EU Spectacle
The word spectacle is carefully chosen, since this is what the current drama of which Greece is the symptom, not the cause, has become. It no longer bears any relationship to coherent democratic leadership or process of governance in a workable political and currency union. The cancellation at a moment’s notice of a summit of all EU leaders is extraordinary.
There is a problem with Greece, but it is not that difficult to solve. Indeed this blog working alone would be able to negotiate a workable solution. What is proving impossible is to find an acceptable solution, because the institutions normally established to process decision making at national and international levels are not there, or there in such abundance nobody can detect who is in charge. And to make matters worse the structure of the currency itself is unsustainable as it lacks a treasury and a finance minister answering to an elected government. A committee of finance ministers at loggerheads, elected by only one member state in each case, on conflicting mandates and to differing electoral timetables will work only in the good times and becomes dysfunctional under pressure.
So all we know at this moment is that Greece may or may not go bust tomorrow, the euro looks more like an impediment to growth than an engine of it, and the reputation of the EU as a coherent political union is severely damaged. Beneath that a big gap is developing between the north and the south of Europe, between the politicians and their electors everywhere and between those in the eurozone who want to stand firm to high principle even if it brings the whole thing down, led by the Germans, and by those who feel pragmatic reality demands compromise, led by France and Italy.
At the heart of of this crisis now engulfing the whole EU are three violated principles. You cannot have a democratic political union without an elected forum from which all authority flows. You cannot have a currency which cannot be printed. You cannot have capitalism which does not permit debtors to go bust. The first is violated because the whole EU is wrongly configured. The last two are rescinded because Germany says No.
message 1251:
by
Linda
(new)
Apr 04, 2016 08:23AM
You mean in Britain you don't have to give your national insurance number to anybody besides the government? Here insurance companies ask for it for no reason at all. Credit card companies ask for it. Even if you want to purchase a one-time debit card filled with money they want your social security number supposedly to identify you. Employers ask for your social security number. Apparently even colleges and universities want to know it. This list goes on and on.
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P.S. When I had a literary agent to sell my young adult novels even she wanted my social security number!
Linda wrote: "When you say that people in Britain are compensated for identity theft by the banks, don't the customers have to first prove that it is identity theft and fill out lots of papers? Or is that done f..."You cannot be given a criminal record for crimes you did not commit. Here anyway. The Court has to prove the person is who they say they are. Also here the banks are responsible if they give your money to someone else. But in order to carry out transactions you have to prove your identity if you are not known. This is usually passport, drivers license and at least two utility bills like power and water. For phone banking you have to give random numbers of your six digit security number and answer pre-arranged security questions if you deal with an adviser.
So we have to go through a lot of identity hassle but if it is stolen we are protected.
Today there has been a leak of I.5 million documents from some Panamanian law firm renowned for money laundering, tax evasion, hiding money etc. All the rich use it. All kinds of names are tumbling out. 70 heads of state, the Prime Minister of Iceland, Cameron's family, Putin, more names by the hour. It's all over TV. Great fun.
You make it sound very simple to avoid these identity theft problems in Great Britain. But if somebody commits a crime in your name, how do they know it isn't you unless you prove that it isn't you? Even here people would say you can't be given a criminal record for crimes you didn't commit, but somebody has to show it. Maybe you have insurance that helps you afford it.
Yes, I heard about the leaks from Panama on the Fidelity website I go to every day. It is about the only news I see. There was a lot about Putin and the Russians. There was something about Cameron's late father. Putin said that it was just badmouthing Russia.Oddly enough what I got out of it was that here are other people trying to protect their assets. If you have enough assets they tell you to go offshore. At the very least you are supposed to have a Swiss bank account. The more you have the more vulnerable you are in a sense. You have to do a lot to shield yourself and your assets from view.
By the way why do they call your social security number your national insurance number? Isn't that an odd term? Why do they confuse insurance with identity? Also how far back does this national insurance number go? I doubt if Shakespeare had one for instance. Somehow I don't think Dora and Edward had one either.
