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Comment by kubb | Hacker News Reader

I can respect that breaking the law is American, and by all means, go for it.

In general life in Europe is pretty good and could be better, thanks for asking. We can invest, we watch different sports than you do and we don't have a comparable military. The stock market is fine, the currency is fine.

I guess the social media campaign is addressed at those of you, who would like less crime, and who would like rule of law, and less aggression, and a safer lifesytle. To lie to them and tell them that having these things leads to downfall or something.

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i did say violently breaking the law is American.

and i did also say it was complicated and nuanced so please do not ignore that detail of my comment.

i’m glad to hear life is good, and to hear you’re humble enough to acknowledge it could be better. it could be better over here, too. are we doing it right or are you? i have no idea. :)

we’re probably both doing things right and wrong. should it even be solved? are we just living a Memento (great movie) like existence where we’re keeping ourselves busy and at war because if we all got along we would over-populate the planet and destroy earth?

what if our ignorant violent human behavior is actually an environmental mitigation technique?

I don’t think this needs to be solved. We should both strive for what each of us want to have.

Obviously in Europe there will be more variety because there’s more cultures and independent countries.

We have the advantage that we can take good ideas from each other, because people can travel easily and observe that certain things work well.

The US doesn’t have this benefit, since it’s so inward oriented. That’s fine, but don’t go saying Europeans don’t have freedom if you can only look at Europe through the domestic lens.

> We have the advantage that we can take good ideas from each other, because people can travel easily and observe that certain things work well.

True, but, interestingly, we can travel thousands of miles within the United States and in so doing observe that different US states have wildly different outcomes while living under the same federal government and very similar state governments.

Louisiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Minnesota live under the same Constitution, the same federal government, and with very similar state governments -- and yet we see that they have very different outcomes on a variety of measures.

Norway and Louisiana have very different crime rates, but so do New Hampshire and Louisiana. This tells us, at a minimum, that the form of government isn't likely to be the primary factor.

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