7 ms·

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 perso

by mixmax 14y ago

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. They overreach by trying to annex large parts of the world, spend all of their resources doing so and eventually implode. The British and Roman empire are good examples. I stopped calling myself a Christian - the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening. If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room. I occasionally felt embarrassed of America - I have a mixed relation with America. On the one hand it's a great country with amazing and open people that will gladly help a stranger, and has an amazing work ethic. On the other hand I have a problem with Americans not knowing or caring about how the rest of the world functions, how Americans define themselves in terms of their job, and their aggressiveness on the Geopolitical arena. I believe America’s time as #1 super-power will come to an end within my lifetime - I think this is already happening.

seanmcdirmid 14y ago
I've been an out American for 7 years now, first two in Switzerland, the last 5 in China. I still think America has a lot going for it. Switzerland is efficient and fair, but something is missing because of restrained competition and protectionism. China is the exact opposite, and its hard to believe the system works at all. For whatever troubles America has, our system still works and is rather effective; no one is really coddled and you have to work hard, but social mobility is still better in the US than anywhere else. 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.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
  Social mobility is actually very low in the US in comparison with other developed countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    I'm mixed about this. People are fairly comfortable in most developed countries, they are in some way too stable: oppurtunities are provided, for sure, but the urge for mobility is not as strong as in the states. The states is very different, however: oppurtunities are not as numerous (economically segrated educational system), but the drive is much stronger to take them when presented because it sucks at the bottom.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrewrogers 14y ago
  Most Americans believe in the provincial caricatures of the other cultural regions of the US with which they have no experience. It is not just other countries, Americans are like that in their own country. And in fairness, the US is a large, populous country with diverse regional histories. Most Americans would probably be very surprised to learn that the "sagebrush culture" (red) states are the least religious or that the western mountain states are the second most urban outside the NYC area. There is a considerable amount of cultural distance between, say, one of the Cascadia cities (like Seattle), and Mississippi, and Boston, more so than you often find between different European countries. What deceives people is that Americans nominally all speak the same language despite the stark cultural and historical differences between regions.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Or how Idaho is an algmation of LDS teetotalers, survivalist libertarians, and extremely liberal hippies! But even the different between Seattle and Spokane (Washington's first and second largest urban areas) is pretty extreme. My dad worked in nuclear, so I moved around a lot when I was a kid: Tricities Washington (sagebrush country), Toledo Ohio, Somewhere (Pennsville) New Jersey on the tristate border, Vicksburg Mississippi, and finally back to the PNW (Seattle). Actually, many Americans are fairly mobile, much more so than their European counterparts. Its not unusual to meet others like me who moved around a lot as kids (and are still moving, just not in the states anymore). General American ignorance is quite a myth, though I'm sure their are many stationary Americans, there are just as many Americans who've lived everywhere.
thetabyte 14y ago
Opening Note: Personal views- Practicing Jewish most of my upbringing, now agnostic by choice "If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room." As an 18 year old American, active in American politics (I've done minor campaigning, father is a US History teacher), this is utterly strange. A politician that was not some denomination of Christianity would be, most likely, completely unable to win a Presidential election. And that's even if they were a religion the Christian majority feels close to, such as Jewish. If they were Muslim, or so help them atheist, they would stand no chance at the White House. I recently had a friend of 6 years from the UK come and visit for two weeks, and we had a number of discussions on cultural differences. When he mentioned that the majority of people in the UK were not religious, I was dumbfounded. I (foolishly) thought it was everywhere as it is here. In my community at least, to openly question the existence of a God is a social faux pas. I have an interesting perspective having been on both sides of the coin, but in the end it scares me as much as it scares you. The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.
- mixmax 14y ago
  As an interesting aside, there's a strong negative correlation between GDP per capita and religion; the richer a country is the less religious it is. America is the exception that sticks out like a sore thumb on a graph.
  - thetabyte 14y ago
    Really? That's actually very interesting, if you have source material for that I'd love to see it. Though I wonder if it's biased by very religious middle eastern states lacking in natural resources other than oil (which benefits a very small group).
    - mixmax 14y ago
      Here's a graph: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/137/religion-god-theology/plot-religious-population-vs-gdp-868284/ http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/137/religion-god-theology/... Looking at it I noticed that I'm from one of the least religious countries in the world (Denmark).
robgough 14y ago
An interesting and relatively recent example of this is that ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair didnt publicly announce his intention of converting to Catholicism until he left office.
- excuse-me 14y ago
  That US presidents have to lie and say that the talk to God all the time and follow his advice - and European national leaders have to lie and say that they don't is perhaps the main cultural difference ( with the possible exception of the Pope )
spindritf 14y ago