Here banks are responsible if they give your money to someone else, too. But again there is a lot of hassle involved. I have a hard time believing that in Britain it is all hassle free. I mean, for God's sake, I remember what happened here in August of 2014 when the bank bounced our last check to the mover even though we had plenty of funds. It was a bank computer glitch. But look at all the trouble they helped to cause! They should have been forced to compensate us for all the trouble we went through for almost another year and a half after that.
Some years ago when I still lived in Charlottesville the local bank there really screwed up. They forgot to add in a deposit and all sorts of things started to bounce including our insurance. They paid the fees and charges, but still it took us forever to straighten it all out.
Linda wrote: "By the way why do they call your social security number your national insurance number? Isn't that an odd term? Why do they confuse insurance with identity? Also how far back does this national ins..."It is just because you are used to one term and we use another. It is the number that we use for the National Health Service, income tax, state pension and other welfare benefits. Everybody pays in as a tax deduction on their income or profits. It is called the NIC or national insurance contribution. Remember we have a Welfare State.
Linda wrote: "Yes, I heard about the leaks from Panama on the Fidelity website I go to every day. It is about the only news I see. There was a lot about Putin and the Russians. There was something about Cameron'..."The prime minister of Iceland has just resigned. He is the first to fall over the leaks.
You say "other welfare benefits". Do you really call it "welfare"? Here welfare is a term used only for poor people who get "welfare benefits" which were cut back and food stamps. In order to get them you have to be in a training program or looking for a job, I think. It is not supposed to be permanent.
Yes, there was something on Fidelity about the leader of Iceland resigning. That is too bad. Such information should not be leaked. It should be private. But then I am not a politician or in public life. It is all the more reason why public officials do better if they are rich to start with. Then they cannot get into financial trouble. There can be no scandals. You notice that George W Bush and his father, the first Bush, never had any financial scandals because they had money whereas the Clintons were always involved in one scandal after the other. Money and politics are supposed to go together.
Talk about identity theft! I’ve seen photos recently on my Facebook page of “Linda Cargill” which really aren’t me at all, of course. They are trying to post pictures that look like Helga von Wessel. I am certainly glad that I never posted a picture of myself online. At least I had the sense not to do that. I can only imagine what could happen there.
You know this business about presidents and prime ministers being ordinary people and not necessarily rich is a modern concept. Leaders in the past were always rich. When you go back to the ancient world leaders were not only rich they were expected to build public monuments and buildings for the public. For instance, Caesar Augustus's friend, Agrippa, built the Pantheon which was later rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian. Somehow it has always worked better if the leader of the country is rich.
Linda wrote: "You say "other welfare benefits". Do you really call it "welfare"? Here welfare is a term used only for poor people who get "welfare benefits" which were cut back and food stamps. In order to get t..."Here you get free healthcare, pension,free bus pass over 70, etc even if you are a multi billionaire. If you pay in as everybody does it is thought fair for you to take out. Any move to stop billionaires getting free bus passes hits the buffers on principle. in fact they never go on buses so it costs nothing.
Their pensions are taxed so the government gets 45% back because they pay the top rate.
Linda wrote: "You know this business about presidents and prime ministers being ordinary people and not necessarily rich is a modern concept. Leaders in the past were always rich. When you go back to the ancient..."Thomas Jefferson was a cruel slave owner who treated his slaves badly and had a black mistress who was a slave, whom he never freed. But he did free the children he had by her. I have never understood why Americans have such a high opinion of him. I am a confederate and I still find him shocking.
There have been quite a few European heroes who were not rich. One of the problems with the US Presidency is that there is not really a job there to do. It is redundant with all the State Legislatures and Congress. I think the confederate constitution which dispensed with a president elected by suffrage in favour of one elected by congress (like the current Germans) would have been better for the Union as well.
I saw an interesting survey yesterday which you will like. There was a table compiled to discover out of fifty passports which got you into the most countries without a visa. America came joint fourth with several others and Britain came in third in a group. The top passport dubbed the most powerful passport in the world was on its own. It was Germany.
