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Does anyone really trust Russia? Or China? Or N. Korea? Or most of Africa? Or any country where the government is sufficiently closed and non-democratic?

Look at how slanted, jaded, corrupt and inept the US gov't has become and we have much more visibility into those dealings. Not to mention a refresh of power every so often and bloodless changeovers of power. I can't imagine living in a place where you actively fear your government...

One thing I always say to myself when I start to really rail on the US/AU/UK/Can etc is that they are still orders of magnitude better places to live than Russia, China or other places of the sort.

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Just because the US/AU/UK/Can are better places to live than Russia, China, N. Korea, or most of Africa doesn't mean we should allow the stuff Western governments are pulling to slide. I don't know if the countries that are orders of magnitude worse than the Western governments were always that way, but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. It was likely a slow path that led them to decline to the point they have today. I don't want to see my government go down the same path.

Exactly, if we continue to allow our governments to pull this stuff, soon enough we WILL be in the same boat.

you should also be worried by this iphone tracking issue too, i think. such things should be banned immediately, because this is one of the first steps towards the real orwellish regime. it seems like bullshit first, then you'd say 'it's okay to use this tracking in court against rapists, maniacs', then communists, then leftist democrats, or rightist republicans, labour union members.. then say goodbye to all washing machines and four cars per family :)

> but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively.

In the case of Russia, you would be very, very wrong. You'd have to go back to the Kievan empire of the 13th century to find the last time the place wasn't an ethical quagmire.

I take your point about holding Western governments to a higher standard -- we definitely should -- but don't assume all cultures had a similar starting point. Your average Canadian has never had to deal with the cultural memory of anything quite so devastating as the Mongol invasion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Rus%27).

"Cultural memory" - is an invasion from around 800 years ago really that devastating on a daily basis to the people of today?

I'd also beg to differ on your point that Canadians have no ancestry of invasion - Canadians descend primarily from France and the UK (with a little German as well), and it would be a tad outrageous to pretend these nations haven't endured bloody and violent invasions throughout history.

It's not whether it's devastating to people today. It's about the fairy tales your kids get told when they're growing up.

And grandparent's point wasn't that Canadian's don't have a cultural heritage of invasions and battles, but rather that the Mongol invasion was somewhat different from most of the things going on in Western Europe (e.g. almost all major cities were sacked; casualties were at levels not to be seen in Western Europe until World War 2) and had widespread and long-ranging effects on society that made it qualitatively different from Western Europe. Second paragraph of the "Influence of the Mongol invasion on Rus' society" section of the cited Wikipedia article is relevant here.

We have Pakistani cab drivers in New York City shuttling Jews around. Don't you have similar situations in Toronto? That should be evidence enough that we cannot make claim to the cultural heritage of our ancestor's nations. People come to the United States and Canada partly to get away from their culture's biases and heritage.

The US is an outlier, though, New York even more so. More than any city in the US, NYC can claim to be the epicenter and cradle of the kind of mythical nation-history-building to which every nation-culture's opportunistic immigration and subsequent assimilation has contributed to and adopted as their own.

The very notion of the American dream is codified on New York's main landmark: "give me your poor huddled masses" etc. The story of America is necessarily the story of many populations coming together to create something new. The Irish may have the old country to look back on, for example, but their original cultural heritage has been superseded by that of America itself.

Russia has no such story; along with its disparate satellites (Ukraine, Belarus and so on) it has a long history of single peoples mostly staying still, or emigrating. The idea of a "Russian people" with a common cultural heritage has been a fairly constant concept for hundreds of years, whereas "the American people" is a very new one, historically.

> is an invasion from around 800 years ago really that devastating on a daily basis to the people of today?

It's not something I'd dismiss out of hand. For example, England was invaded by the Normans over 900 years ago, and the results of that invasion still affect everyone's everyday life today. Or consider that some cultural entities can be very long-lasting, such as religions, languages and writing systems.

Yes, it's true that invasions from long ago can have long-lasting cultural effects, but there's no way this effect could conceivably characterized as "devastating" on a daily basis.

I guess Canadian First Nations have a similar cultural memory of invading Europeans ;)

Not to mention the period from the 30s to the 50s where people were arrested to meet the quotas to fill the camps of the Gulag - unlike Nazi Germany anybody could be arrested - right up to the wife of Kalinin, who was the nominal head of state.

