McDonalds has the world's best food

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Bullshit. You and PE are the only yanks who get 'butt-hurt' (not a bad yank expression btw) on here. The US is the bully of the planet (and I can see why). What's to like about a bully?

[vegetariantaxidermy]

Silly PC ''Progressive'' 'insults' are water off a duck's back. I don't blame Kiwis for leaving their country. Unfortunately more yanks don't do that, because it's the only way they can become normal. What the hell do they put in your water? Some secret undetectable brain-shrinking chemical?
Anyone who claims to never generalise about people is a liar and a hypocrite. It's impossible not to. Apparently it's only 'bigotry' when you say something unflattering

[Arising_uk]

So what's your restaurant favorite?

Pardon?

[vegetariantaxidermy]

So what's your restaurant favorite?

Pardon?

I think he's asking you out.

[Science Fan]

VT: There you go again bringing up the words political correctness, which is ironic, since the politically correct crowd is the one going around social media bad-mouthing America, which makes you part of that crowd, if anyone is.

[Science Fan]

VT: Why are you even on a philosophy forum? In philosophy, and logic, it is recognized that personal attacks are a foul. When you constantly post comments insulting all Americans, you are engaged in a personal attack, having nothing to do with the substantive issues. Furthermore, there is no factual basis for your comments, and in philosophy, any conclusion based on false premises cannot be justified. You've been on here for how many years and still constantly ignore the most basic aspects of philosophical reasoning. So, why bother to be here then, when it is obvious you have no interest in learning even the most basic aspects of philosophy?

[vegetariantaxidermy]

What is the "best" food involves a value judgment, and it's difficult to rank foods. However, PE has a point ---- the popularity of McDonalds does give it some bragging rights on being the "best."

If that's the case then Ed Sheeran is 'the best and greatest' singer songwriter and Richard Clayderman is 'the best and greatest' pianist. McMansions are 'the best and greatest' architecture, and Damien Hirst is the 'greatest artist who ever lived'.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

VT: Why are you even on a philosophy forum? In philosophy, and logic, it is recognized that personal attacks are a foul. When you constantly post comments insulting all Americans, you are engaged in a personal attack, having nothing to do with the substantive issues. Furthermore, there is no factual basis for your comments, and in philosophy, any conclusion based on false premises cannot be justified. You've been on here for how many years and still constantly ignore the most basic aspects of philosophical reasoning. So, why bother to be here then, when it is obvious you have no interest in learning even the most basic aspects of philosophy?

Nice try sunshine. I only state the obvious (although there's no need to on here). All you can do is throw around the 'B' word. Oooh. I'm so 'offended'.
And why get so 'offended' if you don't feel that you are part of a collective whole? You also need to look up 'personal insult' because I haven't used a single one. You, on the other hand....

''LAFAYETTE, INDIANA: Even now, polls suggest that about 40 percent of Americans regard Donald Trump as a suitable president. In essence, this preference has little to do with job performance and must be explained by the nature of the wider society from which this president was drawn.

For the most part, Americans have forsaken every once-residual aspect of an authentic intellectual life. This near total abandonment of a national "life of the mind" was not fashioned in a cultural vacuum. Rather, it was fostered by an unrelenting barrage of crude and voyeuristic entertainments, most of which now center on sex, sadism, torture, murder and dreary profanity.

Surely this is not the time to expect a visit from Plato's "philosopher-king."

In essence, the incumbent US president is not familiar with the country’s history and does not understand that it deserves its proper pride of place. Few Americans consider that the country's Founding Fathers, in supporting the right to bear arms, never imagined automatic weapons. Even fewer know that the early Republic was the indisputable religious heir of John Calvin, and the philosophical descendant of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes. For that matter, only a small number have ever even heard of John Calvin, John Locke or Thomas Hobbes.


In the end, fundamentally basic cultural and educational disfigurements shape presidential selections. Many of this country’s cumulative political ambitions remain bound up with embarrassing simplifications and, accordingly, with stupefying clichés. The appearance of Willie Robertson, a TV star from the reality TV show Duck Dynasty, as a principal speaker before the Republican National Convention was consistent with Trump's own proud personal aversion to intellect and learning. No one seemed to have any trouble with the convention's shameless juxtaposition.

