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Comment by zipwitch | Hacker News Reader

As an American from birth, and speaking for myself, it's not hating my country. It's frustration and sometimes anger at our failure to do better. I believe that doing better than we are is within our grasp, but we, as a nation, so often seem to turn away from positive change in favor of a comfortable and easy (for many Americans) status quo that is ultimately inadequate and often blindly hypocritical.

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Even from just examining the present, it's hard to find much to like about how the US is handling a pandemic.

We have fewer Covid deaths per capita than four of the five biggest countries in the EU. Do you think people in France or Spain are “ashamed” of their country’s handling of the outbreak?

That is incorrect (Belgium is not one of the biggest EU countries nor is Sweden). But even if it were true, wouldn't you want to aspire to something greater than being 7th going on 6th in the world out of 200 countries in terms of deaths per capita?

This thread seems to have too many examples of effusivelt lauding the US for being marginally better than whichever repulsive place that is worst in the world at a particular metric - rather than trying to be the shining "city upon a hill" and taking up best practices.

We are ahead of France, Italy, Spain, and the UK. These are not “repulsive places” that are the worst in the world on a metric—they’re some of the richest and most developed countries in the world, and account for half the population of the EU.

Well for now. With cases rising like crazy in the US, it fair to assume deaths will follow.

It always puzzles me that this kind of argument goes "we are the best" -> "here are numbers that show you are not" -> "but we are not the worst, look over there". Kind of like discussing sports teams. Same fanboyism.

France just replaced the government, the prime minister that is, after the local elections. The former prime minister is being investigated over his treatment of the Covid-19 pandemic.

No other nation in the world had a clown trying to turn facemasks into a political issue to argue about.

Oh sorry, one other nation did, and it's argued that that clown was installed the same way our clown was by the same foxy Australian media mogul.

No other nation had a total jackass absolutely hamper every single effort to contain the virus.

No other nation had such a moronic leader who literally stalled for 6 weeks in his initial response to this.

Spare me the nonsense, please don't LIE to my face. We all saw it.

It's generally left up to the states to deal with it as they see fit. I don't see anything particularly wrong with that. Some governors have stepped up, some haven't.

The epidemiological term for those that haven't is reservoir.

Budget constraints.

I know people like to fantasize that the national debt will be paid down eventually, but we are just sitting waiting for widespread budget crises and the municipal and state levels. The federal government can solve the problem with the stroke of a pen.

Particularly the (lack of a concerted) federal government response to the COVID pandemic.

Selective support of states rights when it's Pandemic Time counts as "kicking the can down the road" to the poster below me.

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