Power Femme
How Do You Identify?: Cinnamon spiced, caramel colored, power-femme
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Join Date: Oct 2009
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Toughy
This idea of US exceptionalism.........we are the best, have the best, work the hardest, have the best system of governing, etc......makes me bonkers. Plus it's insulting to the rest of the world that operate as democracies. As near as I can tell a number of those democracies work better than ours depending on what indicators you look at. None of them have the death penalty and they all have universal health care for everyone paid for by everyone's tax dollars.
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This might be an interesting topic to discuss in depth someplace else but I did want to say this briefly in echo of what you are saying. It is instructive to note that the *newer* democracies (i.e. the ones that came about after WW II in the wake of dismantling of the English, French and Dutch colonies) have *not* modeled their constitutions on the US Constitution. Rather, they have used the constitutions of other Western democratic republics. In fact, even Japan whose post-WW II constitution was all but written by MacArthur uses a parliamentary system. Other than that and excluding Iraq (for obvious reasons) not a single nation that became a democracy in the 20th century has a constitution modeled on the US Constitution. Not a one. The last nation to do so was the Philippines and that was in 1899 when they became a colony of the US in all but name. Before that it was Liberia in 1847.
Cheers
Aj
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Proud member of the reality-based community.
"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up." (Terry Pratchett)
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