Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
You disregard the fact that these men sacrificed a great deal to form America. Shame on you for not realizing the greatness that America is.
If every other country in Europe have so many freedoms, why did so many immigrants com e to America?
and shame on you for being so blindly patriotic to a country that ranks 37th in health, spends twice as much on health care as any other country in the world and can't even cover all it's citizens and let's the number one reason it's citizens go bankrupt for medical bills.
shame on you for being so blindly patriotic to a country that can't even edge out Cuba, Cyprus, and our own territory of Puerto Rico in life expectancy.
people came here (100-130 years ago) because they were poor and the industrial reveloution provided jobs, it had nothing to do with "freedoms", ameica was a big country with a much lower population.
Ronald Reagan. Though I view him from having had him as my governor for eight years. A couple of highlights:
In 1969 he called out the California Highway Patrol and later the National Guard to quell student protests. He later raised tuition rates and cut scholarships for students attending California state universities. I guess he figured if students couldn't afford college they wouldn't be out there protesting a war they could get drafted into. A lot of students had to end their dreams of higher education because of him.
He shut down one of the finest, if not the absolute best, mental health programs in the nation. Thousands of mentally ill people were literally put out onto the streets when he closed down state mental hospitals. Whenever I see some poor, homeless person wandering the streets of Los Angeles talking to himself and unable to care for himself I shout out a great, big, "Thank you Ronald Reagan!"
I've never understood why people have such utter, mindless devotion to the man.
BTW: I give Nancy all the credit in the world for taking care of him while he had Alzheimers. And I was never a Nancy fan. But that was not easy and she deserves to be recognized.
Christopher Columbus may be misrepresented as the "discoverer" of America but his voyages did open up the New World to trade and exploration (exploitation, too, but that's not what this thread is about).
so again, why has the US not done something to modernise and update a constitution that leaves us less free as many more modern ones?
The US constitution has, so far, nor required modernization because American jurists were left with wide latitude to interpret it, and the constitution has essentially been replaced by settled law, the only proviso being that the law could not obviously and conspicuously contradict the constitutional language. In fact, every article of the Ten Amendments are regularly violated, and the courts have simply ruled that social order and public safety trump the constitution. The same thing has probably also happened in most countries who have have written more modern constitutions with the advantage of hindsight. It's illegal in every country to shout "Fire" in a crowded theater. At the same time, American jurists have respected the spirit of freedom embodied in our constitution, and have been loathe to hand down rulings that violate the principle of freedom and liberty, regardless of what the constitutional wording actually says. So, in America, a three-word document saying "Everyone is Free" would have guided the courts to reach pretty much the same verdicts, provided its spirit was respected.
I won't debate you here on the extent to which the principles of freedom embodied in the constitution were a linear result of the Magna Carta. I will say, though, that the Founders of the US were virtually the first to lay out a plan for a nation to proceed without the presence of a Royal authority at all, governed entirely by the citizenry, and that required vision.
I won't debate you here on the extent to which the principles of freedom embodied in the constitution were a linear result of the Magna Carta. I will say, though, that the Founders of the US were virtually the first to lay out a plan for a nation to proceed without the presence of a Royal authority at all, governed entirely by the citizenry, and that required vision.
first they had no model, now they were "virtually the first" , so which one is it?
and the fact that we were "left with wide latitude to interpret it," is as much a flaw as anything.
On Gandhi, I would say he was a remarkable man who came out of relative obscurity to seriously challenge the British empire by peaceful resistance. It's said that, as a young lawyer in South Africa, he was insulted by a racist remark that set him on a path to right the wrongs of racial inequality and colonialism. The fact that he became a symbol of nonviolent resistance and set in motion a movement that freed a subcontinent from colonial rule and established an independent nation of hundreds of millions of people is, in my opinion, quite significant.
I'm baffled, as you obviously are, that anyone would view Gandhi as overrated. Apparently, they didn't like the movie.
Ghandi is often overrated in that many seeem to see him as some kind of saint and not as the clever politician he was. He think he acted disingenuously sometimes. Which is OK unless you consider someone to be perfect, something some Ghandi admirers do.
I didn't like the movie.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