When you say you get a free pension, what does that mean? Is that like social security here, or don't you know? Here social security is a kind of tax that is taken from paychecks from the day you start working. It is collected along with income tax. Then at a certain age --- I'm not sure which age anymore since it keeps changing --- you can sign up to collect the benefits every month. But in recent years I think even social security gets taxed as income at a low rate. I've never heard of free bus passes here, but they may have them somewhere. I just don't know.
The healthcare here is a mess. I can't even begin to describe it. It makes no sense at all especially in recent years since the current administration started to fiddle with it. But there is Medicare for people of a certain age. But I think they also have to buy a Medicare supplement to go with it, which makes that not free either. The part about Medicare was set up during the Johnson administration I think. It's been around longer than the other stuff but still doesn't work right either.
Nobody here seems to want to institute your healthcare system where every citizen gets a health insurance card. What I say is just the opposite, but nobody will ever do it. Government should have a system to take care of the poor. But everyone else no. They should retreat from health care entirely otherwise. The private sector should take over completely. Prices would fall dramatically. Dentists now compete by price and service (TV sets in waiting rooms, refreshments, computers, etc) and so would regular doctors under this system. They might even go back to house calls and billing you by the month. Grocery stores could offer free vaccines to their best customers. I don't know why nobody seems to think like this and they want endless, inefficient bureaucracy instead. It's very sad.
I didn't say a word about Thomas Jefferson! I was talking about Marcus Agrippa and Augustus and the system of what later became "noblesse oblige". People in Europe came to expect their betters to provide for them starting with the Roman system of pater familias where the leader of a big aristocratic family also became the leader of a clan full of ordinary people, farmers, merchants, freed men, and slaves --- think of the modern day Mafia for a crude comparison where the Godfather is in charge of his family. I said in some respects this worked better than ordinary citizens like Abraham Lincoln or Jimmy Carter for that matter or Clinton becoming President without a real fortune of their own.
Your statement about Jefferson is something I haven't heard before, but it is also something that is more rumor than fact. The business about the black mistress called Sally Hemmings has never been proved. What is more certain is that after his wife died Jefferson had many platonic affairs with women sometimes by letter only including European painters! He also had a mistress or two, but again the only ones we know about for sure are the white women.Yes, he was a slave holder. When he was younger he wanted to free his slaves as George Washington actually did. But as he grew older he was in lots of financial trouble and found that he couldn't afford to do so. For instance, he used his slaves to build Monticello, his home outside Charlottesville, Virginia.
You say you are a Confederate, but a strange Confederate to blast Jefferson like that! They would all shun you and turn their backs on you especially in Virginia if they heard a blasphemous statement like that from your lips! Slavery was a rather complicated system. I used to explore the stacks in Alderman Library at the University of Virginia where they had collections on the subject. And believe me the reality was much different from the myths and the popular ideas about the subject. Every possible situation existed. It all depended on the individual slave owner. One slave owner was devoted to his favorite slave. He gave him music lessons. The slave became a concert pianist. The owner took him to Europe to perform. He wanted to free him, but the laws of his state --- I don't think it was Virginia --- wouldn't allow it. In another situation the slaves of the plantation took over the manor house where the owners lived and managed everything for them. In another situation the slave mistress of the owner moved into the manor house and the wife of the slave owner moved into a slave cottage!
The Uncle Tom's Cabin sort of thing was mostly what went on in the Deep South, not Virginia, on very large plantations, especially outside America in the Caribbean. (Haiti was the devil of a place run by the French where there was an insurrection!)
Once I read a scientific analysis of slavery. Apparently at first they wanted indentured servants who were whites from England would served for a term and then got their own jobs and property. But in Virginia there were too many swamps and mosquitoes. Whites didn't survive tropical diseases as well as blacks. So it was necessary to import black slaves for the early US to survive and prosper.
