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Just because the US/AU/UK/Can are better places to live than Russia, China, N. Korea, or most of Africa doesn't mean we should allow the stuff Western governmen

Just because the US/AU/UK/Can are better places to live than Russia, China, N. Korea, or most of Africa doesn't mean we should allow the stuff Western governments are pulling to slide. I don't know if the countries that are orders of magnitude worse than the Western governments were always that way, but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. It was likely a slow path that led them to decline to the point they have today. I don't want to see my government go down the same path.

dublinclontarf 15y ago
Exactly, if we continue to allow our governments to pull this stuff, soon enough we WILL be in the same boat.
- fedd 15y ago
  you should also be worried by this iphone tracking issue too, i think. such things should be banned immediately, because this is one of the first steps towards the real orwellish regime. it seems like bullshit first, then you'd say 'it's okay to use this tracking in court against rapists, maniacs', then communists, then leftist democrats, or rightist republicans, labour union members.. then say goodbye to all washing machines and four cars per family :)
rtperson 15y ago
> but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. In the case of Russia, you would be very, very wrong. You'd have to go back to the Kievan empire of the 13th century to find the last time the place wasn't an ethical quagmire. I take your point about holding Western governments to a higher standard -- we definitely should -- but don't assume all cultures had a similar starting point. Your average Canadian has never had to deal with the cultural memory of anything quite so devastating as the Mongol invasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27).
- nopassrecover 15y ago
  "Cultural memory" - is an invasion from around 800 years ago really that devastating on a daily basis to the people of today? I'd also beg to differ on your point that Canadians have no ancestry of invasion - Canadians descend primarily from France and the UK (with a little German as well), and it would be a tad outrageous to pretend these nations haven't endured bloody and violent invasions throughout history.
  - bzbarsky 15y ago
    It's not whether it's devastating to people today. It's about the fairy tales your kids get told when they're growing up. And grandparent's point wasn't that Canadian's don't have a cultural heritage of invasions and battles, but rather that the Mongol invasion was somewhat different from most of the things going on in Western Europe (e.g. almost all major cities were sacked; casualties were at levels not to be seen in Western Europe until World War 2) and had widespread and long-ranging effects on society that made it qualitatively different from Western Europe. Second paragraph of the "Influence of the Mongol invasion on Rus' society" section of the cited Wikipedia article is relevant here.
  - baguasquirrel 15y ago
    We have Pakistani cab drivers in New York City shuttling Jews around. Don't you have similar situations in Toronto? That should be evidence enough that we cannot make claim to the cultural heritage of our ancestor's nations. People come to the United States and Canada partly to get away from their culture's biases and heritage.
    - lobster_johnson 15y ago
      The US is an outlier, though, New York even more so. More than any city in the US, NYC can claim to be the epicenter and cradle of the kind of mythical nation-history-building to which every nation-culture's opportunistic immigration and subsequent assimilation has contributed to and adopted as their own. The very notion of the American dream is codified on New York's main landmark: "give me your poor huddled masses" etc. The story of America is necessarily the story of many populations coming together to create something new. The Irish may have the old country to look back on, for example, but their original cultural heritage has been superseded by that of America itself. Russia has no such story; along with its disparate satellites (Ukraine, Belarus and so on) it has a long history of single peoples mostly staying still, or emigrating. The idea of a "Russian people" with a common cultural heritage has been a fairly constant concept for hundreds of years, whereas "the American people" is a very new one, historically.

dublinclontarf 15y ago

Exactly, if we continue to allow our governments to pull this stuff, soon enough we WILL be in the same boat.

fedd 15y ago
you should also be worried by this iphone tracking issue too, i think. such things should be banned immediately, because this is one of the first steps towards the real orwellish regime. it seems like bullshit first, then you'd say 'it's okay to use this tracking in court against rapists, maniacs', then communists, then leftist democrats, or rightist republicans, labour union members.. then say goodbye to all washing machines and four cars per family :)

rtperson 15y ago

> but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. In the case of Russia, you would be very, very wrong. You'd have to go back to the Kievan empire of the 13th century to find the last time the place wasn't an ethical quagmire. I take your point about holding Western governments to a higher standard -- we definitely should -- but don't assume all cultures had a similar starting point. Your average Canadian has never had to deal with the cultural memory of anything quite so devastating as the Mongol invasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27).

nopassrecover 15y ago
"Cultural memory" - is an invasion from around 800 years ago really that devastating on a daily basis to the people of today? I'd also beg to differ on your point that Canadians have no ancestry of invasion - Canadians descend primarily from France and the UK (with a little German as well), and it would be a tad outrageous to pretend these nations haven't endured bloody and violent invasions throughout history.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  It's not whether it's devastating to people today. It's about the fairy tales your kids get told when they're growing up. And grandparent's point wasn't that Canadian's don't have a cultural heritage of invasions and battles, but rather that the Mongol invasion was somewhat different from most of the things going on in Western Europe (e.g. almost all major cities were sacked; casualties were at levels not to be seen in Western Europe until World War 2) and had widespread and long-ranging effects on society that made it qualitatively different from Western Europe. Second paragraph of the "Influence of the Mongol invasion on Rus' society" section of the cited Wikipedia article is relevant here.
- baguasquirrel 15y ago
  We have Pakistani cab drivers in New York City shuttling Jews around. Don't you have similar situations in Toronto? That should be evidence enough that we cannot make claim to the cultural heritage of our ancestor's nations. People come to the United States and Canada partly to get away from their culture's biases and heritage.
  - lobster_johnson 15y ago
    The US is an outlier, though, New York even more so. More than any city in the US, NYC can claim to be the epicenter and cradle of the kind of mythical nation-history-building to which every nation-culture's opportunistic immigration and subsequent assimilation has contributed to and adopted as their own. The very notion of the American dream is codified on New York's main landmark: "give me your poor huddled masses" etc. The story of America is necessarily the story of many populations coming together to create something new. The Irish may have the old country to look back on, for example, but their original cultural heritage has been superseded by that of America itself. Russia has no such story; along with its disparate satellites (Ukraine, Belarus and so on) it has a long history of single peoples mostly staying still, or emigrating. The idea of a "Russian people" with a common cultural heritage has been a fairly constant concept for hundreds of years, whereas "the American people" is a very new one, historically.