Are there any good countries?

[PETA]

Originally Posted by J. Fees

lets see how the next 3000 years go before we start patting ourselves on the back.

why would we want to do that?

Originally Posted by J. Fees

i've heard of straight a students ending up on skid row.

and this matters because?

[Keith P]

Originally Posted by synergistic

well I'm glad I have your seal of approval dick.
thank you, come again.

You live in Texas assclown. I think this as good as its gonna get.

[Dionysos]

Originally Posted by J. Fees

lets see how the next 3000 years go before we start patting ourselves on the back. i've heard of straight a students ending up on skid row.

I've heard of dropouts making millions. Shit happens.

[J. Fees]

exactly, who knows how this social experiment will end up. 230 yrs is kinda hard to judge a country by. so far so good.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by J. Fees

exactly, who knows how this social experiment will end up. 230 yrs is kinda hard to judge a country by. so far so good.

230 years is what we have to judge it on... and, we have the rest of the world over that span to compare it to and the rest of the world stretching back as far as historical evidence will take us. That's plenty to make a reasonable evaluation on.

How it ends? As you say, who knows. But, all predictions are the gradual drift from liberty loving to comfort demanding and the willingness to sacrafice the former for the latter... see Toqueville etal

[J. Fees]

230 years into the roman empire looked pretty peachy.

[Ash]

Rome is still there today.

[Keith P]

Originally Posted by Ash

Rome is still there today.

They've got some good looking women too.

[johnny861]

Originally Posted by synergistic

there's a not-so fine line between a libertarian/ socio-conservative principal and anarchistic somalia..
same as there's a not-so fine line between democratic socialism and a communist russia..

If you take into account the years where Somalia was an anarchistic state.
That has changed in recent years.

[PETA]

Originally Posted by J. Fees

230 years into the roman empire looked pretty peachy.

and yet you evaluated those 230 years as peachy didn't you... so an evaluation on 230 years is fine?

We haven't made it to 3000 years since it was founded so were you wrong above? Is it actually too soon to evaluate the Roman Empire?

FTR...230 years from the founding of Rome it was little more than a mud hut village.

[Keith P]

Originally Posted by synergistic

same as there's a not-so fine line between democratic socialism and a communist russia..

Yeh expect for the part where the people get to vote for their representatives.

[BigBallinColin]

and the firing squads

[ItaloManiac]

Interesting thread, i couldn't find a section for an intro.. anyway i'm Italian, i was born in Rome but i live in northern Italy.

Berlusconistan (also known as Italy) is a partly free country where press and TVs are directly owned by the head of government who removes any comment and opinion against him and his Governent. Freedoms are guaranteed by the constitution of course, just like in Belarus, but i realized something was wrong when me and a large crowd of peaceful, unarmed people were beaten up by the police and identified like wild dogs. When i asked the one who seemed to be the higher rank why they were taking our banners to burn them, he said "We decide what you can say and do here", i didn't say a word for like 2 days. We have soldiers with assault rifles patrolling the streets, how many people knew that?

Obviously nobody knows about that. The majority of Italians eat "what comes out from the lower part of human body" infront of the TV, òistening to regime information without access to internet, they don't speak english and they cannot read newspapers like Independent, New York Times, Washington Post, or either watch BBC, CNN, ABC ...except the people who use internet as first source of information (the minority). TVs say we are doing good, they say Italy is still strong and we have no problems while USA and the rest of Europe are facing unemployment and economic recession. In reality workers take over factories, they demonstrate, they protest, they block off airports and train stations. The people are angry and everytime a minister shows up in some public place he is being yelled at, the kindest expression are something like "You have to die".. but the police takes away all cameras, cellphones, and TV channels always miss those protests, what a coincidence.. and mindless zombies masked by citizens say "Uh, i don't see anything on TV, that means there are no riots".

On youtube there are tens of videos about police beating up unarmed people, taking banners away from demonstrators, destroying cameras audio and video tapes.. and then they send some guy masked as a demonstrator to throw a rock at the anti riot troops so they have a reason to charge the crowd, and thats the part where TV crews come out "See, they throw rocks!"

Italy is not a good country, definately

[synergistic]

Originally Posted by Keith P

Yeh expect for the part where the people get to vote for their representatives.

hence the term "not-so fine line", a subtlety, but for the noticeable second time in this thread, subtlety is not your thing, is it?

ps. not sure who pissed in your political cheerios, but you need to deal keke?

[Hey Bubu]

Originally Posted by PETA

How it ends? As you say, who knows.

http://www.slate.com/id/2223962/

Collapse: In this scenario, the country has devolved after a series of catastrophes: unchecked climate change, a pandemic, nuclear war—the stuff that Jared Diamond books and disaster movies are made of. A catastrophe that breeds internal division, Schwartz argues, is more likely to eradicate America than any kind of external threat. A country is like a family, he theorizes. If you feel threatened from the outside, you band together—rather than tear the United States apart, 9/11 galvanized us against a common enemy. The laggard response to Hurricane Katrina, on the other hand, meant that our own government became the common enemy. A long, uninterrupted series of nationwide Katrinas—and a concomitant series of bungled federal responses—is the recipe for collapse.

Schwartz submits that government incompetence might not be enough to trigger America's implosion. After all, we could always just vote out the bozos who let us down. What we need to destroy the country, he argues, is Zimbabwe-sized corruption: a succession of executives who pilfer the national treasury and refuse to hold free elections. In that case, the country could fall apart as our national creeds of freedom, democracy, and openness are gradually abandoned.

Friendly breakup: In future No. 2, the country dissolves peacefully because the overhead of running a large nation becomes unmanageable. Schwartz likens this to the breakup of the Soviet Union, a case where the cost of holding the country together proved too great and the advantages too small.

While Igor Panarin—the Russian who forecasts America's demise for 2010—would certainly agree with that idea, making parallels with the USSR seems a bit dubious. Unlike the Eastern bloc, the United States isn't an agglomeration of states with strong ethnic identities. It was foreseeable that a socialist republic like Lithuania, which had its own long-standing culture and language, might someday become an independent nation. In modern America, where English predominates and a highly mobile population flits from place to place, is it possible that some state or region could develop enough distinctiveness to split from the union? GBN's Michael Costigan suggests that self-segregation could lead to an amicable parting of the ways. If Democrats migrate to Democratic cities and Republicans cluster in GOP strongholds, we could reach a point where the redder-than-red states and the bluer-than-blue states decide to go it on their own. Hey, it's the future—it could happen!

Global governance: In our third future, the national government declines in importance relative to the world community. Barack Obama's recent brief in defense of American exceptionalism is just one indicator among many that the United States is nowhere near willing to cede its position as the greatest of the world's great powers. But Slate contributor Robert Wright argues in his book Nonzero that humankind must come together to head off the challenges of the "non-zero-sum," globalized world: climate change, biological weapons, pandemics. While Wright tells me that "you wouldn't need something so centralized" as a souped-up United Nations, he believes that if in the next 100 years "America's identity has not dissolved into some sort of larger body of global governance, then chaos will reign."

Global conquest: The final scenario and the grimmest of all: a figure described variously as a "global Napoleon," "a much more empowered Hitler," and "a super-Mao" conquers America and the rest of the world via brute force. This idea, which Schwartz classifies as the least likely of the four, leads us to debate whether it's harder to subjugate the world than it used to be—Schwartz believes it is, as there are "more people with military competence spread across the world." That's followed by a discussion of the best method to exercise dominion over the globe. "I think the way you conquer the world these days is from space," he says. "You can put weapons up there and shut down the world."