I don't know what you mean by your analysis of the Confederate government. I remember that Jefferson Davis was the one and only President (in reality his wife, Mrs. Davis, who was a really moralistic, prudish, authority figure who could not be thwarted) but I don't understand all this stuff about a Confederate legislature. In any case it is hardly worth analyzing. It was all so impossibly disorganized, weak, inefficient, and impossible to run, it was doomed to failure before its inception. There was no way the Confederacy could ever have survived even if the North had let them go. I don't see how they could be a model for much of anything. Comparing them to the Germans is a wild leap. Hitler would probably have liked that idea. For one thing the Weimar government was also not very strong. It was inefficient and could not get anything done. It was one of the chief reasons Hitler didn't like the idea of democracy for the Continent.
I have tons of stuff to say about your Jefferson comment. But I have to make breakfast first. More after I sit down to eat. I also have to look up Thomas Jefferson's biographer.
The most famous of all biographers of Thomas Jefferson is a man by the name of Dumas Malone. He wrote a many volume biography that won the Pulitzer Prize.: Jefferson the Virginian, Sage of Monticello, Jefferson and the Rights of Man, Jefferson the President, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty, Jefferson the President Second Term, etc. He doesn't go for the Sally Hemmings story. If there is DNA evidence, Jefferson had wastrel male relatives who stayed at Monticello. Why would Jefferson be involved with slaves when there were other women associated with him? Also where is the evidence of his cruelty? What do you think he did if you forget about the Hemmings rumors? Do you have any other evidence?You don't know why Americans think so much of Jefferson? Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence. He also was responsible for the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom in the 18th century. Before that you had to own property and be a member of the Episcopalian(Anglican) Church to vote in Virginia. He was one of the Founding Fathers. He was called the Sage of Monticello. He was part of the Constitutional Convention drafting the Constitution, though Madison did a lot of work here. He was President of the United States twice. What I think is his most significant accomplishment was the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. It started the big western movement and made America stretch from sea to shining sea. Get it?
In addition he introduced viticulture and viniculture to America. He wanted to make wine. He introduced growing rice to Virginia. It later went to South Carolina. He also designed and built Monticello and the Rotunda. The Rotunda is on the nickel. It is a World Heritage Site. His library collection later became the Library of Congress. He thought his most significant accomplishment was to found the University of Virginia of which I am an alumnus. I attended the graduate school of education. Even nowadays in Virginia he is quoted all the time including in the state legislature. Everybody always wants to hear what Mr. Jefferson had to say about something.
Gorbachev visited Charlottesville to see Monticello and he wasn't American. The Emperor of Japan showed up to see Monticello, too. Did you know there is a Jefferson Institute at Oxford in Great Britain?
Jefferson is one of the Presidents whose likeness is carved at Mount Rushmore.
I sent you a copy of the Declaration of Independence by email.You don't think the American President has anything worthwhile to do. You must be thinking of the current occupant of the office. FDR had plenty to do. So did Abraham Lincoln. Even you liked Richard Nixon.
Remember for years I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jefferson was considered something of a demi-god who lived on a hill just outside of town called Monticello, which I think means "Little Mountain". Nobody took his name in vain. Kenny was born in Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville. Martha Jefferson was Jefferson's daughter who served as his first lady when he was in the White House. I used to bank at Jefferson National Bank. There was also a Jefferson Savings and Loan. You couldn't escape it. It was everywhere.
Kenny was taught about Jefferson in elementary school in Charlottesville. He grew up with a really positive impression of him. Right now he likes to listen to a program called The Jefferson Hour narrated by Clay Jenkinson who impersonates Jefferson and talks like the Sage of Monticello. You can write him questions. Apparently Clay is a humanities scholar who writes books about Jefferson and has been impersonating him for over 30 years. He had lots of podcasts on iTunes. You could listen to them and see what you think.
I'd be curious to know what you saw, heard, or read to convince you that Jefferson was a cruel slave owner from Virginia who mistreated his slaves. Where did this information come from? Did you have a teacher who said that? A newspaper article? A book of some kind? TV?Did you visit Monticello or Charlottesville or both when you were in Virginia? Did you ever visit the Rotunda at the University of Virginia itself on the "grounds"?
