12 hours ago, ScienceNostalgia101 said:

Worst: The fanatical worship of the free market. America knows it could alleviate a lot of poverty if it embraced Scandinavia-esque unionization policies to protect the working class, and give people something to lose by resorting to welfare or turning to crime; and then they could afford to treat prisoners and welfare recipients better without risking outflow to both crime and the welfare rolls. They just refuse to, because as far as they're concerned, that strategy is somehow more morally reprehensible than causing massive poverty from stubborn refusal to embrace it.

Agreed, but the USA didn't patent that model...

So, the best and worst of Amerca, is freedom?

That seems unlikely...

 

On 7/1/2021 at 11:28 PM, CharonY said:

That is a cliché that US Americans believe and which is unlikely to be true. Idea of free speech and related concepts are ancient and did not start with the USA. Moreover, the US had many, many issues with it. McCarthy, anyone?

 

Not that the US under the last administration did not try that. Instead they muzzled the agency responsible for keeping folks safe. I am not saying that China did the right thing, but at least eventually they openly declared that the outbreak was an issue and did something (whether it was the right thing might be debatable).

In the US meanwhile, the officials offered mixed messages and were not able to clearly communicate the severity of the disease. The differences in countries that did that and the US is clearly visible in the death counts (which is even worse when one also includes undercounted cases).

In short, freedom of speech is an ideal that many American hold dear in principle. In effect, there are many mechanisms that undermine it, which tend to show up when the system becomes more authoritarian. 

This is basically also true for Europe, looking at some countries who recently have become more authoritarian (e.g. Hungary or Poland), some of the measures almost always include limitations of freedom of expression of some sort.

I'm referring to Europe as a whole, compared to the USA as a whole. Obviously there will be a few European countries that are exceptions, just as there are a few U.S. states that are exceptions.

This is the legacy of the Arab Caliphate and the Timurids. All the Islamized countries were subordinate.

And  no one was going to make them rich, they were only sources of labor and additional product. This policy is still alive to this day, so it is precisely the "centers" of the Islamic world that are flourishing.

And this is manifested not only in poverty. For example, the modern Uighuristan, that was previously a Moghulistan, the land of Genghis khan, does not even have protection from genocide in the Islamic world(except Turkey), and this is also not an accident: it was from there that the real Mughals came, who destroyed the Arab Caliphate.