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Re: wake up and smell the fucking coffee

well, i can assure you angrily punching keys i am not.  merely trying to
kill some time until i can get up the motivation to run some errands.

but speaking of isolationism, i am sure you might like the delusion of era
between 1865 and 1914 when we were happily "self-sufficient, self-governed,
and self-concerned"  funny, i am reading that as selfish, selfish, selfish.

but self-sufficiency in this world is merely an illusion.  try as we might
to separate ourselves, with modern transportation and communication
technologies, countries are more tightly bind together than ever.   Stock
markets are open across the world, 24 hours a day.  meaning,  business is
being conducted where the US government have no control. and whether we are
asleep or not.  US treasury bills are traded on the world market, whether we
like it or not.  what it means is that our economy is tied in with everyone
else's.  the value of our money inflates and deflates according to what
other countries are doing at the time.  and what happens elsewhere has an
impact on what happens in this country.  do you suggest that we put up
impossible tariffs and pull back all the US companies as we did back then,
so everyone else can follow suit and do the same thing?  what we have then
is a stagnant market where nothing happens, no trade, no jobs,  which is
exactly what happened before W.W.II.  so we can have some tin pot dictator
rise up and promise their people change from their daily drudgery, for a
small little price called personal freedom.  so its 1935 all over again.
and the economic down turn we experienced prior to W.W.II had nothing to do
with the fact that we participated in W.W.I (i don't see where you got that
brilliant piece of deductive logic from, but...), and everything to do with
the fact that we did exactly as i described above.  so much for the
isolationism argument.

and if a comparison is to be drawn between what is happening now in
Yugoslavia and to what happens in this country that might warrant outside
interference, then that period of history is probably most appropriate.  We
did our share of "ethnic cleansing" back then, and should someone have stood
up and fought for the Native Americans?  i say yes, but no one did.  Had
some country did interfere maybe we wouldn't have this shameful past in our
history.

 But we are ever so proud of our achievement,  manifest destiny and all
that.  we expanded from sea to shining sea, and ground the natives under the
heel,  the survivors, their spirit broken, got herded onto reservations so
we don't have to concern ourselves with them.  but of course the
"self-concerning, self-governing, self-sufficient"  Americans back then
didn't see a problem with that.

i would explain my history in living in two different countries, but that's
a bit complicated and not at all applicable. l was born here so i can claim
Americans as "we" without undue stress on my psyche, but i grew up in China
because of a certain family situation... but i did see things first hand as
oppose to your videos and second hand stories.  let's just leave it at that.
since there is really no moral issues involved in trading and befriending
china, then i say its stupid to unnecessarily provoke it when everyone
benefits from a productive commercial relationship.
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