Linda you are making some very good points which I do not necessarily disagree with but we are coming from different directions. I have a lot on at the moment so I cannot debate this properly but I will try with a summary.I have had that opinion of Jefferson since very early days and I cannot tell you what sparked it. It is from stuff I have read but which or what I cannot now say. It is not recent.
America is a country put together quite recently in historical terms and made up almost entirely of people in flight from poverty, lack of opportunity and terrible repression. In the new world they were given their first chance to prosper on their own initiative and be free. There are all sorts of sub plots, including slavery, which have created tensions but by any measure it has been a success and continues to be the foremost country for innovation and invention. It is at he very frontier of science. It is not the only player, but it is the only player on all fields. It is assertive and believes its way is best.
Britain is a country as old as time and in its current format a development over a thousand years. It has a self confidence and an individuality which longevity allows. There is no Jefferson or founder or founding fathers. There are personalities from history and heroes and heroines but the nation is a thing of collective evolution not sudden declaration. It likes to do things its own way. It has moved seamlessly from Roman colony to Saxon Kingdom through the Norman Conquest to Empire and back without much planning, no constitution and very little written down. It has had almost every social structure imaginable and is now a multicultural society founded on a welfare state. But it is still a monarchy, its judiciary is independent of government and party politics, It is egalitarian but still awards titles.
It sticks close to the side of the United States and it a good deal less respectful of the US than the US is of the UK. The two hang together because they share so much. Each could be said to be the better half of the other, but which half is the better overall neither can actually tell.
There is a book I think you and Gary should read which is the best I have ever read about the two countries and their joint history. It is called
A World On Fire. An Epic History of Two Nations Divided.
It is by Amanda Foreman, a world best seller.
What is so good about it is that it is entirely based on contemporary writings and reports which produce a vivid and absorbing picture of the relationship between the US and the UK in the nineteenth century. It is not cluttered with too much opinion. The facts are laid out for you to form your own. It is 1000 pages, so it is a long read.
Thank you for the emailed print of the declaration of independence. Useful to have.
I even discovered the other day that there is a Jefferson Institute in Serbia of all places. Our Russian expert tells us that there was a group of Slaves who were trying to use Jefferson as a model and wanted Russia to have a constitution, but they didn't make it and didn't prevail. Instead the Bolsheviks did. So Jefferson as world wide fame, not just in America.What about all these programs that the University of Virginia sponsors at Oxford University? They are all about Jefferson!!!
No, England did not have Founding Fathers. Nor did any European country, except Rome's mythic founders, Romulus and Remus who were supposedly raised by wolves. The American colonial Founding Fathers were real people with portraits and biographies such as Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, etc. It is the only Republic founded this way and follows to some extent the tenets of Plato who talked of an ideal society being founded by philosophers. It comes the closest.
I am still not claiming that Jefferson was the greatest and most famous man who ever existed with the longest historical reach, though I know some Virginians who think like that. If you don't believe in the historicity of Christ, I would say the person with the longest historical reach is easily Julius Caesar. Yawn! This sounds like real basic main stream western civ. People would start moaning not wanting to hear it all said again. But of course he and his adopted son, Augustus, founded the Roman Empire. And the name Caesar for almost two millennia after his death was adopted by all sorts of rulers from Tsar to Kaiser. He was the greatest and most successful general of all times and was imitated by everybody after him including Napoleon. Unlike Jefferson who had more amateur scientific interests, Caesar when he was in Britain made real observations about longitude and latitude. He's probably the real reason why the Prime Meridian goes through Greenwich, England and why the Royal Observatory is there. P.S. He also is the author of one of the greatest works of Latin literature studied in all classrooms since, Caesar's Gallic Wars Veni vidi vici, I came, I saw, I conquered quoted all over the place. He did a lot for the Latin language and sentence structure. He might have been even more influential on written Latin than Shakespeare was to be on the English language.