> i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have to skip through five channels before I hit a non-American production. > the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious. I'm sure the author didn't mean that, that his observations are an honest account of his journey but I can't help to notice that articles like this strike this weird SWPL chord "I'm from America but I'm not like the rest of those simpletons" (that's a mild version) and comments to them tend to be real oikophobia festivals. No, I'm not an American and don't live in the States (otherwise the whole tv exercise would be pointless).
- mixmax 14y ago
  I'm writing this on a computer produced in China, running an operating systeem developed by a Finn, delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN.
  - spindritf 14y ago
    Yeah, and even the Finn moved to the States.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    Unless you are one of the 1% or so of the world who uses Opera, your browser is produced by an American organization. As is the most important and expensive chip inside your China-produced computer. And CERN had very little to do with the WWW; more on that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572
  - rdtsc 14y ago
    > a computer produced in China Is it an American company that made it? Yeah it could have been produced in China because labor there is cheaper than in California. Next year it could be produced in Vietnam. > running an operating systeem developed by a Finn Last I checked he is an American citizen, isn't he? So +1 for America then? Would you agree? If you go by your logic, then nothing from America is from America, because most people could easily trace their ancestry to one of the ships that came America at some point. > delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN. Ok, we can argue about the first two. This one is just silly.
philwelch 14y ago
If the USA was ever an overreaching empire, it was very reluctantly. OK, we picked some fights and managed to take a fair chunk of our own continent, but we were also isolationist to a fault until the mid-20th century. It was the Europeans who managed to rope us into both of their "world wars"--and in 1945, when you're looking at the whole of Europe spent and in ruins, and Joseph Stalin as the last dictator standing--well, would you really rather we just went home and forgot about you at that point? People who say the US was imperialistic seem to forget that we didn't, for example, send tanks into France when they wanted to pull out of NATO, which is more than you can say about the other superpower. The British empire stationed troops and bureaucrats all over the world where they weren't wanted. They directly ruled over civilizations larger and more ancient than their own. Aside from the Philippines (whom we granted independence in 1946) and Hawaii and Puerto Rico (who both want to stay with us), we didn't really do that. It starts getting far more abstract when you talk about American imperialism via Coca-Cola and blue jeans.
- bane 14y ago
  Imagine an America that was a true Empire, in the Roman fashion. An America with the additional 51st state of Germany, 52nd of South Korea, 53rd of Cuba, 54th of the Philippines and 55th of Japan? Hell, why stop there? An American claim to France would have been just as strong as a Roman claim to Egypt (namely, America claims it, who disagrees?), let's seize Canada, stop paying for oil to the House of Saud, figure out what we're going to do with our territories of Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. America isn't a true empire, but it has some flavors of one. The U.S. is a weird sort of quasi-empire with military outposts and large economic interests all over the world, but in territories that aren't their own and with the notion that the countries we inhabit are not part of the U.S. in any way shape or form. Sort of like vassal states, but without all the "pay us your tribute or we'll invade and burn your cities down" that modern America is terribly uncomfortable with. It's an interesting academic exercise to pick apart where the U.S. is and isn't like an Empire because it's not that simple.
- neilk 14y ago
  Hey, there's a monument right on Montgomery & Market in San Francisco celebrating California's achieving statehood in 1850. It reads: "The Unity of Our Empire Hangs on the Decision of This Day". And here's a graphic from 1898 which proudly shows the US eagle dominating an entire side of the globe, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:10kMiles.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:10kMiles.JPG I know you mentioned the Phillipines and Puerto Rico already, but what's striking is that you somehow think it doesn't count as a real empire. But there's no inherent reason why the USA should have such a large sphere of influence, other than it can. There's not even any inherent reason why it had to dominate all the land west of the original colonies, wresting it not only from native Americans but other colonial powers. For most of its history the USA was proud to say it was building an empire and dominating other nations (for their own good, of course!). I'm not sure when this propaganda effort started that there is no American empire -- perhaps the US wanted to assert it was more pro-local-sovereignty than other competing empires, like the USSR.
einhverfr 14y ago
You might find Prof. Joseph Tainter's assessment of Rome interesting. he has a very different view of what caused the Roman collapse. In his view, the problem was that Rome based their economy on conquest and pillage. As they'd conquer places, theyd bring back gold into their economy and this would allow them to lower or eliminate taxes. During this time of expansion they did well, and the complexity of their culture increased quite a bit, but in the end, this phase had to come to an end, and Rome was unable to sustain their economy internally. Their attempts to do so involved additional complexity and a great deal of additional attempts to regulate their way out including quantitative easing of their currency. In the end, the problems were too great and the society collapsed from within, through the very process by which they expanded (greater and greater complexity of society). One interesting thing I would add that Herwig Wolfram suggests is that the Western Empire was particularly poorly suited because of the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which limited the tax base and made taxes harder to collect. The Byzantine Empire listed much longer but a couple hundred years after the Roman Empire fell, they too experienced a massive simplification when faced with the Arab invasions. They did so in a more controlled way however and survived but in doing so, Tainter suggests, transitioned from a Roman society to a medieval one.

