21–30 of 216 posts
This gravitation toward a shared belief makes it not surprising that living where most peoples' belief is that God does not exist would result in one sharing that belief.
Thanks for the article. It's always great to see other perspectives on the world.
What I noticed about living outside America when I did it later as an adult was that it made it clearer what was distinctive about the US.
Many of the distinctive things I noticed could be summed up by describing America as a young culture. Americans have the optimism and energy of youth, but they're also comparatively unsophisticated.
Living and traveling outside the US (Europe, Middle East, Asia) for ~15 years convinced me of the inherent superiority of the US (culturally, economically, etc.). Our government is broken, but generally the US lets problems get really inefficiently bad, then overcorrects, so I hope that will happen in the next 20 years. The threats to the US are not other countries getting better than us, but the decline of the natio…
As an Australian who has travelled the world extensively, spent a great deal of time in the USA, and currently lives in Canada, I strongly disagree with this statement.
It should also be noted that in most quality of life indexes, cities in the US rank far below many of those in Europe, Canada, and Australia - that is one such meaningful metric in my mind when declaring the "superiority" of a country (which I think is a pretty absurd notion anyway)*
* http://www.mercer.com/press-releases/quality-of-living-repor...
> I stopped calling myself a Christian Specific to this point as someone that has lived in England forever I find it really strange how on the reddit atheism subreddit all the (American) posters act as if they're persecuted for their Atheism whereas in England religion is just something people do in private if they do it at all, it's hard for me to understand the way r/atheism posters perceive their persecution, but…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've never really understood the notion that any one country is better than another one. It just seems way too subjective and people seem to generally favour the country they were born or brought up in. I think it's much like picking a car. You can argue the pros/cons all day and night but it just boils down to what you personally prefer and what evidence you feel justifies your decision. Declaring a country is bette…
Obviously you need a metric, but mine is "place to start a world-changing technology business."
A fair example being how fucked all the bitcoin startups are going to be once the market is big enough for FinCEN to care about... or e-gold if you want a historical one.
The US is fine and dandy... if you don't mind not having privacy, and keep your "world-changing" ideas within the lines of what the military-industrial complex sees as acceptable.
Living and traveling outside the US (Europe, Middle East, Asia) for ~15 years convinced me of the inherent superiority of the US (culturally, economically, etc.). Our government is broken, but generally the US lets problems get really inefficiently bad, then overcorrects, so I hope that will happen in the next 20 years. The threats to the US are not other countries getting better than us, but the decline of the natio…
Living and traveling outside the US (Europe, Middle East, Asia) for ~15 years convinced me of the inherent superiority of the US (culturally, economically, etc.). Our government is broken, but generally the US lets problems get really inefficiently bad, then overcorrects, so I hope that will happen in the next 20 years. The threats to the US are not other countries getting better than us, but the decline of the natio…
To be fair, most of the places you lived in that 15 years sucked really hard, even just objectively. The good non-US places are way better than the states in almost every measurable aspect.
> I stopped calling myself a Christian Specific to this point as someone that has lived in England forever I find it really strange how on the reddit atheism subreddit all the (American) posters act as if they're persecuted for their Atheism whereas in England religion is just something people do in private if they do it at all, it's hard for me to understand the way r/atheism posters perceive their persecution, but…
It's inexcusable, considering the breadth of information available to the contrary, but most just never expose themselves to it. I know I didn't until I moved away.
This is a great article, and as a European I can relate to all of his points. Here are some comments from the other side of the pond; they're of course my personal opinion but I think they're somewhat representative of the European view. I don’t view the USA as the center of the world - i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday. If you take a historical perspective this is how many empires fall…
There are people ignorant about the world in any country, I'm not sure why we always single out home bound Americans for being apathetic to world events. There is plenty of that to go around, even in Europe where people tend to travel more to other countries, but especially in China and even in Japan where people have many misconceptions about the rest of the world.
There are no more superpowers, not when IEDs are easy enough to procure by anyone.