Julius Caesar reputedly did the first experiments with freedom of the press with newspapers in ancient Rome. But it was short lived. His successor, Augustus, did not continue it.
The book sounds interesting. We will have to check it out.
As always you have a deep academic reach and bring to life many modern issues within an historical framework. You should consider writing non-fiction.A minor point but you will I think understand it. As you know I am a Confederate, but opposed to almost all the conservative and racist dogma of the South. I have just been appalled that North Carolina has passed laws that roll back protection for gay people and require transgenders to use the public restroom for the gender on their birth certificates. This is ignorant, cruel and hypocritical. It is prejudice of the very worst kind and looks backwards into a world long gone, thank goodness. It is a part of America's psyche that the rest of the world hates.
But America proclaimed itself a democracy and therefore if a part of it wanted to go a different way, democracy allows that to happen and that democratic right has to be defended. I know you believe in the indissoluble Union, but I do not believe there can be any such thing in a democracy. In a monarchy or autocracy or dictatorship or even an empire, but not a democracy.
In my view all this tea party conservative anger and anti Washington rage is the confederacy still alive but spread all over the US.
Linda wrote: "The book sounds interesting. We will have to check it out."If you do start to read it I will re-read it at the same time so that we can discuss it live so to speak. It would rather stimulating and engaging.
Obviously you have to have people of the right gender using the correct bathroom. Women would be frightened out of their minds if they saw some man who thought he was "cross gender" using their public bathroom. The opposite isn't true. I know from personal experience happening upon a men's room by mistake and fleeing when I discovered my mistake. I have never ever seen a man enter a woman's room who wasn't cleaning it, and even those guys usually flee if they see a woman hanging around. This isn't ignorant at all. It just recognizes the fact that when you are born a man you look like a man and you can't really change your gender at all. After all, it is one thing to be gay and continue to look like a man and use men's restrooms and quite another to pretend you are a woman. Nobody can change sexes. It is a biological impossibility. This is just common sense. I didn't know about this law in North Carolina but it only makes sense. They don't want women calling the police on their cell phones or the highway patrol or the state police. And believe me they would do it.
"require transgenders to use the public restroom for the gender on their birth certificates. This is ignorant, cruel and hypocritical. It is prejudice of the very worst kind and looks backwards into a world long gone, thank goodness. It is a part of America's psyche that the rest of the world hates."I cannot believe you wrote such a thing. Why is it prejudice, cruel, or hypocritical? Why is it ignorant to make sure that people use the restroom on their birth certificate? Why is it "looking backwards into a world long gone thank goodness"?
I went to a women's college called Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. It welcomed plenty of lesbian women without blinking an eyelash. But I never heard of a woman who thought she was a man. Usually the gay women at Bryn Mawr thought just the opposite. To quote one of them she wished that the nearby men's college, Haverford, "would drop through a crack in the earth". In other words, they didn't like men at all. They used the same restrooms as the rest of the women.
The only men using the restrooms and showers in the dorms were those visiting their girlfriends in a rather heterosexual fashion. Even that put off some of the freshmen girls. It made them uncomfortable. They didn't think it was proper for unmarried people to be shacking up like that. One of my room mates my junior year when we had a suite at the nearby men's college, Haverford, would not take a shower in the dorm because she did not want to find herself showering next to a man in the next stall. I did use the co-ed bathroom, and my room mates thought I was quite daring and brazen.
I have never seen a transgender man except once in my life. I recognized what it was right away and thought it odd, and this occurred when I was a girl of about fifteen. I thought it looked like a Hollywood comedy where men were dressing up like women. But my mother at the time found herself sitting in a beauty parlor on Montmartre in Paris. She looked at the person next to her under the next hair dryer and saw a man with makeup, eyelashes, a woman's wig, and high heels, etc and freaked. She leaped up and fled out of the beauty parlor screaming. At that point she didn't even know about such things. I had learned about it by reading Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
You keep on saying that this is what the world hates about America as if the rest of the world speaks with one voice. But it certainly doesn't. Russia has criminalized being gay or transgender, and that law still holds. You get thrown in jail, and St. Petersburg and Moscow are European Russia. Obviously the Arab world doesn't support such ideas. South America and Mexico don't support it much either. I wonder what China thinks for that matter. So it is mostly the western world that you are talking about.
