Is the United States the best?

Wrong as always.

New Zealand may be my leader in the clubhouse. Independence was a slow but peaceful process, and in the 1890s they enacted a bunch of laws that made them arguably the most socially progressive state in the world. Its women were the first in the world to be enfranchised (1893), and beginning in 1936 the country began building an advanced welfare state.

The main skeleton perhaps is the treatment of the Polynesian ancestors of the present Maori by its British overlords. But that pales to American treatment of African-Americans and Native Americans. And the Maori were given full rights and privileges of British subjects in 1840.

I'm fascinated by Russia. But I don't hold it in any high esteem (other than its WWII sacrifice and its absolutely gorgeous subway systems). I just like to correct gross misrepresentations to educate ignorant people from time to time.

 

That's a fair, well-reasoned answer. But it also demonstrates how vague the question is. Your criteria for "the best," it appears to me, is how peacefully a country comes to its independence and how well it takes care of its citizens. Perfectly valid.

But there are plenty of other criteria by which others may judge "the best." For instance, I think advancing civilization is an important part of being "the best." America, for all of its faults (and it has a great many) has contributed far more to the advancement of civilization than New Zealand has. NZ seems like a great place to live, but aside from Rutherford's work on the atom, I can't think of much the Kiwis have accomplished to help the advancement of humanity.

I'm really not arguing America is "the best." I'd just like to know what the parameters are for the discussion.

 

Gross misrepresentations? Your Moscow Bob. You’re full of shit.

 

We are the best, and the light of this world, and not to be judged in totality by three years of a simpleton's reign.
Or the historical error and mathematical anomaly that briefly brought that simpleton to power.
This too shall pass.

If we weren't heretofore the greatest then people wouldn't be so shook up by this shit.

 

What we were told:
"The Russian prospect over the coming years and decades is more promising than ever before in its history." --- David Remnick, The New Yorker, 1997

"Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia." --- Vice president Al Gore, 1998

"Russia is a radically different place than it was 10 years ago. . . . And just seven years into this transition, basic arrows on all the big issues are pointing in the right direction." --- Michael McFaul (who would go on to be Obama's Ambassador to Russia), 1999

What was really happening:
"A human crisis of monumental proportions is emerging in the former Soviet Union." --- United Nations Development Program, 1999

"All the fundamental sectors of our state, economic, cultural and moral life have been destroyed or looted. We live literally amid ruins, but we pretend to have a normal life. Will we continue looting and destroying Russia until nothing is left? God forbid these (post-Communist) reforms should continue." --- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 2000

"So great is Russia's economic and thus social catastrophe that we must now speak of another unprecedented development: the literal demodernization of a twentieth-century country.'' --- Professor Stephen Cohen, 1998


Everything you were told, and are told, is what someone wants you to believe. If it's the truth, it's only by accident. Quit believing it just because you want it to be true.

I admit my criteria leans heavily toward "first, do no harm." That's to prevent Biff Tannen (and countries like him) from being called "best" in the alternative 1985 universe.

 

Tell me more about Putin and what a good guy he is.

Or better yet tell me how there was no Russian government run doping program and the documentary Icarus was a bunch of bull shit.

it’s a shame Slava Malamud doesn’t post here, he’d have fun with you.

 

I hardly see how that remark wasn't prescient.
Swaths of Russia don't even have hot water in spring and summer months.

"Do no harm" - that's a funny one for this gang of thieves and crooks.
Trump is a vandal,
a Visigoth,
a Trojan Horse -
he and his henchmen planned destruction from the start.

 

He's the best alternative for 144 million people who are scared shitless that another Yeltsin could replace him. That always has been my position on Putin.

That's the key difference in American and Russian elections. Americans unfailingly look at them as "Now things will get better!". Russians view them as "Fuck, let's not let things get worse!"

Nah. They turn off the hot water in certain areas on a staggered schedule for 1-2 weeks in the summer to perform maintenance on Soviet-era equipment.

 

Our health care takes us out of the conversation for best country. The cost of higher education is about to go side by side with health care.

 

What are the parameters? Is it the nicest place to live? Most economic opportunity? Longest average lifespan? Least violence? Most honorable formation? Most advanced? The discussion really can't move forward until someone offers up at least some criteria for a definition of what "the best" means.

 

Well exactly. The whole question was ridiculous, and to my point that it was a Trump-level of analytical thinking - declare it the best, greatest, "strongest" (he's fucking obsessed with "strong) and don't even worry about KPIs.