Amnestic said:Yes, you're certianly top dog. Remind me again how the Best Country In the World's military offensives are going in Afghanistan after 8 years?Therumancer said:
Or how your economy is doing? What's the deficit up to now?
Or! Let's move on to firearms homicide rates [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence#Homicides_by_country].
And teen pregnancy rates [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_pregnancy#Global_incidence] - guess that education system you're paying through the nose for is paying off.
How about obesity/overweight rates? [http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/overwt.htm]
Or perhaps your government? With someone who could barely operate a computer less than a year ago trying to push a Net Neutrality bill through Congress? Clearly there's no companies pushing their own personal views via donations there. Oh no, your government is a bastion of purity.
Not to mention your political system being so wraught with pathetic party politics, underhanded dealings, lobby interest groups and voter apathy. The vast majority of your citizens seemingly have no qualms with quoting the Constitution having never even read it.
Best country in the world - Ha! By what standards?
I've not even got a real beef with Americans or America as a whole. When I visited eight years ago, most everyone I met was a decent enough person. Don't pull "Best country in the world" on me though, because there's no such thing. And if there was, it certainly isn't America.
The day your economy collapses because of reliance on Chinese Loans [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/opinion/23iht-edchina.3259616.html] and the like will be a day in which the planet turns its head at the once great giant who had it all and blew it away in their own arrogance and sheds a single tear because of what they could have been and what they weren't.
So once again - I ask you, "Best Country"? By what standards?
Yes, I am awfully ill-informed about this, for I am just a poor, stupid Brit.
Okay, for starters the point is that if people are going to be nationalistic, I have the right to be also.
If you want to get more serious than that, it's going to get way off subject. However I will point out a few things:
#1: The reason why our military is not doing so well is because we're not using it properly. It was never intended to be a police force, but a "go in and kill everything" force. Hence one of the reasons why we went scrambling to get armored hummers and such which we didn't have in large numbers because we never intended the military to be doing the job it is now.
We decided to go for a "smaller, better armed force" relying on things like our abillity to decimate cities, collapse buildings, and other assorted things if we were to engage in a war. All the technology to turn 5,000 people into hamburger inside a second means nothing if the politicians decide to go in and deal with insurgents with guns, by using soldiers with guns. When we fight them man to man, gun to gun, we lose like 99% of what makes our military powerful.
You could argue that we were stupid to go there and fight the war under these terms, and I would agree with you. I won't go into any more details on engagement doctrine or how it should have been handled since that will go off in other political directions (and has been dicussed in other posts).
Basically though the fact that we have been doing things like loading our missles with concrete to avoid doing too much damage summarizes why I think anyone who judges what the American military can do by these engagements is foolish.
I will also point out that I see our morality as a weakness, the very fact that we have engaged under these terms has a lot to do with us listening to the rest of the world, and caring what others think to an unhealthy extent. The British Empire and other dominant world powers before us wouldn't have bothered.
We could have erased The Middle East pretty much, but we chose not to despite everything. I'm not entirely sure other nations would have been as merciful as we were under the same circumstances. In general as a dominant world power the US has been open to global input to an unprecedented extent. Compare this to say Russia who pretty much does whatever they want and doesn't much care what anyone else says.
#2: The American Deficit again comes about from the US being too nice. A lot is said about the things we buy globally to prop up economies, the duties we perform globally, and of course about the fact that we honor agreements for "loans" which amounted to tribute at the time like they were actually loans.
The US could be in much better shape economically if we chose to pretty much worry about the US exclusively. As it is, a lot of the money we borrow is actually used to help prop up various aspects of the global infrastructure that has become dependant on us.
Understand that for all of the "Deficit" we're still the first person countries go to (especially in the third world) when they need a hand out or relief.
We could be a lot more ruthless and self centered economically. This is not to say we're total pantywaists when it comes to trade, but basically for everything you hear about what a ruthless group of sharks we are, you also hear about how we're basically operating as an international "Meals On Wheels".
