>>Gerry: I don't think all linguists will agree with you that the >> first
>>farmers belonged to the Nostratic family.
Listen to the man, John. It doesn't necessarily have to be Nostratic just
because they had one group of items and not another. Terms can easily shift
meaning and one can easily confuse a term "barley" with "wheat" or "sheep"
with "goats" or even "squirrel" with "mouse". It happens. Since a child, I
was using "bitter" to mean "bland" and then I found out just recently that
it in fact means "sour". Whoops! See how easy it is?
>I am proposing that it began out of an exitinct family which I call
>Japethic. Whether that is Nostratic or part of some other grouping,
I'd rather you base the _language_ "Japhetic" on _linguistic_ reasoning
rather than archaeology, first and foremost.
Gerry wrote
>>So, as I've stated before, although democracy has its many problems, it's
>>the best political system available to us at this >> time.
John wrote:
>So you think you have a democracy do you? Given the record I'd say >you
>have a plutocracy.
Yep, John's right. The problem with democracy is that it never existed and
that still is to be invented in the far future. In order for there to be a
true democracy, _people_ and I mean ALL people must rule. This would require
a Borg-like unity to accomplish but this is the basic definition of the
word.
Take it from a typically jaded and unpatriotic Canadian (Our lack of
patriotism and lack of respect for cultural norms is what makes us different
from the Americans and our comedy usually reflects this by being far
superior than say, SNL, blah... :P). Just because we vote for a president or
prime minister doesn't mean we have democracy. It just means that we have a
democratically elected oligocracy that constantly and disturbingly is swayed
by sensational media and mob-rule by special-interest groups that do not
necessarily have to be majority-view, just full of clout and money like the
people we elect to take care of umemployment and health care for the
impoverished. Governments get away with so much because of mass ignorance
and apathy about what is truely going on.
Yeah, China's communism sucks and most Chinese say so as soon as they live
in Canada or US for a while but with the reward of freedom comes the pain of
awareness.
- gLeN
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