</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Are you pointing out your own flawed reasoning?</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Obviously. Come on, thats on a par with "I am rubber, you are glue."
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">People don't need work be happy. If your measurement of how happy a person is by how much they work, you are nuts. You cannot, yet still try, to give that broad definition of happiness to everyone. Some people's life is their family. Being with their family, playing with their kids, being a good spouse, etc. They have no ambition to change the world, yet they are very happy. Other people are happy when they get their paychecks; the fruition of their labor brings them happiness. Not the work leading up to it.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I pity anyone who finds happiness in a paycheck. You can't define people by their work, and no, not all people do, but most people have to work. Its an inbuilt human need, and a good one to have.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Eugenics is the forced (?) mating of a species (humans?) to create better stronger offspring, and the forced celibacy of the weak. I don't see how this compares with natural selection, which is just the death of the weak and the continuation of the strong through natural forces. We do the same with plants but destroy the offspring instead.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">But how do you stop the weak reproducing?
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Stalin? We conned Hitler into attacking Stalin. Played him like a cheap fiddle. Hitler broke the non-aggression pact and we got Stalin into the war. The U.S. won the war, and helped rebuild you afterwards. Don’t forget that.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Thats the most moronic thing you've said thus far. In fact, its the most moronic thing I've heard all week. If not month. The knowledge of History here is minute.
If any one country has the right to say "You'd all be speaking German if it wasn't for us" it's the former Soviet Union. The sacrifice they made to defeat Hitler is mind-boggling.
However, in reality, no one country can or should claim all the credit for defeating the Nazis. America's entry into the war was of course significant, but Hitler had probably already bitten off more than he could chew by violating his non-aggression pact with Stalin in the same year (1941). Also, the war might have taken a very different course had Britain not succeeded in holding out against invasion up to this point. All allied nations made a massive contribution, and although the French often get a hard time for capitulating so soon, its resistance fighters, and those of other occupied nations, also deserve massive credit.
I would suggest that importance to the result of the war should be evaluated by running a mental scenario of World War II, minus the country in question.
Scenario 1: Britain surrenders or is conquered in 1940 (aka, Hitler doesn't commit a strategic blunder by ceasing his attacks on the RAF to focus on the Blitz of London and other British cities)
Europe is now entirely occupied by the Nazis. The US no longer has any opportunity to enter the war on the European front, allowing the Nazis to consolidate their power and focus on the USSR & Africa. The latter would have fallen easily. As to the former, as was mentioned above, there is some question as to whether the USSR might not have been able to overcome the Nazis alone and unaided. This is a legitimate point, but I must point out that, first of all, Stalingrad was seen as a turning point in the war because it--and arguably, it alone--prevented the Nazis from capturing Moscow, which would have severely damaged or completely destroyed the Soviet ability to continue with the war.
Another point is that without Britain, the US would be less likely to involve themselves in the war, and so the Japanese might have chosen to open a second Soviet front rather than bombing Pearl Harbour. After all, the reason the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour was because they saw US intervention in the war--mostly on the behalf of Britain--as inevitable, and so wanted to strike first. If US intervention was no longer inevitable, the Japanese may well have focused on the USSR, instead. It seems unlikely that the USSR could have withheld the combined forces of the Germans and the Japanese.
(This is a somewhat simplified view of the situation--the Japanese would, at some point, have been forced to take on the Americans, as their eventual goal was total domination in the pacific. However, they (the Axis) could have concentrated on one foe at a time.)
Now you've got the US (well, and Canada and a few South American countries) alone against a combined German-Japanese force (assuming the two didn't self-destruct on contact), holding all of Asia, Africa, and Europe, with no shortage of natural resources.
Scenario 2: No Pearl Harbour, no US intervention, possibly no supplying the USSR & Britain?
Now you've potentially got Britain capitulating due to sheer lack of raw materials.
Even were this not the case, you've got Japan running amok in the Pacific (well, I can't see a realistic scenario in which Japan runs amok in the Pacific without American retaliation), or possibly in Russia. In either case, the damage to the Allied cause would be catastrophic.
Possibly more important, you have no significant second front in Europe in 1944, and thus, the Iron Curtain covers all of Germany, France, Italy, and Spain--all of the Continent. I wouldn't argue that Stalin was on a par with Hitler, but he was ****ing close.
Scenario 3: Hitler doesn't commit strategic suicide by attacking the USSR (though many historians figure it was only a matter of time before Stalin did the backstabbing)
All of the might of Germany concentrating on Britain and Africa. Millions of German soldiers are spared for use on the western front. Unless the US joined in early, Britain is doomed. Africa falls easily. It's possible, if the war didn't end then and there, with a good 1/3 of the world under Nazi control, that the Germans would be defeated, but surely not by 1945.
Keep in mind that, in the minds of the Germans, and in terms of sheer statistics, the much touted Second Front in the West was small potatoes--the real war was fought and lost (by the Germans) on the eastern front.
Clearly, it would seem, all three of the major Allied players were nothing short of necessary to the war effort. None were expendable. Additionally, The Chinese did not win World War II for us, but they should certainly be up there with the others cited as contributors. Estimated figures for Chinese casualties vary widely, but the death toll of regular soldiers alone measures in the millions.
Argue against that. You will fail.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">As for bullies, the two “chaps†before us, Jbird and Yo, had more of a conversation than you are supplying.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Because I didn't see the debate. How does one defend bullying and fighting in school?
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">On to the rapists. Most men don’t **** women over procreation; it is done as a show of power and force. “I can do this and there is nothing you can do about it.†It is ego that makes men do that. Even if the same drive can be applied to capitalism, it doesn’t make it wrong. Some of the things that you quoted were correct, some wrong. It isn’t all one sided as you want to lead us to believe.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">My (simplified) point was merely that just because something is natural, and that no society has succeeded in containing it, does not mean that it is right and that we should not try to contain it.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Capitalism is a great driving force. Ambition, “I’m better than youâ€, ego, etc. When it is pointed in a direction that helps society</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">But that's my point, it never is. Its pointed in a direction that helps that individual.
[/quote], or when it is regulated so that the individual doesn’t get screwed over (Constitution, United States of America; was created to help do this) society can grow. We are not the last standing super power because we wanted only for society. We are number one because we wanted to be better than the rest, better than the best. You can’t get that out of socialism. Necessity is the mother of invention, and adversity is the key to growth. Socialism denies that, capitalism forces it. When faced with adversity, your are forced to succeed, succeed or die.[/quote]
But you're number one at the expense of other people. The people of Indonesia (CIA backed Suharto), the people of Cuba, the whole of South America. That isn't something I'd want to have on my conscience. Good for the US that it doesn't seem to have one.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Now, before you pervert capitalism any more with another **** story (Similar branches, different effects), why don’t we expand this discussion some? There has to be more that you want to talk about, since you effectively dodged my “school bullies†discussion.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Again, I didn't see the point in the "school bullies" discussion. However, feel free to view my "A question." thread if you want.
<small>[ February 20, 2002, 11:11 PM: Message edited by: Massy ]</small>