Questions! Questions! Ever More Questions About the Way We Are Now
"You can't make a republic without republicans." —Stendhal
Just asking—
What happens to a "service economy" when people no longer have the money to pay for service?
What happens when “precision” bombs and missiles are not really as precise as they are supposed to be?
What happens to a country where judges make up the law as they go along?
What happens to a country when presidents, governors, and mayors only enforce the laws they like?
How come Congress can regulate toilets and parking lots but not war and spending?
What happens to a country when the government and the citizens spend borrowed money for years and years?
What happens to a society in which right and wrong and courses of action are determined by charts and graphs prepared by “experts”? And where generals conduct wars by "Power Point Presentations"?
What happens to a generation of people raised on a daily diet of television comedies and music videos?
What is to be said about a society in which many of the most important things are known by everybody but cannot be mentioned in public?
Who said nothing good ever came out of San Francisco? I hear they are naming a sewage plant after George W. Bush.
Why do leftists persist in calling neocons "right-wing"?
What does it mean when have men started wearing earrings, a custom that died out among Europeans several centuries ago?
What does it mean when a society’s musical tastes shift from harmony and melody to rhythm
and loudness?
What good has the CIA ever done? Has an account ever been made of its mistakes and failures? Hasn't its main accomplishment been to affront the world with the arrogant and incompetent side of the Yankee national character? (Attentive readers will know what I mean by "Yankee.")
Why did the U.S. not stand down at the end of the Cold War and return to a peaceful demeanour instead of seeking hegemony? (Because of that same Yankee national character. There is a large category of Americans whose natural tendency is to make themselves feel important and righteous by inventing holy missions and interfering in other peoples' business. That is why it is useless to discuss foreign affairs in practical terms.)
Just asking.
Entries(RSS)
NGPM,
Best thing to do would be to restore monarchies at this point or go back to city states. There you have both ends of the centralization/decentralization spectrum. Monarchies are heavily centralized, but since the person in charge is going to pass it(power) on to his kids he is more likely to care about what shape his nation/empire/state is in. It is like how a person who owns his own home takes better care of it than a renter or squatter. City states would work out better than the current regime as localities can concentrate on what is best for them without worrying about an intrusive federal or state govt looking to mess things up. A lot less waste in terms of money and resources.
NGPM: If you want to do some research, you may wish to read a speech given by one of the liberators of Latin America (O'Higgins?, cant remember which one) to the Columbian parliament, in which he outlined why the North American colonies did so much better after independence than the Latin American ones.
As for Latin America, I think it indisputable that independence came too soon and in the wrong way, considering the state of Latin American societies at that time. They needed time and experience to learn to govern themselves effectively, and insulation from enlightenment ideas which were a destablising factor from the beginning of independence.
America needed slower westward expansion and slower or no immigration in order to develop its civilisation. In the end, it wasn't that South European Catholics or East Europeans came over here, it was the speed at which they did. The rate of expansion in the colonial period and the early nineteenth century was natural. It was the result of the gradual growth and expansion of civilisation. The immigrant explosion of the late 19th - early 20th century, and resulting accelerated expansion westward and greatly accelerated growth of cities undermined society, to the detriment of the original Americans and the immigrants.