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>Peace - bwahahahaha how many global conflicts, or even local conflicts between any two major powers, have there been in the past 60 years? While "Pax American
by kec 13y ago
>Peace - bwahahahaha
how many global conflicts, or even local conflicts between any two major powers, have there been in the past 60 years? While "Pax Americana" obviously isn't perfect, it's hard to deny that it doesn't exist.
>Transistor - The Canadian Julius Edgar Lilienfeld first patented the FET.
He was actually Hungarian, (and emigrated to the US shortly afterward) but that's besides the point. He never actually created his design, only patented it. It took another 20 years for a design to actually be implemented by Shockley and others at Bell labs.
>Computer - The first programmable electronic computer was built by Tommy Flowers in the UK for WWII code breaking.
Fair... Although it was IBM, Intel, RCA, DEC and eventually Apple which made computing what it is today.
>Internet - Certainly a hell of a lot of the initial work was done in the States, but the protocols were knocked out between groups in Stanford and University College London and the bit of it that most people use was designed by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN.
Fair
- moocowduckquack 13y agoPax Americana means very little in the countries being bombed by the USA. And in the past 60 years there has been quite a number of them, many of them proxies.
- grey-area 13y agohow many global conflicts, or even local conflicts between any two major powers, have there been in the past 60 years? You are trying to redefine the word peace to fit your rhetoric. I prefer to define peace as an absence of war, in which case we definitely have not seen anything like peace, and certainly not because of US involvement. The US has been involved in, and started, many wars over the last 60 years where millions died, has backed many brutal dictatorships (and continues to back them - see Bahrain), and has pioneered in the last decades new ways to perform targeted assassinations far beyond its borders, including innocent civilians far from any war zone. Hardly a force for peace. There are many good things about US culture but promoting global peace or human rights is not one of them. Pax Americana is an old comforting lie, as was Pax Britannica, and the Pax Romana before it.
- rayiner 13y ago> I prefer to define peace as an absence of war The absence of war is relative. The late 20th century was remarkably free of the kinds of conflicts between major powers that defined the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. What relative peace coincident with the ascendancy of Rome, Britain, and America have in common is that a global with overwhelming military power keeps major wars from breaking out between lesser powers. After all, do you think Europe suddenly just got religion in the 1950's after hundreds of years of infighting? Human nature didn't change that suddenly--what changed was the political balance of power: there was no room for Britain to war with France or Germany when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were internationally dominant.
- grey-area 13y agoThe late 20th century was remarkably free of the kinds of conflicts between major powers that defined the 17th, 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. There have been many wars all over the globe, including some in progress still involving the US, we've been on the edge of global nuclear war due to brinkmanship between the US and USSR, we've seen genocide in various African countries, Syria, Iran-Iraq, Iraq, Iraq II, civil war across the middle east. There is no Pax Americana. That is not relative peace, that is a state of constant warfare, much like the rest of global history.
- rayiner 13y agoSee: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-01-22/india/30652668_1_steven-pinker-wmds-violence http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-01-22/india....