The full horror of the Trump presidency begins with the intellectually unambitious American individual, with the flawed citizen "microcosm." Significantly, the electorate can never rise any higher than the amalgamated capacities of its separate members. "When the throne sits on mud," observed philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, "mud sits on the throne."

Ultimately, every democracy represents the sum total of its constituent "souls." In the deeply fractionated American republic, however, We the people – more and more desperate for a seemingly last chance to "fit in" and "get respect" – inhabit a vast wasteland of irretrievably lost human opportunity. Within this largely desiccated society of cheap and abysmal entertainments, Americans have indeed become the "hollow men," chained to a lifetime of more or less exhausting and meaningless work.

This demeaning fate is often as true for the very rich as for the very poor. Unsurprisingly, for both extremes of wealth and poverty, many American citizens increasingly seek solace by drowning themselves in vast oceans of both alcohol and drugs. Still, even the great seas are not limitless solvents.

In essence, "we the people" now cheerlessly embrace the full range of cultural and intellectual declension. Willingly, we go down in the blithering Trump era without even a murmur of palpable resistance or visible courage. Above all, too many continue to think aggressively against history, bombastically, somehow strangely pleased that few adults care to read or learn anything important. Too many Americans are remotely concerned that Donald Trump never reads. As for the president himself, he is unashamed, even proud of this disposition to eschew books.

Few condemn this attitude. Intellectual endeavors have little cash value and hardly "pay."

To a significant extent, the presidential debility reflects a society that rejects Emersonian individualism in every conceivable form or nuance. "I belong, therefore I am." This is not what René Descartes had in mind back in the 17th century, when the philosopher had urged greater private thought and, as essential corollary, greater doubt. Without demurring, this sad credo positively shrieks that social acceptance is equivalent to one's own physical survival, and that even the most ostentatiously pretended pleasures of inclusion are worth pursuing.

Adrenalized, this crowd-centered American society proceeds imitatively, at the lowest possible common denominator. This is fertile ground for a president whose principal commitments are not to reason, intellect or logic, but instead to rancor, blame and systematic deflection.

For too many young people, learning has become an inconvenient but mandated commodity. And commodities, like the next batch of mass-produced college graduates, exist for one purpose – to be suitably "processed." For Trump and supporters this represents not an embarrassment or liability, but rather the optimal definition of an American democracy.


Though confronting genuine threats of war, illness, impoverishment and terror, millions of Americans still prefer to amuse themselves to death, resorting to various forms of morbid excitement, voyeuristic "reality shows," inedible or openly injurious foods, and the distracting repetitions of a persistently-vacuous political discourse. Not a day goes without some premonitory sign of impending catastrophe. Still, the numbed country continues to impose upon its exhausted and manipulated people a shamelessly open devaluation of challenging thought and a continuously breakneck pace of unrelieved work and emotional submission.

Soon, even if the nation somehow manages to avoid nuclear war and nuclear terrorism – an avoidance not to be taken for granted in the unraveling Trump era – the swaying of the American ship will become so violent that even the hardiest lamps will be overturned. Then, the phantoms of great ships of state, once laden with treasures, may no longer lie forgotten. Then, perhaps, we may finally understand the circumstances that could send the compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Freud and Kafka to join the works of forgotten poets, were neither unique nor transient.

In an 1897 essay titled "On Being Human," Woodrow Wilson inquired about the authenticity of America: "Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?" The former president, then a professor at Princeton, answered "yes," but only if citizens refused to stoop and join the injurious and synthetic "herds" of mass society. “Let us remind ourselves that to be human is, for one thing, to speak and act with a certain note of genuineness, a quality mixed of spontaneity and intelligence,” he wrote, adding that this is especially essential during times of shifting standards. “The art of being human begins with the practice of being genuine, and following standards of conduct which the world has tested.”

Otherwise, Wilson had already understood, our entire society would be left bloodless, a skeleton, as incapable as the rusty demise of broken machinery.

The Trump presidency is merely the most debilitating symptom of a much deeper pathology. The nation’s underlying disease is a far-reaching unwillingness to think seriously. Left unchallenged at this rudimentary level, such reluctance could quickly transform into the finely-lacquered corpse of a once promising American society.

