> Yeah the American system absurd.
The hilarious thing is that if we remove the context from this statement it applies so broadly that you could mean just about of our systems.
Having absurd systems is pretty much our defining characteristic.
The hilarious thing is that if we remove the context from this statement it applies so broadly that you could mean just about of our systems.
Having absurd systems is pretty much our defining characteristic.
Of course, it's good to celebrate specific absurdities being overturned, as is (slowly) being done in this instance.
We're just not aware of foreign dirty laundry, and as a tourist you'll not notice.
It's like when people say: Europe is so much better at xyz. When what they mean is: Finland is amazing, you know, tiny little 5m person Finland, with very little diversity and a strongly exclusionary (just try immigrating into it as a low-skill poor person) homogeneous culture, it's amazing. The same goes for much of affluent Europe: it's hyper exclusionary, elitist, and often extraordinarily racist against outsiders.
Meanwhile the US is the world's largest economy, has welcomed tens of millions of poor people from the third world over the past 40 years (and that door is still very much open), has the third largest population and is hyper diverse compared to nearly all peers in Europe. Even Canada is drastically less diverse than the US. It's far easier to manage a nation that consists of an overwhelmingly dominant single culture, there are far fewer competing interests or complexities.
A country as large and complex as the US, with that much diversity, and that many layers of government to manage it all (federal, state, local; the US state government system is gigantic in its own right), is going to be a very messy machine. There's no scenario where that isn't going to be the case, no matter where it exists.
The only reasonable comparison regardless, due to the scale, is the US to Europe broadly. The US does just fine on that comparison. Shall we talk about how nice Western Russia is? How about the last 20-30 years of Greek and Italian history? Or is the premise to only refer to the good outcomes of Europe?
What I'm saying here is: Until you've lived in a country, you probably don't know the absurdities of their own system.
-- Winston Churchill (probably not[1])
1 - more likely a generic version of this was posited by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in the 1960s and mis-attributed to Churchill sometime in the 1980s