America 101: How would you answer these kinds of questions?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Actually, nowadays all the GOOD guys are played by foreign actors, too! Batman was a Welshman! Thor and Wolverine are Australian.

Seriously, you look at all the high profile Hollywood movies, and you’re liable to find foreigners playing all the leading roles, even when the characters are supposed to be American. In recent years, we’ve had an Irishman (Daniel Day-Lewis) playing Abraham Lincoln, a Welshman (Anthony Hopkins) playing Richard Nixon, an Aussie (Cate Blanchett) playing Katharine Hepburn, a South African playing Aileen Wuornos.

That said, there ARE some serious British stage actors who figure they can play the villain in some American action movie and make enough money to go back to the West End for a few years and do the low-paying work that actually interests them.

42

Thor had a very international cast. In the major roles, you had an Australian, an Israeli, three Britons, a Swede, an Irishman, four Americans, a Canadian, and a Japanese.

43

This is a good post for helping the OP understand the problems we have here.

44

West Virginia has higher homicide rates than much of Western Europe. A well armed society is a society with paranoid cops. US cops killed over 404 people in 2011, compared to two in Britain (zero in 2013) and 6 in Germany and Australia. Zero in France IIRC.

Now let’s break out the homicide numbers for about 2011.

West Virginia: 3.3
US as a whole: 4.7
That’s not too different, in my view. Let’s look at other upper income countries:

Australia 1.1
Britain 1.0
Italy 0.9. Yeah, even with the mafia.
Greece 1.7, Yes: even with their economy in terrible condition
Sweden 0.7
Norway 2.2. Huh. That’s pretty high, but not by US standards.
Ireland 1.2
France 1.0
Germany 0.8
Japan 0.3

Iraq has a murder rate of 8.0, 142% higher than West Virginia’s. West Virginia’s murder rate in turn is 230% higher that Britain’s. I wouldn’t call West Virginia a safe place to live: its murder rate is closer to war-torn Iraq percentage-wise than it is to Britain. (You can look at the differential and get different results: the bottom line though is that West Virginia has an elevated murder rate by 1st world standards.)

45

Ok, I messed up the US numbers. Let me try again:



                         Murder 2013                Murder 2011
United states            4.6??                          4.7
West Virginia            3.3                            4.7

Vermont                  1.6                            1.8

4.6 figure from here: FBI — Table 16

I took the lower 2013 figure from West Virginia and said it was 2011. In fact West Virginia’s murder rate in 2011 was the same as that of the entire US. So I understated the violence in West Virginia. Vermont though has murder rates in striking distance to that of an ordinary first world country, though still higher than Britain, France, Germany or Italy.

46

I expect you’re looking at Breiviks stats. The normal rate is about 0,7 - 0,8.

I did once calculate that if Norway had the murder rate of Texas, the increased murder rate would be equivalent to one Breivik every 5 months.

47

These kinds of comments come up a lot when I’m talking to my European friends and colleagues; usually I answer that most of these problems come from red state America and that the nation has grown apart to the point where we no longer share the same culture. ETA that I also agree with their sentiments and concerns.

48

There may be some truth in that, but I don’t think it’s helpful to divide the world, or the country, into an “Us” vs. “Them” and smugly assume that “Us” are enlightened and right-thinking and “Them” are all stupid primitive yahoos.

49

The US has a population level of 310 million, unevenly spread among 50 Federalized States, each with it’s own challenges & concerns, and to some extent, slightly different cultures.

Maybe comparing the US to Norway (a politically stable and economically well off country of 5 million) is not really useful, IMO.

Europe, from the Urals to Portugal, has a population of 700 million. So the US has the about half of the population of Europe as a whole. Just looking at Europe as a whole, I think you will find a wide spectrum of economic stability/unstability, approaches to governmental activities & responsibilities, crime rates, cultures, etc. etc. blah blah, then just cherry picking one much smaller (and better performing) subsection of that continent.

50

It was still worth a giggle, though, when we watched Air Force One the other night, and on seeing Gary Oldman’s screen credit, Mr Boods (who is British) said, ‘I think I know who the bad guy is in this one…’ (We followed up with that other '90s Die Hard rip off, Passender 57, and yup, British dude as bad guy. :slight_smile: )

51

Well that’s an interesting opinion. I trust you can name an upper income European country with a substantially higher murder rate than the US. Here, I’ll get you started:

Upper income countries:

Murder rates by country:

In the list above, I reported some of the largest countries in Europe -Britain, Germany, France and Italy- as well as those with depression levels of unemployment (Greece). All had murder rates a fraction of that of the US.

You are correct though that third world countries and tinpot dictatorships often have higher murder rates than the US. Middle income countries and those with weak rule of law also have higher murder rates. When the cops are corrupt or incompetent, plenty of bozos will take the law into their own hands.

52

My response is “Why should we do what another nation wants, instead of what *we *want?”

