France has been at war with the 'Anglo-Saxons' since at least 1066. Its conflict with America is part of this.

It is not surprising that an English paper would play this up. After all, anti-American feeling is at least as intense and has persisted since 1776 when we threw their sorry fat butts out of the country. At least the French have the decency to be up front about it, not like the English spending a lot of time telling us how much they love us and then stabbing us in the back at every opportunity.

America has paid a far greater price for our association with Perfidious Albion than any cost we have imposed on them, although the Brits will tell us it is the other way around.

We're a British nation. The French are scum.

bart a francophile? The American revolution was civil war among Brits, the rebels won. The Bolshevik's was modeled on the French and the human race lost. What else do you need to know?

It's only in French minds that their objections to us raise to the level of a "conflict." At this point, thumbing their noses at us consists of costing us the "legitimacy" of a UN resolution, maintaining an artificially high currency and, maybe, giving up their national sovereignty in favor of a bureaucracy that, even by French standards, is arrogant, Byzantine and unresponsive.

OJ,

Distinctions between the Brits and the Euros are becoming less pronounced rather than more, when Blair goes, the Brits will be more anti-American than the French or Germans.

Maybe we are a 'British' nation, it is unlikely that Britain, with its grinding statism, high crime and disgusting underclass, still is.

David,

It is absolutely childish on the part of the French to continue an enmity which has been a losing game for over a century. An increasing number of French on both right and left are seeing its stupidity. Bernard-Henri Levy, who is like the weather vane of French opinion, is a good example.

Tom,

The Russian Revolution was far more influenced by the 1871 Commune and the 1848 Revolutions across Europe than by the French, which itself was inspired by the American. Far from the human race losing, July 14, 1789 might have been the single greatest day in human history.

bart-

You sure about that? The only thing the American revolution had in common with the French was the word 'revolution'. Time to revisit your Edmund Burke as well as the observations of Adams et al as the French revolution unfolded. The Paris Commune and 1848 were based on what?

I was a Soviet Studies minor in college and took several courses in Soviet Econ, History, Soviology, etc. (I also graduated the year the USSR officially was dissolved, but it was interesting.) The 1917 revolution seems to have been in large part motivated by a sincere Marxism. Also, if I remmeber correctly, Lenin's brother or father was executed by the czarist government.

BTW, Jean-Francois Revel is another Frenchman who recently published a book, "Anti-Americanism", on his country's bizarre obsession with the US.

PS: In the last post I meant sociology, not soviology.

Tom-

What is Marxism? The culmination rationalism run amok, as it always has. The French were the first to revolt against things not rationally justified, i.e traditional institutions developed slowly over time whose origins could no longer be definitively traced. The 'new soviet man' was to be created along certain lines, rationally, scientifically planned by a revolutionary vanguard who understood Marx's 'science' and it's inevitability. The jacobins were no different, only a matter of degree. Reform was not an option, only a destruction of all that stood before upon which the new would be built with nothing but reason as the guide. The Terror was Lenin's favorite part of the historical science of revolution and he learned from the French.

Marxism is most defintely NOT rational. The labor theory of value alone is so obviously imbecilic that only a Harvard humanities professor could give it any credence.

By the way, Marx (and Hegel from whom he drew his inspiration) was German. Engels, co-author of the Commie Manifesto, was English.

Tom:

The rational can be imbecilic, often is.

OJ - You're confusing actual rationality with an imbecile screaming "I'm rational!" Any half-brain can claim to be rational.

Rationality is, by definition, half brained. That's its problem.

OJ -

Precisely.

Quibble: Engels was, like Marx, German (even if strictly speaking, a unified Germany did not yet exist).

http://www.indepthinfo.com/communist-manifesto/engels.shtml

Barry - OK.

OJ - Huh? Rationality includes using empirical reality to make judgments about what works and what doesn't. We have ~75 years of socialist experiments in our data now; they haven't worked. Ergo, rational people understand it doesn't work. Why it doesn't work is a secondary (although fascinating) question.

Tom;

includes, doesn't require. Darwinism doesn't "work" either but many rationalists still believe.

Rationalism and utilitarianism are a scary combination. No way to go through life.

I'm going to let the evolution comment go and focus on the other part. Rationality DOES require paying attention to empirical reality. Otherwise you're just floating in a sensory isolation tank theorizing about what might be outside. (Hmm, sounds like some of academia.) Speculation is OK, honestly labelled as such, but any firm opinions about what it's like outside the tank aren't rational, no matter how many matrix differential equations are involved in drawing out the logical implications of the speculations.
What's tragic about your position on rationality is that it concedes waaaaaay too much to the Left. Those people aren't rational.

The Left is right about rationality--and several thousand years late getting there--they just don't understand the implications.

Reason demonstrates that empirical reality is a mere construct.

"Reason demonstrates that empirical reality is a mere construct."
Now that's just silly. But at least you're not predictable - I wouldn't have called it that you'd be a PoMo epistemological relativist.

I'm a pre-Modern absolutist. That you can't know anything rationally has nothing to do with what you are required to believe.

Reason demonstrates that you and I are dead and damned ( leave it, please ) this very instant, and that one day soon we will never have lived at all. That's empirical enough, and real enough, to have struck lasting terror into you at some point in your past, else you wouldn't practice the faith you do. This world doesn't need to prove anything to us, oj, and it's craven to pretend that it does.

joe:

Sic transit Reason