by mixmax 14y ago

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

I've been an out American for 7 years now, first two in Switzerland, the last 5 in China. I still think America has a lot going for it. Switzerland is efficient and fair, but something is missing because of restrained competition and protectionism. China is the exact opposite, and its hard to believe the system works at all. For whatever troubles America has, our system still works and is rather effective; no one is really coddled and you have to work hard, but social mobility is still better in the US than anywhere else. 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.

RivieraKid 14y ago
Social mobility is actually very low in the US in comparison with other developed countries: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_comparison http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility#Country_compari...
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  I'm mixed about this. People are fairly comfortable in most developed countries, they are in some way too stable: oppurtunities are provided, for sure, but the urge for mobility is not as strong as in the states. The states is very different, however: oppurtunities are not as numerous (economically segrated educational system), but the drive is much stronger to take them when presented because it sucks at the bottom.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jandrewrogers 14y ago
Most Americans believe in the provincial caricatures of the other cultural regions of the US with which they have no experience. It is not just other countries, Americans are like that in their own country. And in fairness, the US is a large, populous country with diverse regional histories. Most Americans would probably be very surprised to learn that the "sagebrush culture" (red) states are the least religious or that the western mountain states are the second most urban outside the NYC area. There is a considerable amount of cultural distance between, say, one of the Cascadia cities (like Seattle), and Mississippi, and Boston, more so than you often find between different European countries. What deceives people is that Americans nominally all speak the same language despite the stark cultural and historical differences between regions.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Or how Idaho is an algmation of LDS teetotalers, survivalist libertarians, and extremely liberal hippies! But even the different between Seattle and Spokane (Washington's first and second largest urban areas) is pretty extreme. My dad worked in nuclear, so I moved around a lot when I was a kid: Tricities Washington (sagebrush country), Toledo Ohio, Somewhere (Pennsville) New Jersey on the tristate border, Vicksburg Mississippi, and finally back to the PNW (Seattle). Actually, many Americans are fairly mobile, much more so than their European counterparts. Its not unusual to meet others like me who moved around a lot as kids (and are still moving, just not in the states anymore). General American ignorance is quite a myth, though I'm sure their are many stationary Americans, there are just as many Americans who've lived everywhere.