> unlike Nazi Germany anybody could be arrested

You are saying that like that's a bad thing.

What I meant was that the cultural impact of the policies of mass arrest, torture, murder and imprisonment probably had a much deeper social impact in the Soviet Union (and the areas they conquered) than in Nazi Germany (and their conquered areas) as the Nazis targeted specific racial and political groups and if you didn't belong to these groups then your chances of being arrested were pretty small. However, in the Soviet Union the arrests were being made primarily to feed the requirements for slave workers in the camps - not just for political/racial reasons so anyone could be arrested - often for trivial things (e.g. having a foreign stamp in his collection got one poor soul 10 years in the camps).

That is not correct. Even "Aryans" were tortured/arrested/harassed by government officials for anti-Nazi behavior (criticizing Hitler or the Nazi party [even indirectly], having relationships with POWs, suspicious political behavior, etc.).

If you're ever in Berlin make a point of visiting the following museum/exhibition: http://www.topographie.de/en/topography-of-terror/exhibition...

edit: fixed some typos. Additionally, a poignant example: many laws/acts in Nazi Germany were passed by Ja/Nein referendums. Of course, if you voted unfavorably in those referendums you were harassed and publicly humiliated (i.e. marched through town with signs labeling you as the enemy of the people)

> arrested - often for trivial things (e.g. having a foreign stamp in his collection got one poor soul 10 years in the camps).

i am terribly sorry, where do people take these stunning facts? like 'often for trivial things', 'mass torture' etc.

there are a lot of documents revealed, online too. is there some real case where it is said 'sentenced to imprisonment for having a foreign stamp'? i want to see a link

http://www.amazon.com/Gulag-History-Anne-Applebaum/dp/140003...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gulag_Archipelago

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stalin-Court-Simon-Sebag-Montefiore/...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whisperers-Private-Life-Stalins-Russ...

really good answer, thanks.

aren't such prejudices a type of racism? at least this is a supremacy/inferiority theory which is not very en vogue these days, isn't it?

I'm not here to defend Russia. But how is it fundamentally "worse" than any of say 100 other countries? Looking at most countries from the outside, they all look okay. Not perfect, but not barbaric either. Once you start digging deeper, however, shit will hit the fan very hard in most parts of the world. You don't have to be in North Korea for that.

Basic example: Singapore looks like a great developed country. But it's ranked just near Russia in Press Freedom Index. The ruling party (and it's a parliamentary republic) is ruling there for 10 years longer than Gaddafi has been ruling in Libya. Oops.

It's just a question of scale. Small local problems go unnoticed by the world. If this particular story did not involve foreigners, you would have never heard about it.

Singapore is an interesting case.

They do not have a free press, and many other freedoms are lacking.

OTOH, they have a very, very strong anti-corruption standard. They consistently rate at the top of anti-corruption indexes: http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/...

(Reply to my original comment since I couldn't edit anymore)

I should point out that my comment is simply about perspective, not complacency. Of course we should strive to fix and hold gov't officials repsonsible, fix the mess that led to the GFC etc etc...I was more or less pointing out that if we are myopic in our views we cannot take stock and realize the good we do have it. It is hard sometimes for someone who was born in the US to realize how much we simply take for granted (ask any recent immigrant from war torn countries or very oppressive regimes about their experiences and what they can and cannot do etc etc).

One thing I always say to myself when I start to really rail on the US/AU/UK/Can etc is that they are still orders of magnitude better places to live than Russia, China or other places of the sort.

Or so the story goes, anyway, since we only hear one side.

I've been hearing a lot of the other side since I came to Vietnam. Maybe it's just a Southern thing but most of the people I've talked to here tell me privately that they wish they had a Western-style democratic government. I think they probably see Western government through rose-colored glasses but the fact remains that saying the wrong thing about the wrong people can land you in jail here.

> I think they probably see Western government through rose-colored glasses but the fact remains that saying the wrong thing about the wrong people can land you in jail here.

You mean like

http://www.lvrj.com/news/exclusive-police-beating-of-las-veg...

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/well-done-dearborn/

I agree that there are troubling abuses of police power in the U.S. but you can still say whatever you want about George Washington in public.

