A few people alive today have forgotten that, but most people alive today have never known it.
edit: HN, I just typed a long response to a comment below but can't post it becuase I'm "submitting too fast." Cut the crap and tell me about that before I write a long comment.
I'll grant you that culturally and regulatory wise, there are advantages to certain regions in the US. Some of those features are shared in parts of Canada, UK, Australia and other Commonwealth culture countries, where a view of entrepreneurship, risk, and ambition seems to differ with that of say, some continental Europe cultures. But I'd also include China, a politically unfree country in that last, in the sense that, despite "Communism", the country has many regions of wild west of wide eye entrepreneurs and greed.
Like Obama said, you may believe in American Exceptionalism like the British believe in British Exceptionalism, or the French believe in Francophone Exceptionalism, but it's not unique. Canada's not really less free than the US for example. And unprecedented human happiness? Really, with the events of Baltimore (my hometown) going on, you can say this with a straight face?
We live in an amazing amazing time that entrepreneurs can now do what only nation states did in the past. But our current situation is a precarious thing, and rather than be rah-rah about freedom and human happiness, we need to be worried about the environment and a breakdown in our social structure that might be fueled by such amazing abilities.
Automation, software, robotics, et al, are starting to devalue labor, but we have not evolved politically or socially to deal with perhaps, the decline of work itself, as a focus of human self worth or well being.
Those rioters are thugs trashing their own neighborhood for a laugh. SJWs will pretend it is about poverty but blacks who live there understand exactly what is happening and were even trying to protect the police who are majority black.
But I also lived in a mixed race neighborhood and watched how my friends and playmates became "drugged out zombies", most of whom are now either in jail or dead. My own sister is dead from a lifelong addiction to heroin. I made it out.
It's not "social justice warrior" to try and understand how people become trapped in poverty and succumb to gangs and drugs. My siblings were raised by the same parents, but some of them got involved with the wrong crowd, and some didn't. I watched both working class black and white families encounter the same disintegrations.
The right wing or libertarian narrative seeks not to find solutions, but to scold. It wants to say that people "get what they deserve" and so all of the poverty and misery must be justified somehow. If you're poor, if your kids are criminals, well, you have no one but yourself to blame, or them.
Did you ever consider what causes people to become addicts in the first place? Or to join Gangs, or for many black families to be fatherless? Do you have any idea how hopeless it is to get a career off the ground if you've got an arrest record? Especially if you've got a felony where a white offender got a plea down to a misdemeanor?
Baltimore wasn't always full of drugged out zombies. When I was 10 years old at the beginning of 80s, I used to walk halfway across town to the Inner Harbor by myself without fear. There was a sea change that happened, and it wasn't become the people who lived there suddenly became assholes, deadbeats, criminals, and bad parents. That all happened over many years from external factors.
We need to understand how these external factors undermine our social capital and learn how to reverse it, otherwise you'll be living in a walled fortress in the future trying to avoid Zombies.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/swiss-reign-sup...
This ignores the history of capitalism, which is more important than the factors you mention. And capitalism was a philosophical and legal development.
> But I'm afraid the 'unprecedented human happiness' you cite is only readily available to an elite few.
That's just not true. The American sense of life is a happy one, unlike the British or continental European sense of nausea, dread, anti-semitism, nationalism, requiring one's brother to be one's keeper, and so on. Unfortunately I think the American sense of life is mostly gone in the east coast cities.
What utter nonsense.
Oh, here's another one: Tall poppy syndrome. That unspeakable evil is not present in the U.S. I was horrified to hear about it.
I'm not religious, but given that the context of that quote, being your brother's keeper is not that bad a plan. Better than murdering them.
To be simultaneously jingoistic about the USA while wagging a finger at Europeans for nationalism and bigotry reminds me of another bible quote. First cast out the beam out of thine own eye.
There are a number of good places to live in the world, and the United States is one of them.
Tell me a place in the world where I can live without being treated, in principle, like a sacrificial animal, and I'll tell you it's good to live there.
My hopes were in Ron Paul, but this great American will never be let make the much-needed changes to truly justify the "democracy" label!
What you're seeing are actions by the police that would have previously gone unreported, or otherwise not been widely exposed to a large population via eg social media.
Obviously the NSA reference is spot on. As would have been a point about incarceration and SWAT deployments.
It's also worth noting that the war on drugs is finally beginning to end. That is an improvement, and will lead to less police brutality almost by default as pot is fully legalized across the US, and other drugs start to be de-criminalized in favor of treatment.
Corporations are far more regulated and controlled today than they were as recently as the 1960s or 1970s. The EPA didn't even exist until 1970. If you think corporate interests are running rampant today, you really would have hated the first 150 years of US corporate history.
And of course the US has been militarily aggressive since WW2, with Korea and Vietnam being larger military actions than Afghanistan and Iraq. Not much has actually changed there in 70 years.
Use the back button to get back to the page you posted it from. The text is still there in the text window. Copy it.
That is, the text is probably there. HN seems to be better at preserving it than many other sites, but I don't guarantee that this will work.
I don't want to go back, leave the tab open, and have to remember to try again in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, and so on.
Today, I actually did the dishes and the laundry, and still could not post the long post I was referring to, so I just closed the tab (gave up). At that point, you either close the tab, or you put it on your todo list, and I am not going to clutter up my todo list with stuff like that.