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From: don@allegra.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Strange Belief Systems
Message-ID: <1829@allegra.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Sep-83 21:56:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: allegra.1829
Posted: Fri Sep 16 21:56:42 1983
Date-Received: Sat, 17-Sep-83 21:02:56 EDT
Organization: Bell Labs, Murray Hill
Lines: 21

Laura:

Let me see if I have this straight now.  Do you believe that Britain is
training its army in Northern Ireland so they can be used to take
freedom away back home when the evil Labour Party comes back into
power?  Do you also believe that Poland makes buildings out of nuclear
waste?  Since reactors only produce fairly small amounts of waste
(hundreds of pounds a year?) it doesn't seem like a logical source of
filler material.  I guess they are just doing it to be nasty.  Oh,
those dastardly commies!  Perhaps you are confused, and your friend was
really talking about New Jersey.

To be serious, I have two strong impressions from England.  The first
is that their tradition of democracy is older and more firmly
established than almost any other country in the world.  There is a lot
of participation in local politics, and parties genuinely represent
different classes in English society.  Secondly, their economy has
never been quite the same since they lost their colonial markets;
however, their standard of living is quite high.  One should also
recall that at the height of their empirial era, the average working
man had a very low standard of living.