With luck, the Trump presidency will end without catastrophic nuclear war, but even that "happy ending" would represent little more than a temporary reprieve.

Unless citizens begin to work much harder at changing their society's stunningly deep indifference to intellect and reason, they will recurrently face the dreadful kinds of metamorphoses that Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously termed a "sickness unto death." The real work for Americans must not begin with politics directly – as all politics are epiphenomenal – but with a distinctly more resolute "fixing" of our individual selves.

Louis René Beres, educated at Princeton, is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue. His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published in 2016 by Rowman and Littlefield. A previous contributor to YaleGlobal Online, his essays have been also published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hudson Review, The National Interest, The Atlantic, Harvard National Security Journal of Harvard Law School, International Security of Harvard University, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, World Politics of Princeton University, US News and World Report, The Hill and Oxford University Press. In 2016, he co-authored a monograph in Israel, with General (USA/ret.) Barry McCaffrey, dealing with Israel’s nuclear strategy and American national security. ''

He must be a 'bigot'.

[Science Fan]

VT: I had zero interest in reading that lengthy post. Especially after you claimed you only state what is "obvious." After that, I stopped reading. Your bigotry may seem "obvious" to you, just like David Duke thinks it's obvious that blacks are inferior to whites, but that just emphasizes your irrational thinking. It certainly doesn't justify it.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

VT: I had zero interest in reading that lengthy post. Especially after you claimed you only state what is "obvious." After that, I stopped reading. Your bigotry may seem "obvious" to you, just like David Duke thinks it's obvious that blacks are inferior to whites, but that just emphasizes your irrational thinking. It certainly doesn't justify it.

[Walker]

Frugal McDoogal, waste not want not, liquefied into the pink soup.

They say it’s the American way, but it’s not.

America is extravagance.

Haggis is penny pinching.

[uwot]

I bet you walk past a McDonalds just about every day.

PhilX

Well yeah; that's what anyone with tastebuds does.

[Walker]

The marketing-team has obviously abandoned Ronald, probably because of bad press for clowns: Chucky, that Batman movie, Aurora, Co.

The Burger King is a clown more relatable to the target audience of hungover twenty-something males with a burning metabolism, a late-night need for grease, and a happy selfie-face as worn by the King.

Peer-pressured kids want to be like their Mc’Peers and not be seen with a big chunk of onion or bell pepper in the burger, although home-cookin crunchy vegetables grilled on the edge do taste good with bread and the proper condiments. Little pickle relish, onions, pickles, hot sauce, pickled hot peppers, make your head sweat in the summertime.

In America, no freedom of mind to allow for extravagance still permits pursuit of the American dream, which for some ends up being a disillusioned treadmill of trying, like a dog chasing its tail in the sense of living a lifestyle to afford the lifestyle that permits living the lifestyle. Some folks need a fancy car to get to the fancy job in order to pay for the fancy car, and the two-page obit. Like Thoreau said, one could use the work time required to pay for a trip and just take a long walk, thus skip all the circular drama.

However, such opportunities to experience and transcend the limitations of self-perpetuating manna are more rare in a hell-hole.

Come to think of it, obituaries are actually resumes.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

The way you yanks talk you would think it was the only country where people can get rich if they are so inclined. Some of the richest people in the world are Russian, Chinese and Muslim. What the fuck does 'the American dream' mean anyway? So f'ing arrogant.

[Philosophy Explorer]

There seems to be confusion about the richest people in the world. Here's a list of the top 10 of which over half are Americans:

List of the 10 Richest People in the World
Jeff Bezos. Responsible for the growth of online shopping and e-commerce, Jeff Bezos made his fortune by founding Amazon.com. ...
Bill Gates. ...
Amancio Ortega. ...
Warren Buffett. ...
Mark Zuckerberg. ...
Carlos Slim Helu. ...
Larry Ellison. ...
Michael Bloomberg.

It's certainly not arrogant to be rich nor a crime. In fact it's very positive to the world. For example the funds are kept at banks and other institutions who then lend out the money to build schools and stores and streets and roads and homes and apartment buildings, etc. And in the US, people have the opportunity to get rich.

McDonalds is a textbook example of success by any yardstick. They have much to be proud of.

PhilX