No. In fact I often bring up how similar I feel most cultures are, particularly the US/Canada and Western/Northern Europe, an idea that sometimes meets resistance here.
I'm actually shocked by the comments in this diary that are stated similarly to yours.
Maybe there is a cultural difference here? *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I'm actually shocked by the comments in this diary that are stated similarly to yours. Maybe there is a cultural difference here?
Maybe there is a cultural difference here?
you are the media you consume.
We're certainly disagreeing on intellectual matters. In terms of how people actually live, I don't see a big difference.
In the US, how many children without access to healthcare (via insurance) does the average American tolerate?
Compare and contrast to the rest of the industrialized world.
Keep in mind that the answer to this is more or less one, statistically-speaking, of life and death. If that isn't a difference in how we live, I'm not sure what is.
We could run down all the other items on the list which detail, in anecdotal terms, what the differential in gini coefficients between the US and most of the rest of the industrialized world expresses in statistical terms.
But I guess if you mean do middle class people in both parts of the world eat the same sorts of food, watch the same television programs, enjoy similar fashions, have similar aesthetic sensibilities and dring the same colors of wine, I suppose you're right - there are more similarities than differences.
Let's lay it on the line, without wanting to provoke unnecessary rancor: the European social model is superior, it is above all more moral, than the social darwinism which obtains in America (and is, alas, quite bipartisan). And indeed, the "intellectual" disagreement of which this is symptomatic is very much an existential disagreement. It isn't simply a figment of Starbucks discussionary imagination. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