53

I guess my question would be if there are actually Norwegians stupid enough to ask such absurdly simplistic questions about issues that obviously do not have simple answers, or if, in fact, the questioners really have no interest in asking the question at all, but are merely saying “you suck compared to Norway.”

54

It would be nice to be sweet little Norway all tucked up nicely out of the way with tons of oil to pay for universal healthcare and few people to spend it on.

55

Any discussion of murder rates in the USA should mention that they vary greatly. My humble home state of North Dakota has a murder rate of 2.2 per hundred thousand people per year, so it wouldn’t be too out of place in Europe. Other states are even lower. In fact most places in the USA have murder rates comparable to Europe. There are a few small islands with murder rates more like a third world country.

56

No, my point was that the US is NOT a monolithic entity with the same murder rates, income rates, and uniform laws dealing with abortion, SSM, business and environmental regulations, culture, approach to governing, and the challenges all those diverse constituent populations feel are important to them.

It’s like assuming that the entire US (culture, laws, business, crime, economy, education, health care, etc.) should all be considered to be no different than what is found in Wisconsin (based on pop size compared to Norway).

57

(1) Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
(2) Why can’t you understand science?
(3) How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?

Two reasons. One, the U.S. is much more religious than most European countries. Compare the U.S. not with secular Europe, but with fundamentalist Iran. (Fundamentalists don’t constitute a U.S. majority, but they occupy a key electoral niche.)

But two, ignorance and bigotry will often enhance corporate profits, or enable electoral success. Because money plays such a strong role in American elections, bigotry and misconception become the norm when they are advantageous for the big Dog-eat-dog players.

(4) How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
(6) How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?

Here, I’ll take a more sanguine, nearly right-wing position. The U.S. has often played a role as world policeman/imperialist. Some of its interventions are altruistic or nearly benign. There is a natural exemption for cops (as shown in numerous threads here) and I supported exemption of the Big Cop from World Court prosecution. I will stipulate that this postulates a level of integrity which some or many U.S. administrations do not deserve.

As for the lonely ordinary planet blower-upper, what alternative do you suggest? Do you argue against round-the-clock major MAD strike capability, nearly worshipped by U.S. leaders? :eek:

(5) How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
(7) Why do you Americans like guns so much? Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

I wonder this myself. Many Americans, if you read between the lines, blame our “ethnic diversity” for the high crime rate and need for guns. Others focus on “their right” to a gun – The Second God-given right, with the peculiarity that any actual purpose is often considered secondary or even irrelevant. Some say gun-holding would reduce school massacres, but one holder said he’d not risk being a dead hero. One Doper fears to travel abroad, if he’s not allowed to carry. The strong support for liberal manslaughter acquittals in Texas and Florida astounds me. (Are there any stats on SYG and Texas-legal shootings’ broken down by race?)

58

I’ll address some of the more relevant questions since I find the entire morality play of “enlightened Europeans” vs. “Neanderthal Americans” quite tiresome, even as an American liberal who generally finds Europe superior in most areas of socioeconomic policy.

If the question is generally applied to health care access in general, it is quite relevant, but obviously here its an euphemism for abortion. Perhaps the questioner should ask the French or the Germans or even the Norwegians themselves who both generally restrict abortions to the first trimaster, whereas in the United States a 20-week abortion ban is seen by many as a return to millions of women dying from coat-hanger abortions.

Obsessive GMO-paranoia reflected in mandatory GMO labelling and in the case of Germany shutting down nuclear power after Fukushima isn’t exactly reflective of understanding science either.

I doubt Britain and France has their entire House of Commons and National Assembly respectively deciding when and where to use nuclear weapons.

The abnormally higher American murder rate is probably driven by more factors besides just the lack of gun control such as the existence of large minority populations that have been culturally alienated due to a long past of oppression and discrimination.

59

Ok, fair enough and thanks for the amplification.

Personally though, I perceive the US as pretty homogenous. In practice it has a single language and I can travel anywhere here without too much culture shock. But hike 300 miles from Amsterdam and you can be speaking 3 or more different languages. I suspect the truth lies somewhere between our two perceptions.

Also, Norway is only 86% Norwegian. I wouldn’t characterize it or any other large Western European country as homogenous.

That’s twice the rate of Britain, France, Italy and Germany. It’s approximately the rate of Norway when they have a once in a lifetime massacre. It’s seven times that of Japan: imagine how they feel!

Hat tip to Qin: he’s one of the few center lefties who has a working sense of modern American conservatism. A real resource.

60

Norwegian universal healthcare counsumes about 9 % of GDP. US healthcare consumes 18 % and fails to be universal. You might as well say the US could afford the same sweet stuff for its citizens as Norway if it had an economically performing healthcare system.

Norwegian healthcare is not paid for from oil anyway, since all the oil is saved in a fund. Has been for decades. The country is run off the non-oil economy, much like Sweden and Finland which are organized in a similar manner, and offers similar benefits without oil.