So invading foreign countries for no real reason and in general destroying the world’s opinion of us? Opting to act unilaterally as opposed to working through international bodies? Watching our economy slump? Why shouldn’t we worry?

“I’d be fine with that, as long as a very strong majority of Hawaiians supported the idea. Something like 75%.”

Yeah but here’s the thing, the government doesn’t give a damn if you are fine with it or not. The majority of the citizens of the south wanted out in the 1860s and rather than let them go, we had the war with the most casualties this country has ever seen. I think it would be the same thing again if it had to be, and I don’t find it unreasonable to expect China to do the same.

And I think the last 7 years is a good indication of how we’re going to handle our decrease in influence.

We won’t be the only legitimate superpower forever. Our influence is already waning and my concern is how we will handle that. Will we bow out gracefully or will we go down shooting and try to maintain our current status? Guys like Cameron think we should be the world’s police, but what if we are #2 and #1 doesn’t think we should be? What if we can’t boss the world around anymore?

And I agree about stuff like the Red Scare, it actually came to mind when I wrote one of my other responses to you. But be that as it may, crushing dissent is not one of our ideals or an openly touted position of our government.

On the other side, you have China, where they setup a massive government system to block unwanted internet traffic to China. They’ve scared Google and Yahoo into pruning their search results to remove anti-government websites and pictures. Those aren’t abberations of an otherwise open government and it’s not only intensely anti-freedom but anti-intellectual as well.

And why shouldn’t we expect other nations to learn from our mistakes? Our founders took cues from history when drafting the Constitution.

McCarthyism and the Red Scare are probably the best counterexamples to what you are saying. You couldn’t be a member of the Communist party in the country unless you wanted to go to jail. Try marching in the streets for that in that day and age. Free speech and thought my ass. Free speech as long as you don’t really threaten the government. Vietnam stemmed from this nonsense, and the people really bought into the anti-communism crap. Just look at how people react today to talk about public health care: “Oh thats socialist”. Like socialism is taboo or something. Yeah we have some freedoms, but that kind of talk in itself should be enough to convince you that the government has some control over people’s thought processes. This is pretty recent too. I mean the cold war ended under Reagan.

And as for human rights abuses, lets just leave it with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Granted, not our citizens, but dropping a bomb on hundreds of thousands of civilians is pretty abusive.

I don’t want to keep going cause this is dumb. If your idea of serious dissent is having people be able to draw political cartoons about Bush’s big ears, fine thats great. But really, Guantanamo and all the torture stuff should tell you that even this country has limits. China is a still developing nation, but they are doing it in their own way. We got to go through slavery, women’s rights, and all that on our own, but China has to deal with other “progressive” nations telling them how to do everything. We built our nation up during the Industrial Revolution and polluted like crazy. China, because of the timing of their industrial expansion, has to listen to the rest of the world complain about their pollution. You can sit there and feel morally superior I guess, but its not like we didn’t do some pretty awful crap on our way to where we are now. Its also not like we aren’t still doing and won’t do more awful crap either.