thetabyte 14y ago

Opening Note: Personal views- Practicing Jewish most of my upbringing, now agnostic by choice "If the Danish prime minister started confessing her belief in a god she'd be laughed out of the room." As an 18 year old American, active in American politics (I've done minor campaigning, father is a US History teacher), this is utterly strange. A politician that was not some denomination of Christianity would be, most likely, completely unable to win a Presidential election. And that's even if they were a religion the Christian majority feels close to, such as Jewish. If they were Muslim, or so help them atheist, they would stand no chance at the White House. I recently had a friend of 6 years from the UK come and visit for two weeks, and we had a number of discussions on cultural differences. When he mentioned that the majority of people in the UK were not religious, I was dumbfounded. I (foolishly) thought it was everywhere as it is here. In my community at least, to openly question the existence of a God is a social faux pas. I have an interesting perspective having been on both sides of the coin, but in the end it scares me as much as it scares you. The concept of God abounds in our Pledge of Allegiance, in our graduation ceremonies, in our political speeches--it is almost universally accepted and above question.

mixmax 14y ago
As an interesting aside, there's a strong negative correlation between GDP per capita and religion; the richer a country is the less religious it is. America is the exception that sticks out like a sore thumb on a graph.
- thetabyte 14y ago
  Really? That's actually very interesting, if you have source material for that I'd love to see it. Though I wonder if it's biased by very religious middle eastern states lacking in natural resources other than oil (which benefits a very small group).
  - mixmax 14y ago
    Here's a graph: http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/137/religion-god-theology/plot-religious-population-vs-gdp-868284/ http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/137/religion-god-theology/... Looking at it I noticed that I'm from one of the least religious countries in the world (Denmark).

robgough 14y ago

An interesting and relatively recent example of this is that ex-UK Prime Minister Tony Blair didnt publicly announce his intention of converting to Catholicism until he left office.

excuse-me 14y ago
That US presidents have to lie and say that the talk to God all the time and follow his advice - and European national leaders have to lie and say that they don't is perhaps the main cultural difference ( with the possible exception of the Pope )

spindritf 14y ago

> i see America as an overreaching empire that has had it's heyday And yet most of us are right now using computers designed in America, with an operating system written in America, posting on an American website. How is the USA not the centre of the world? From jeans to Katy Perry, from Google to McDonald's -- Americans totally dominated both the culture and the business. If I turn on the tv right now, I will have to skip through five channels before I hit a non-American production. > the fact that many Americans are so religious is just utterly strange, and somewhat frightening Why? Religious people commit less crime, get and stay married more, use less illegal drugs, donate and volunteer more... It would make more sense to fear people becoming less religious. I'm sure the author didn't mean that, that his observations are an honest account of his journey but I can't help to notice that articles like this strike this weird SWPL chord "I'm from America but I'm not like the rest of those simpletons" (that's a mild version) and comments to them tend to be real oikophobia festivals. No, I'm not an American and don't live in the States (otherwise the whole tv exercise would be pointless).

mixmax 14y ago
I'm writing this on a computer produced in China, running an operating systeem developed by a Finn, delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN.
- spindritf 14y ago
  Yeah, and even the Finn moved to the States.
- hollerith 14y ago
  Unless you are one of the 1% or so of the world who uses Opera, your browser is produced by an American organization. As is the most important and expensive chip inside your China-produced computer. And CERN had very little to do with the WWW; more on that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4172572
- rdtsc 14y ago
  > a computer produced in China Is it an American company that made it? Yeah it could have been produced in China because labor there is cheaper than in California. Next year it could be produced in Vietnam. > running an operating systeem developed by a Finn Last I checked he is an American citizen, isn't he? So +1 for America then? Would you agree? If you go by your logic, then nothing from America is from America, because most people could easily trace their ancestry to one of the ships that came America at some point. > delivered to you via the world wide web which comes from CERN. Ok, we can argue about the first two. This one is just silly.

