Mon 3 Nov 2008
What is it that prevents America from righting herself? Stupid, blind, unthinking patriotism — willful idiots yelling “We’re number one!” while ignoring all evidence to the contrary.
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That Americas now have shorter lives than Bosnians, that our democracy is only slightly better than the Czech Republic’s, that we have more people in prison per capita than any other country in the world, and that a child born in Slovakia is more likely to survive than in America is pathetic.
Sources used for the above are from wikipedia.org
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Why do you hate America?
:o(
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:19 pm
our military = NUMBER ONE!!!
come on… who wants to fight with america?
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:40 pm
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November 4th, 2008 at 11:23 pm
No, you are not number one in everything. But Iceland seem to have done something right.
November 5th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
This really puts things into perspective. It’s amazing that Iceland is #1 in so many categories and now the country is on the brink of bankruptcy. Is there a link or correlation there?
November 5th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
@FixThePig — Talk about bankruptcy, well U.S.A is closer to that. Got the correlation?
November 5th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Collectively, the US is still the best place to do business. Because of this, the US ranks well in many categories, but not the top. Sometimes greed gets in the way of what’s best for society.
November 6th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Anyone with a real working brain would have serious quections about the methods used to arrive at these numbers. Though from the other comments here, I can see that the scientific illiterates of the world are out in force, as usual; ready to believe whatever crap they see on teh interwebs.
Exactly what methods were used to obtain these results? Citing Wikipedia in general is not very convincing. How exactly do you quantify “lack of corruption”? What studies were used to rank nations by “scientific literacy”? What is your definition for “quality of healthcare”?
Give me a break. You spew a bunch of anti-american BS on the internet, cite only wikipedia (not even individual articles), and expect people to just accept your statements as fact? Only a moron would take this for anything but useless mind-vomit.
By the way, “United States of America” is the name of a singular country. The author of this article ARE in need of a better grammar checker.
November 7th, 2008 at 5:16 am
And among these comments we find the real problem that America faces – blind patriotism.
People who say that things might be better somewhere else are accused of hating America, or of “spewing anti-american BS”, and everything seems to be disregarded as bullshit out of hand.
These figures look like the ones that the United Nations present in their yearly reports. I somewhat trust that. But never mind that right now; maybe they aren’t trustworthy. But the knee-jerk reaction of people here is very typical. “If it says that the American way of doing things isn’t the best, then it is anti-american propaganda”…
I think that my country’s biggest strength is that we tend to be able to look at other countries, see what their strengths are and try to adapt similar things. But in all too many cases I see Americans doing the first part of that – seeing that something is better somewhere else – but utterly failing the second part, and just saying “Oh but that can’t work here, we’re a bigger country/we have more immigrants/we have another history/something else” instead of even considering it.
November 9th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Apparently we are not number 1 at research either, otherwise you wouldn’t have gotten this from WIKIPEDIA, jeez
January 25th, 2009 at 6:08 am
Status Quo
Take into consideration the huge numbers of brilliant engineers about to graduate from Indian and Chinese schools, compared to the U.S. and then look at the “mired in the 1930’s sheet-metal and hydraulics, grease-pit technologies” of American cars in general, and expect revolutionary innovation on a genius scale from these people! Our auto-related laws, like our building codes are holding back North America – The almighty “Status Quo” and ever-rising oil prices will feed the (GRD) great republican depression until the last of us are poverty stricken and starving in the streets. Other countries, not so rigidly bound, will prosper and we will die by the roadside, legal in all respects and in obedience to the very laws that killed us! It is the American way!
January 25th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I’m Canadian, but have to agree with John – how do you measure freedom of speech? And how does 40th on ‘smallest prison population’ make you the worst country in the world? I got news for you, there are a few more countries than 40.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:35 am
This kind of thing clearly gets certain types quite emotional but why are people incapable of reading and understanding what this article says?
What exactly is so complicated about a simple statement like “The USA is NOT number 1”
Anyone reasonably intelligent would certainly not expect the USA to be number 1 at Life Expectancy. Go down the list and name one single example where the US could possibly be number 1.
You would probably have to admit that there is none. What then is the point in arguing?
The real question is: “So what……If the US is not best at everything or anything on the list for that matter, so what?”
Is that a catastrophe? Does that make the US the worst country in the world? NO, of course it does not. It precisely means that the US is not the best but by far, it is not the worst either. Understand?
I tell you why you won’t find clever Americans commenting here! It is simply because they know that they are not number 1 at a lot of things and therefore they see absolutely no point arguing over it?
Fortunately many Americans do know the truth.
January 26th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Er, the only people who seem to think America is great is America. And even then not ALL Americans think so. The world would be a lot better without it.