I've seen some pretty outrageous things said about Barack Obama, the current President, in public, and the people who have said those things are free to say them another day. Similarly, I heard a lot of people say very outrageous things about George W. Bush, the previous president, and those people are still free to urge other people to agree with them in decrying that president. I lived during my twenties for three years in an actual dictatorship (which has since democratized). The situation here in the United States, as bad as it has recently been, is nothing at all like the situation in Russia today, or indeed like Russia any time in my lifetime. I know plenty of Russian (and Chinese) immigrants who didn't learn to breathe easily about expressing opinions about the government until they had been here quite a while.

It may be worth pointing out that legal justice is really a post facto affair. The question is not whether bad things sometimes happen in the US, but how the legal system reacts to it after the fact.

In both the cases you've cited, the book is far from closed on the incidents. It's hardly even opened.

To establish anecdotal evidence of real injustice, you need to cite cases where the legal system failed to provide any sort of redress. Which with more effort you certainly could; I'm not claiming otherwise, nor am I claiming that you can't build a more comprehensive fact-based case against the US on some grounds. My point is simply that the implicit standard you are using by citing two things that haven't been through the system can't be used to score points for or against the system yet. The question is less "can you be put in jail" than "can you be kept in jail", and the corresponding second-order effects that has on society.

I am not entirely satisfied with the US; I am simultaneously not aware of any place that strikes me as obviously better, or even obviously on a better long-term trajectory. (Some places are better in some ways but end up being worse than others.)

Come on, Vietnam isn't measured the same way as Russia and China, which was the topic of conversation. That's the other side I was talking about, not US vs. non-US, or democracy vs. non(?)-democracy, or habeas corpus, or etc. Read the article, "the other side" is specifically referring to a country large enough to acquire a mythology of punishing existence as well as economic power that the US has to pay attention.

EDIT: singularize topic of article

To me Vietnam is largely "of a sort" with China. Certainly not as developed economically but politically not so dissimilar. Your brief comment didn't seem to me to be making finer distinctions.

> we have much more visibility into those dealings.

in Russia people have a lot of visibility into all the corruption and how the things are being done.

> Not to mention a refresh of power every so often and bloodless changeovers of power.

you should be confusing Russia with Iraq or some other country. in modern Russia there were only bloodless power changes.

> I can't imagine living in a place where you actively fear your government...

the people in the West have this advantage - not to fear their governments, everybody should admit. there are not very many stories about how some businessman or ordinary citizen was killed or imprisoned.

Agreed. I mean, what a story about how companies are stolen, criminals take over banks, and murderers dictate to judges. About how politicians pay lip service to cleaning up the system, or actively assist the criminals. It's a story whose twist and turns lead down a dark trail of corruption, violence.... and theft of billions from taxpayers via bank bailouts and currency devaluation and the eventual US/UK default upon billions of social obligation debt.

Oops sorry, was going to stay on track with the Russian story. Don't know what happened there. Wait, what? The russian politicians only stole $235 Million? Man, they are small potatoes. Our politicans print hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air every month, and we say 'sir, may we have some more'.

Not sure if you are American, but to make you feel better about your country, it is worth pointing out that unlike Russia in US the corruption is mostly happening at the top. In Russia (and whole ex-Soviet space pretty much), the corruption is spread through and through the society. It is like a metastasized cancer.

It starts with grade school where you have to bribe the teacher so they don't lower the grades of your child, you have to bribe your way out of a traffic ticket, you have to pay "extra" to not be ignored by nurses in a hospital, you have to pay public officials under the table to pretty much do anything. Then it goes to the top -- if you run a small business you often have to keep paying larger sums to avoid a mountains of artificially created red-tape, if you are unlucky you might have to also pay protection money to the local police/mafia. Then it gets worse as you go higher. Once you reach a certain level then you really have to start worrying about your life. Contract killings are just part of the business there.

As an American who has lived in an ex-Soviet state, I always cringe now when someone points out how Western governments are the same or somehow comparable. Getting pulled over by the police for no real reason at all except to get shaken down is a real eye opener. At least in the US you can go to a police officer for help and have a reasonable expectation of getting it.

One of the first questions my wife asked me when were were thinking of starting a business in the US was who we had to pay to make sure nothing bad happened.

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