Obviously you have to have a Union in a democracy or America wouldn't be able to function as a country. For one thing, how could you run an army, navy, or air force that is rigidly based on central control and always has been? How could you have foreign policy with many voices speaking out in a contradictory fashion? A Supreme Court? Nor would you be able to build a turnpike or freeway system across the country. It just would not be practical.
As far as the racist dogma of the South is concerned, I actually lived in the South for many years. I graduated from Duke University in North Carolina before that. I had many southerners explain their way of thinking in person to my face. You began to see where they were coming from. One thing most people don't understand is that it wasn't just whites oppressing blacks it was mutual. The blacks still prefer to have their own Baptist churches when possible. Many of them like to live together, too, in neighborhoods of their own. They were conservative, too, you see.I once had an acquaintance who came to my writer's group named Nordette Lawrence who was black. She hailed from New Orleans. She attended a writer's conference in New York, met an editor, and was told that "blacks don't read romances". She came back and fumed and said that she was more comfortable back home in New Orleans. She told me about a drama professor in Louisiana who called her and her friends "niggers" (black English word, you know and invented by blacks) but always included them in all his dramas and performances. He even took them to lunch.
I am not talking about cross-dressers or men or women in drag. I am talking about those who are born with a problem of gender, sometimes with both organs, others with a man's mind and emotions but in a woman's body and vice-versa. This is now recognised as no different to being born lesbian or gay, or with some abnormality or disability.There are now clinics and surgeons who can help these people to lead normal lives and in Europe people can formally change their gender under those circumstances. The North Carolina law is outrageous and is symptomatic of hate and prejudice, not understanding and reason.
Linda wrote: "You keep on saying that this is what the world hates about America as if the rest of the world speaks with one voice. But it certainly doesn't. Russia has criminalized being gay or transgender, and..."No Russia has not criminalised being gay or lesbian but it does forbid propaganda in support of it particularly among children. But Russia does not claim to be the kind of open society that America claims to be. It has only elected its leaders since the early 1990s.
Linda wrote: "Obviously you have to have a Union in a democracy or America wouldn't be able to function as a country. For one thing, how could you run an army, navy, or air force that is rigidly based on central..."I did not say there could not be a Union or Confederation I said in a democracy it has to be voluntary. Canada does not have an issue with it. Quebec has twice held referenda to decide whether to leave and both times voted to stay. There is no problem over freeways or railroads.
America is socially very old fashioned outside California and New York in my limited experience.
Linda wrote: ""require transgenders to use the public restroom for the gender on their birth certificates. This is ignorant, cruel and hypocritical. It is prejudice of the very worst kind and looks backwards int..."A lot of offices and restaurants etc now have unisex restrooms, but the cubicles are fully enclosed with lockable doors.
Part of the conservatism of the Deep South is the conservatism of the black population. In Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana you have a majority of blacks. They flock to religious institutions like the Baptist Church more than the whites do. It is a more male chauvanist pig culture with sharply defined roles for men and women. Maybe that's the part of the South that you don't like or understand. In England dark skin probably means somebody from India.
Linda wrote: "Part of the conservatism of the Deep South is the conservatism of the black population. In Alabama or Mississippi or Louisiana you have a majority of blacks. They flock to religious institutions li..."I agree with your analysis of deep South conservatism. But in the UK we are very racially mixed with people of all colours. We have since WWII had immigration from all over the Commonwealth, from the West Indies to Asia. However it is not so racially diverse along the south coast. Most are fully integrated and we do not notice what colour people are. We do of course have racially prejudiced people but they cannot do much harm as racial discrimination or abuse is a crime.
