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In response to Psudo's thread;

canada-us-relations-f14/only-in-america-t103981.html

I've been meaning to post it for a while, but just kept forgetting...

Only in America – observations by a real Canadian


Only in America can tens of thousands of people be killed every year by firearms, yet millions of Americans will insist guns have nothing to do with the problem.

Only in America do they spend more on defence than the next dozen countries combined, yet complain about China and Russia spending $100-150 billion each (1/5 of what America spends BTW).

Only in America can they boast that their health care system is the best in the world, despite 46 million Americans having no medical insurance to access that health care system.

Only in America is health care so expensive that the biggest cause of bankruptcy is medical expenses.

Only in America do conservative politicians prattle on about morality while at the same time they are having an affair with their assistant/secretary.

Only in America can call themselves a Christian, yet reject most of Jesus’s teachings such as turn the other cheek, judge not lest ye be judged in turn, etc (they prefer the death sentence to that kind of liberal nonsense).

Only in America can someone decry the death of an unborn fetus and then kill doctors who perform abortions.

Only in America can someone turn milk into plastic and call it ‘cheese’.

Only in America is one of the biggest industries the porn industry, yet nipples and breastfeeding are "immoral"

Only in America do women have no problems posing for photos in bikinis, yet draw the line at bras and panties.

   

Cue indignation in 3....2......1.......

   

you're American?

   

I was expecting more points.

   

Maybe you can add to them.

Only in America will you take the auto industry - one of the foundations of the modern American dream and builder of the very American car culture and outsource it to Canada and Mexico!

   

It's been posted here before... probably more than once.

   

Psudo's thread?

I can't let him take the rap for something he actually critiqued.

No. That thread was mine. It was one of those little smiley, ironic, half-truth, winks from one side of the partisan divide to the other. One sees them from both sides.

What amazed me about it was how angry it made some. I still hear bitches about it from commentors on current posts 'Remember that time months ago, you posted that humor thing that wasn't 100% fact. Proves you're a liar.'

Also, I see now there are now parodies on the original. I'm surprised. Apparently it was much more powerful than I thought when I first posted it. Hell, I just thought it was a bit of a smile.

   

Fiddledog! You're alive!

   

I was kinda wondering what rant of mine this meant.

I actually agree with some of the points from this list.

Any American who complains that other nations are spending too much on defense are just plain nuts. I don't hear that argument much, but it's clearly a stupid and hypocritical position to take.

The US health care system is clearly not the best in the world. It has top-in-the-world emergency response, research and development, and outcomes for those who can afford them in the world, but (as mentioned) is infamously too expensive and terrible at providing equal access to health care.

American cheese is crap. Obviously.

American modesty and morality have strong undercurrents of hypocrisy, no doubt. People ought not to pretend to have views they don't actually intend to honor by their actions. I'm skeptical that such behavior is exclusive to Americans, but it may actually be more common in the USA than in the rest of the world. On the other hand, I suspect it is also more common in the rest of the West than in the Islamic world, so perhaps anti-Americans (especially Christian ones) ought to refrain from throwing the first stone.

Some of the points range from a stretch to clearly wrong. For example, politicians prescribing behavior they cannot maintain in their own lives is a timeless hypocrisy of those in power which neither started in America nor exists primarily in America. When such hypocrisy comes out, I think Americans are more likely to run the politician out of office for his moral failings than other nations are.

I'm not sure this is empirically demonstrable, but it seems to me that Americans are more likely to publicly and internationally criticize their own country and culture in general than people in any other nation (except Germany, obviously). Would anyone like to offer disputing argument to that? I'd like to hear it debated by people who know more about it than me.

   

Ironically:

Bootlegga then disputes bootlegga now. (Then-Boots was referring to this post when he was calling me level-headed.)

Also, you did bring up this list (at least in part) in the other thread.

   

Have you ever heard an American argue this? I never have. I usually hear the argument that other nations don't spend enough, making NATO the USA and the however-many dwarfs.

   

Putting forth the argument that the US has to keep defense spending high because of the threat of Russia and China is arguing that those countries spend too much on what they would call defense but to the US seems like offense. And of course Russian and China make exactly the same argument, just reverse who's offense and who's defense.

   

Yet, I've never heard an American complain that Russia and China spend too much. Also, I refer you to the first part of my signature.

   

Only in America can you go on about being the most free country in the world without acknowledging that you also have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Only in America can white people worry about becoming second-class citizens despite pretending today that minorities aren't treated second-class.

Only in America do people wonder what is wrong with the youth when all the role models are rich pampered self-absorbed children with a thick wad of cash and some brutalized concept of being a "deserving success story of the American Dream".

Only in America do the banks rob you. It's getting difficult to think of ones that apply only to the Untied States and aren't an endemic social problem shared by most countries in the throws of capitalism, like Canada. We can only basically say that "America is the sickest" but the fact is that we're all ill.

   

Only in America can you call yourself the land of opportunity yet have here's what their intergenerational income elasiticty looks like compared to other developed nations.


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