Re: OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

On 16/02/2025 2:55 am, john larkin wrote:

On Sat, 15 Feb 2025 10:07:18 +0000, liz@poppyrecords.invalid.invalid
(Liz Tuddenham) wrote:
 

Cursitor Doom <cd@notformail.com> wrote:
>
[...]

For once - once! - a politician makes a speech I actually enjoyed!

>
It was clearly aimed at the home market; he was supposed to be there to
talk about security in Europe and never even mentioned Ukraine.  All
that this speech has done is to turn most European countries against the
kind of ignorant, thuggish, self-serving America he represents.

 Nice work.
 

Fortunately there are still many Americans who are not like that.
>
Trump doesn't seem to realise that you can make friends with a bear but
he will still eat you when he wants his next meal.

 The history of Europe is millenia of warfare. And it's not over.

The history of the world includes a lot of wars. It's a stupid way to work out who controls particular resources, but  if you kill off enough of the people who don't want you to control them, you can get control if you don't get killed off in the process.
There are cheaper and less destructive ways of settling differences of opinion, and there have been periods when they've worked. Sadly, it's hard to keep psychopathic idiots out of power. Free elections with proportional representation have done well recently, but there are techniques to mislead the voters - and if you have enough money you can buy experts who will help you get elected. A good education system produces less gullible voters.
Western Europe has had that for a while. The US education system isn't all that good, Eastern Europe is even worse, and Russia is dire.
China has had to cope with a truly terrible writing system. To get access to Western technology they've had to train a lot of people to read an alphabetic (phoneme-based) writing systems, and it may yet save their bacon, but it's a pretty recent change. Computerised text processing may be starting to help them cope with the defects of a syllable based writing system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney