@tallamerican
Respect your sentiment - I'm pretty much the same way - but for different reasons - never try to reason with a stone - the rock doesn't care and you generally look insane for trying to hold a conversation with a rock.
On another note - one of the benefits of expats from foreign countries is the exchange of cultures, which includes your/our opinions. Please don't blend like furniture - just be yourself and hopefully encourage people to see that peoples of other nations are reasonable, civilized, compassionate, have other ideas and thoughts, and learn from each other.
Most Americans have absolutely no clue why everyone else in the world don't particularly like US Government politics, which overflows towards opinions about Americans in general - which isn't particularly true or fair and in the case of the recent islamic incident - actually moronic and imbecilic in response - if not utterly UN-Islamic. Advocating the murder of innocents based on the alleged crimes of others is utterly heretical - yet I hear not a single voice of PUBLICIZED reason from the Islamic clergy and THAT is irresponsible AND heretical also.
Same with the Japanese issue - most Japanese living and working here are painfully aware of their government's historical atrocities in China and are generally surprised this information has been systematically and methodically suppressed in Japan.
Americans didn't know our government tried to genocide American Indians. We've forgotten we trained today's Islamic terrorists. We've forgotten or have chosen to forget we helped maintain a despotic dictatorship in Iran for decades and choose to fall back on irresponsible and ignorant rhetoric - although their leader is a bit of a loon. We've forgotten that we funneled billions of tax dollars which helped maintain the Marcos regime of corruption and oppression in the Philippines for decades, so we could maintain military bases in Asia.
We (the USA) recognize China as THE one China and Taiwan is part of China's sovereignty - yet we continue to sell weapons to Taiwan to maintain the separation. That is a policy that is decades old and rife with hypocrisy. How can any nation in the world respect our foreign policies, when we exhibit such behavior..although it's a great economic deal for American defense contractors. We sell Taiwan arms BILLIONS of USD in arms, but "store" them in Guam. Those Taiwan arms trade deals reek of corruption.
Speak out - learn, exchange, encourage. Otherwise we'll never understand each other - and that's not a good thing - it leads to irrational fear of the unknown, which leads to mob-like hostility.
@Chingis
<poltroon> learned a new word - NEVER heard that before - had to actually look it up - thanks..sort of. Is that a legitimate scrabble word? On another note, I thought personal attacks were supposed to be banned from the blogs (honor system, followed by potential formal moderator intervention). If I remember American culture correctly, them's fightin' words...(assuming we were back in say...junior high or elementary school)...
