!
And if we're so generous, the MOST generous in the world in fact (!) and so intent on income redistribution, why do we have so many of our own poor and destitute... A LOT of them, who drastically skew any numbers?
You know, when I put some of your ideas next to other ideas of yours they go poof!. So OOC what ARE you trying to say?
Wow..... so you're just going to throw logic and reason out the window because your source is bunk here and proves my point. If you would like to get serious and keep up this debate, you're welcome to post an intelligent argument. Otherwise... I've said my piece and even though you're trying desperately to twist my words, you know what it is.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Quote:
Originally posted by Drostie:
Random points:
- US citizens do not pay much in taxes, and they are nothing like a communism.
- Other countries who pay more in taxes tend to have a much higher standard of living.
- The U.S. does not pay much in aid in relative terms -- taking the E.U. as if it were one country, the US and the EU have roughly the same GDP. But the EU gives more than the US on just about every indicator that I know of. (It was claimed that the EU doesn't do private charity, but that's just false.)
- Communism is demonized because Russia did it immorally. If you ever bother to read Marx's Das Kapital, you'll notice that it's much more of a passive consequence of people interacting with capitalism. Marx's big mistake was that he thought a revolution was necessary; but the socialist progress in both the US and the EU has gone remarkably naturally -- and both have done incredibly well. By contrast, what Russia called communism was much more a beast of capitalism than anybody could have anticipated.
Random Opinions...... but whatever.
I won't even bother asking you to find references on any of that.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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Nope Six, I haven't the faintest clue WHAT you're trying to say. Although I exaggerated to make a point, your posts contain fundamental self contradictions. This is what you've said about charity:
Americans are the most charitable because we donate a lot of money and pay a lot in taxes. So government-funded social programs are (forced) charities, which is the same as communism. But Europeans who pay more taxes are NOT charitable because they don't understand "private" charity, which is dirty and lazy.
So can you take this bag of snakes and lay it out straight? Or, describe for me what YOU think "charity" is.
---------------------------------
Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.
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*shrug* All of the points I mentioned are wholly factual, and can be Googled.
I'm more intimately familiar with the details, because I'm a dual citizen of the US and NL, and consequently I've seen both first-hand. The improvements tend to be implicit -- things you take for granted. For example, in the US, there are potholes; in the NL, there aren't. In the US, you *sometimes* can catch a Greyhound to the next city; in the NL, the trains run every couple of minutes to any city you'd like.
But, of course, you may also look up actual standards-of-living indices between the EU and the US. The only one that the US consistently beats the EU on is GDP per capita -- and since most of the US wealth is concentrated in precious few hands, that means that your Bill Gateses and Waltons are pulling up the mean, leaving the average citizen in the dust.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Drostie:
*shrug* All of the points I mentioned are wholly factual, and can be Googled.
I'm more intimately familiar with the details, because I'm a dual citizen of the US and NL, and consequently I've seen both first-hand. The improvements tend to be implicit -- things you take for granted. For example, in the US, there are potholes; in the NL, there aren't. In the US, you *sometimes* can catch a Greyhound to the next city; in the NL, the trains run every couple of minutes to any city you'd like.
But, of course, you may also look up actual standards-of-living indices between the EU and the US. The only one that the US consistently beats the EU on is GDP per capita -- and since most of the US wealth is concentrated in precious few hands, that means that your Bill Gateses and Waltons are pulling up the mean, leaving the average citizen in the dust.
That's a real nice story and all but I've read plenty of people from the UK bitching about the insane amounts of money that they have that go to taxes and they have no control over. Your definition of standards of living and mine are obviously much different. Mine is higher the less the less that government takes from me and the less they have to do with my life, period. I do very well with my median salary because I show self control and responsibility. Most people in America would be much better off if they could keep their credit cards in their pockets and not spend like a bunch of idiots with a magic goodie getter. For the most part, I'm thinking my quality of life is pretty good. What the government does with our money is a waste most of the time and I'd rather be able to do with it what I will.
As for your post Signy.... I'll get to it soon. I can't give it the attention it diserves at the moment. Thanks for being serious this time and clearing that up. I don't think sarcasm translates very well and your other post came off as pretty insulting.
Oh, and I dont' feel I've contradicted myself at all. It's simply a matter of taking what I said out of context.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack
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- They'd still rather live in the UK than the US. You know that because they haven't crossed the ocean.
- I find it surprising that you hate taxation so much. Especially given the good that it can do -- for example, a government-sponsored health care system would probably save US citizens money. (The NL spends 8% of their GDP on health care; US citizens spend 15%.) The BBC is another good example of how a government can cooperate with a market to produce a better outcome for everybody.
- Expanding on that theme of finding your tax-dislike surprising, I just don't understand why you don't see it as a civic duty. Tax dollars go to roads, schools, hospitals, scientific research -- these are civic responsibilities which you have. What, would you prefer a US with no taxes, and no military, and no roads, and no science? Most Netherlanders feel like taxation is part of a damn fine contract between citizens and their government.
(It is also worth noting that NL citizens are much more active in the political realm. To continue my pothole example, if a Netherlander sees a pothole somewhere, there are numbers you can call to report it.)
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