Yep--a little history gives context. I love senator Inoyue's respond about how he felt about the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII when he said, "It was war and people did stupid things that seemed right at the time". @"Needs-to-take-a-deep-breath" Swicord... His age is relevant...you know what you have seen. You know about what you've been told. I don't listen to talk radio (except science Friday on NPR) but I do know there's a lot of effort now to present a revisionist history--based on ideas of people who mostly didn't witness it. I'm sure if we pontificate long enough we'll find a reason to love Hitler too and that Attila was really a nice guy once you empathize with his cultural context. And I personally disagree with our involvement in our current military conlicts but those weren't what I was addressing ( that was just "you").

So you have nothing to say about where you found that silly prattle about when "we all had peace" then? You need to put remarks like that in a context if you want to have a productive conversation with strangers.

Regarding the WWII talk, I'm quite conservative about the art of writing history, and rule #1 is that if someone who witnessed it is alive, it is still current events, not history. That aside, I also found the senior senator from Hawaii's remarks to be remarkably candid and well worth considering by everyone who wants to start any new wars. Our species does enough stupid things on an ordinary day--wartime might drive technological development, but it also puts stupidity on crack, especially when the combatants can't keep themselves well-separated from the civilians.

Godwin's Law has just been invoked.

Let's not get too extreme... let Jafo interpret his verbal shorthand... 

Deep breath time.    

My OP is rather far from the World Wars, etc.

Well, you seemed to be encouraging the digression in reply 14, but I always defer to a thread owner's direct request.

Fair dinkum. I was trying to 'ease' things a bit there as well...

However, the digression did occur before that.

You're been hanging around 'us' too long, Doc  ... the transformation is near complete

"very post WWII" is relative.  I expect I was considerably LESS 'post' than yourself.... hence a better understanding of global politics/the world in general.

Living the history is more valid than a pretension to be able to distinguish between 'politically correct bull' and whatever it is you hang on to as truth.

I'm 51 and my dad was a B-25 bomber pilot who flew out of Guadulcanal and then who skip bombed Japanese merchant shipping out of Okinawa towards the war's end.  Grew up reading Studs Terkel, Churchill, Clay Blair Jr. and the like and tons of historical books on the war (including some German and Japanese views). Also served during the Cold War in US Navy and then USAF intelligence services as an analyst.I was six months away from the draft at the end of the Vietnam war.

My point wasn't to debate anything in our recent history--just the idea of re-visiting the past and pointing to the US as "the source of all evil".  There is a lot worse out there and evil has been around a long time--we haven't come close to cornering the market on it--we just get more press.

Yep--living it is more valid.

Yeah, right....like I said that.  Let's try NOT to mis-interpret...whether through ignorance OR design.

Odd you missed the draft by 6 months at 51.... unless the US had National Service for 6 years longer than Aus.

 

@Swicord...my response was in the probably just careless and not so intended implication that somehow the cause of  the opening hostilities of WWI and WWII could be laid primarily at the feet of the US.

That's a bit broad and lacking a lot of context.

Happy?

6 months--a year--somewhere in there.  I was young and don't have a calculator on me   I grew up during a time where the draft was something I was told to expect to happen to me when I graduated during most of the latter part of my childhood.  Luckily that didn't happen. Ironically, I went into the military just after my 17th birthday anyway.

Besides, everyone knows your time is upside down over there.

My point is simply that "wishing away the US" is not going to usher in "the age of peace" and I in fact predict quite the opposite will happen.  Though I'm sure we'll get blamed for that too then.

If only Stalin and Mao had been able to finish their good work and had saved the rest of us...

If you insist on using phrases in quotation marks it'd probably be clever to actually use the Forum tool for such so that you're NOT yet again giving the appearance of attributing statements to someone who said no such thing.

Have a lend of the truth...have a lend of reality...but don't include others in the fantasy.

It's to emphasize the absurdity.

My point in regards to the original OP was simply that vulnerabilities and  instabilities in the areas of cyber security can really have serious consequences--and I used my own country as an example.  My intent was not to begin to argue neo-politics over "How evil is America?" and to question grammar usage.

Stable large nation with lots of cash and firepower and at least some restraint + a world of other nations with firepower and many of them with much less restraint = "Good".  Remove said influence and see who grabs at the opportunity="Not so good".

Whether it's America or not doesn't really matter.  If Finland was stabilizing the world, I would have said the same thing in the same sort of circumstances.

I'm just hoping now that Finland hasn't done something to make the internet mad.

Quotation marks mean quotation, not emphasis.

Underline, italics, enlarged font...caps...take your pick...

THIS IS EMPHASIS

Forum Laws now?

Writers use scare quotes for a variety of reasons. When the enclosed text is a quotation from another source, scare quotes may indicate that the writer does not accept the usage of the phrase (or the phrase itself),^[3] that the writer feels its use is potentially ironic, or that the writer feels it is a misnomer. This meaning may serve to distance the writer from the quoted content.

If scare quotes are enclosing a word or phrase that does not represent a quotation from another source they may simply serve to alert the reader that the word or phrase is used in an unusual, special, or "non-standard" way or should be understood to include caveats to the conventional meaning.

 

Example 2:

 

• Kazakhstan's famous "130-year-old"—Headline on BBC News web site^[6]

 

The quotation marks around 130-year-old indicate that the news source is reporting but not endorsing the claim.

 

Other cases

 

Examples:

 

• creation "science" or Creation "Museum"
• "normal" people

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes

The above would be it and THIS is SPARTA!  (As in, "too much dramatic emphasis".)*

*Please note the ironic usage of the preceding quotations in the indicated sentence.