#3: I do not consider things like gunshot homicides to be a bad thing. It's a sign of freedom on a lot of levels. The populance neither being defenseless, or totally at the mercy of law enforcement.
In the end a lot of countries might have less in the way of violence statistics (at least as far as they get to see) but also have coorespondingly less freedom despite what they might think. A key example of this is France for example, which likes to present itself as being as free as America, but they are also a lot more closed culturally, and despite their pretensions do not have freedom of speech or freedom of the press at American levels as things like the "Oil For Food" scandal demonstrate.
Given that the US is a cultural melting pot, that tolerates behaviors and differances that most other countries simply don't (whether they admit it or not), with empowered civilians, etc... I think we do a very good job here walking the line that we do. Sure we COULD have less violence, but that would come at the expense of the freedoms we have now.
-
Is America the best? Well to be honest it's the only system I know of that I feel could work globally. Most other stable nations I know of achieve that stability by being well behind the US in some areas like personal freedom even if they choose not to admit it or see things that way.
You look at say Japan, or France and their violence statistics for example, but then you look at their govermental policies/civil liberties compared to the US, how powerless the citizens are in general (What do you do if they come for you?), and of course the fact that for all comments about civil liberties if you look around in a typical crowd in say Japan everyone is Japanese, it's not like the US where you can spot differant ethnicities in pretty much any crowd. In France in most places nearly everyone is white. France also holds on to strong immigration policies (which is why it nearly decided not to join the EU, for fear that it would allow other europeans to come into France and claim the benefits of being French0.
Other nations can go "look! we're tolerant!" but it's not taken to the same level as the US, which is one of the reasons why I don't think their system COULD work on a global scale. It hasn't seen the same trial by fire. By the same token I think it's the existance of the US and it's affects on global culture that has made it so that other nations are stiving to at least be seen as tolerant.
When it comes to things like the right to bear arms, I suppose I'll explain in slightly more detail. See in the US if someone passes a law, you still need to get the cops to enforce that law. In the US it requires some thought because in the end some cop has to go through a door to get a citizen who might very well be armed. This isn't that big a deal when your dealing with armed individuals, or small groups of individuals, it it means that the goverment has to be VERY careful not to start a civil war (limiting what it can do), and also to avoid passng laws that might very well have cops go "no... I am NOT going to risk getting myself blown away over something like that" (which has happened before, especially with state and local ordinances. You don't see it very often but there have been threatened police strikes, and similar actions in the past).
In a lot of other countries without an armed populance, "will the people stand for it?" is less of an question, as is "will our police be willing to risk their lives to enforce this?".
See, the American attitude is supposed to be one where the goverment is afraid of/serves the people, as opposed to the people being afraid of and serving the goverment. It's a distinction of attitude a lot of countries do not possess, and one of the things that makes the US system one of the best.
See, in the US we have all kinds of wierd dramas about the hypothetical possibility of a goverment going out of control, disappearing people, or whatever else. The thing is that in other countries the goverment has the abillity to do such things if it ever decides to ignore the rules. For example the French Goverment could probably disappear someone a bit more easily than the US goverment could since the French goverment has more direct control over the press/communication, not to mention less of a risk involved of someone objecting to being disappeared with firearms (making things potentially messier) not to mention to what happens if such things get out of control and you wind up with GROUPS of people eventually objecting.
In the US a lot of the "hypothetical conspiricy theories" would end with a lot of Waco type standoffs, and outright warfare with the equivilent of militia groups. One of the reasons why they are laughably implausible here (among many reasons). In other countries they become less so, becuse things that would require a conspiricy in the US are already abillities possesed by the goverment in some other countries.
-
Feel free to disagree, I'm not going to argue this anymore as it's getting well off topic. Fine, you don't think the US is the best country. Just as I can be nationalistic, so can everyone else (which is pretty much what started this... I mean everyone EXCEPT Americans being able to be nationalistic seems to be the undeclared rule).
We could argue this stuff to infinity and beyond. "Who has the best country" is an arguement without a definitive answer, which is why we haven't exactly come together under a global culture yet.
