Y'know, there are good French, and there are bad French. Just like there's good Americans and bad Americans.
There's frenchmen like Marquis de Lafayette, then there's Frenchmen like that murdering bugger who got owned by Napoleon soon after the French Revolution. (Forgot his name off the top of me head.)
Just like there are American's like Alvin York, and American's like Charles Manson.
Same deal with politics and National policies, with an elected government some years you get good politicians and good men in office who make educated decisions and do the best they can. Some years you get dirty, backstabbing power-hungry egomaniacs.
Mistakes get made and then good people get blamed for trying to fix them.
It takes less than 20 seconds to destroy a Nation's reputation for hard work, goodness, and equality... and decades to rebuild it all because of a few people.
Dago. You're complaining that we don't need to justify ourselves to others.
Partly you're right, but mostly you're wrong. Without the need to justify our actions and motivations to an audience outside our control, with what are we able to judge the rightness or wrongness of those actions and motivations?
Blind ignorance towards others is a very swift road to Vader-ville.
Even if we don't take their advice, criticism, or judgements to heart, we still need to
hear it. Otherwise we are no better than men like Hitler, Stalin, or Napoleon.
And I think that is what KGB is trying to get at.
I'm a college student here in Austin, TX. Took an ethics course last semester and had the hardest time of it, being 1 of 3 conservatives in a classroom full of liberals. Took me awhile, but after I really started listening to the other students, their criticisms of my views and my ethics... I didn't change, I just became smarter and better able to defend those views. I took their most biased method of proving the War in Iraq as unjust and illegal and... with a great deal of research proved them wrong.
Even if we, as American's don't want to change our views of the world, don't want to listen to what the Europeans say we should do... we still need to listen, if only to better our arguments and reaffirm our resolve.
Now, can we stop mudslinging and start back on the topic of French politics. That's actually something I'm interested in. And I have a feeling this guy is going to do well... after all the French win when not lead by a Frenchman.