philwelch 14y ago

If the USA was ever an overreaching empire, it was very reluctantly. OK, we picked some fights and managed to take a fair chunk of our own continent, but we were also isolationist to a fault until the mid-20th century. It was the Europeans who managed to rope us into both of their "world wars"--and in 1945, when you're looking at the whole of Europe spent and in ruins, and Joseph Stalin as the last dictator standing--well, would you really rather we just went home and forgot about you at that point? People who say the US was imperialistic seem to forget that we didn't, for example, send tanks into France when they wanted to pull out of NATO, which is more than you can say about the other superpower. The British empire stationed troops and bureaucrats all over the world where they weren't wanted. They directly ruled over civilizations larger and more ancient than their own. Aside from the Philippines (whom we granted independence in 1946) and Hawaii and Puerto Rico (who both want to stay with us), we didn't really do that. It starts getting far more abstract when you talk about American imperialism via Coca-Cola and blue jeans.

bane 14y ago
Imagine an America that was a true Empire, in the Roman fashion. An America with the additional 51st state of Germany, 52nd of South Korea, 53rd of Cuba, 54th of the Philippines and 55th of Japan? Hell, why stop there? An American claim to France would have been just as strong as a Roman claim to Egypt (namely, America claims it, who disagrees?), let's seize Canada, stop paying for oil to the House of Saud, figure out what we're going to do with our territories of Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. America isn't a true empire, but it has some flavors of one. The U.S. is a weird sort of quasi-empire with military outposts and large economic interests all over the world, but in territories that aren't their own and with the notion that the countries we inhabit are not part of the U.S. in any way shape or form. Sort of like vassal states, but without all the "pay us your tribute or we'll invade and burn your cities down" that modern America is terribly uncomfortable with. It's an interesting academic exercise to pick apart where the U.S. is and isn't like an Empire because it's not that simple.
neilk 14y ago
Hey, there's a monument right on Montgomery & Market in San Francisco celebrating California's achieving statehood in 1850. It reads: "The Unity of Our Empire Hangs on the Decision of This Day". And here's a graphic from 1898 which proudly shows the US eagle dominating an entire side of the globe, from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:10kMiles.JPG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:10kMiles.JPG I know you mentioned the Phillipines and Puerto Rico already, but what's striking is that you somehow think it doesn't count as a real empire. But there's no inherent reason why the USA should have such a large sphere of influence, other than it can. There's not even any inherent reason why it had to dominate all the land west of the original colonies, wresting it not only from native Americans but other colonial powers. For most of its history the USA was proud to say it was building an empire and dominating other nations (for their own good, of course!). I'm not sure when this propaganda effort started that there is no American empire -- perhaps the US wanted to assert it was more pro-local-sovereignty than other competing empires, like the USSR.

einhverfr 14y ago

You might find Prof. Joseph Tainter's assessment of Rome interesting. he has a very different view of what caused the Roman collapse. In his view, the problem was that Rome based their economy on conquest and pillage. As they'd conquer places, theyd bring back gold into their economy and this would allow them to lower or eliminate taxes. During this time of expansion they did well, and the complexity of their culture increased quite a bit, but in the end, this phase had to come to an end, and Rome was unable to sustain their economy internally. Their attempts to do so involved additional complexity and a great deal of additional attempts to regulate their way out including quantitative easing of their currency. In the end, the problems were too great and the society collapsed from within, through the very process by which they expanded (greater and greater complexity of society). One interesting thing I would add that Herwig Wolfram suggests is that the Western Empire was particularly poorly suited because of the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, which limited the tax base and made taxes harder to collect. The Byzantine Empire listed much longer but a couple hundred years after the Roman Empire fell, they too experienced a massive simplification when faced with the Arab invasions. They did so in a more controlled way however and survived but in doing so, Tainter suggests, transitioned from a Roman society to a medieval one.