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> That’s not what that word means. Ah, but it is, regardless of your personal word gatekeeping! > It’s not any improvement but actual perfection. I'm not con

> That’s not what that word means. Ah, but it is, regardless of your personal word gatekeeping! > It’s not any improvement but actual perfection. I'm not confident they preferred just "any improvement" over the ideal state, but rather they set out for the ideal, and what they achieved was just how far they got towards that ideal. They would have preferred the ideal, if it was possible, obviously. What's another word for ideal end state? Utopia. In any case, your inability to cite an example of how _you_ criticizing another country has led to _you_ improving _yours_, seems to prove my point: it likely hasn't, because it usually doesn't. You hit the nail on the head: We The People don't run things in another country, we run them in ours, which is why criticizing other countries isn't very useful for improving ours. Indeed, we've completely abandoned that claim, and are now reduced to a claim about utopian vs subutopian goals, entirely omitting anything about other countries. By doing so, we're now discussing how to improve ours. QED.

Retric 3y ago
> gatekeeping “utopia, an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/utopia https://www.britannica.com/topic/utopia Suggesting any improvement is aiming for utopia is simply false. Sentencing someone to life imprisonment absolutely guarantees that you aren’t going to live in a utopia while they are alive. Therefore it isn’t aiming for utopia but an imperfect compromise. There’s no gatekeeping involved simply the actual meaning of the word. As to your suggestion I am backtracking, I am an individual not a country. I can point to cases where my critique of other people improved myself but suggesting I changed the US is kind of silly. Abstractly, I could say my voting habits have been impacted by analyzing failures of other countries. However, having never actually changed any election outcomes such a statement is in effect meaningless. On a tiny scale I there thousands of minor actions which I think are a net positive but I don’t know. Witnessing the repeated failures associated with exporting plastic recycling, I realized it’s better for the environment to throw plastic into the trash bin than attempting to recycle it. But, while it’s true that’s a net positive for the US and the world it isn’t a meaningful difference.

Retric 3y ago

> gatekeeping “utopia, an ideal commonwealth whose inhabitants exist under seemingly perfect conditions.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/utopia https://www.britannica.com/topic/utopia Suggesting any improvement is aiming for utopia is simply false. Sentencing someone to life imprisonment absolutely guarantees that you aren’t going to live in a utopia while they are alive. Therefore it isn’t aiming for utopia but an imperfect compromise. There’s no gatekeeping involved simply the actual meaning of the word. As to your suggestion I am backtracking, I am an individual not a country. I can point to cases where my critique of other people improved myself but suggesting I changed the US is kind of silly. Abstractly, I could say my voting habits have been impacted by analyzing failures of other countries. However, having never actually changed any election outcomes such a statement is in effect meaningless. On a tiny scale I there thousands of minor actions which I think are a net positive but I don’t know. Witnessing the repeated failures associated with exporting plastic recycling, I realized it’s better for the environment to throw plastic into the trash bin than attempting to recycle it. But, while it’s true that’s a net positive for the US and the world it isn’t a meaningful difference.