Name a nation greater than the US and why

[ToddNotTodd]

I don't believe the is possible. Thanks for trying.

So with no clear definition, any country can be the greatest.

I don’t see the point of the thread.

 

[Anthony2019]

Denmark, I've heard is the happiest country on earth. I popped over there a couple of years ago and spent a week in wonderful Copenhagen. The weather was crap, but I had great fun on the rollercoaster in their amusement park.

 

[JacobKStarkey]

UK, NZ, Norway, and Denmark are as good if not better.

 

[SoldierOfTheKing]

Those same Nazis started out as ‘people who other people disagreed with’ before they evolved into a national party of psychopathic killers who set the world on fire. I can’t help but wonder what your grandfathers (or mine) would have to say to people who try and excuse the latest fascist incarnation as just a group of people exercising their freedom of speech. I think their response would be less than kind.

If your grandfathers and mine only knew, they would never have fought that war to begin with...

 

[Arcangl86]

Well, the Australia’s asylum policies—which see asylum-seekers languishing for years under inhumane conditions in offshore detention centers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. That is definitely not better.

No that is bad, but it's not like we can brag about how we treat refugees.

The unemployment rate is almost twice that of the US.

5% is not almost twice of 3.8%

Cost of living is 8% higher. Perth compared to Tulsa

Perth is 5 times the size of Tulsa. If you compare Perth to Houston which is a lot closer in population, Perth ends up being about 1% cheaper then Houston.

Personal income tax is higher

True, but they also have more in the way of social services, including Medicare.
[/quote]
Demography of Australia - Wikipedia

Not exactly a diverse culture, virtually zero African and Latinos at all
[/quote]
The US is a much more diverse country that's true, but it's also one that is still very racially divided, so I think that's a wash.

Australia does not have explicit freedom of speech in any constitutional or statutory declaration of rights,

True, Australia does not have a bill of rights, which would be nice. However, the High Court has recognized several implicit rights, including something roughly equivalent to our freedom of expression. I'm ok with that.

There are no gun rights

Not a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.

I think this just shows that this thread is sort of tenuous. No two people are going to agree on what makes a country great.

 

[JacobKStarkey]

If your grandfathers and mine only knew, they would never have fought that war to begin with...

Of course they would. They would be knocking out the far right as well as the far left.

 

[dzheremi]

Those same Nazis started out as ‘people who other people disagreed with’ before they evolved into a national party of psychopathic killers who set the world on fire. I can’t help but wonder what your grandfathers (or mine) would have to say to people who try and excuse the latest fascist incarnation as just a group of people exercising their freedom of speech. I think their response would be less than kind.

Gee, I don't know. Do you want to call my grandfather and ask him? He's 97. I'm sure he'd be more than happy to talk with you about how it actually was to fight the Axis in WII.

When he was 91, the local senior living magazine in his hometown interviewed him about his life and he said that he regrets being old now because he doubts that the military would let him fly his fighter plane anymore at this age, but if they would, he'd be happy to take on Al-Qaeda (so I think he knows modern incarnations of dangerous authoritarianism, though we haven't talked about Herr Trump, because at a certain point you just want to let the 90+ year old people live without being bothered). He also called Charles Lindbergh, who he had flown with back in the day, a prima donna and basically insinuated that he couldn't really fight.

I'm not sure that you'd get the kind of response that you assume you would, but my grandfather is not very political, and he doesn't falsely read a person's entire political profile out of one clause in a post on the internet so that he can have something to complain about like an idiot.

 

[RDKirk]

Denmark, I've heard is the happiest country on earth. I popped over there a couple of years ago and spent a week in wonderful Copenhagen. The weather was crap, but I had great fun on the rollercoaster in their amusement park.

Interestingly, they also have the lowest percentage of women among industrialized nations claiming to be feminists. It might be that they don't have to.

 

[dzheremi]

If your grandfathers and mine only knew, they would never have fought that war to begin with...

That's not true at all. I don't think some idiot college kid or whatever like in the last panel can really be compared to the organized and state-sponsored war machines of the Axis. I don't recall Tojo or Rommel or whoever ever having to resort to beating people up with bike locks or sucker-punching their opponents. The Axis powers represented a real threat that needed to be confronted militarily, as they were making alarming territorial gains across Europe and Asia. They were in no way comparable to a bunch of rioting idiots, be they rioting idiots in Portland or rioting idiots in Charlottesville.

If real, honest-to-God fascists or nazis ever end up taking over the United States, I don't think it's going to be because the 'wrong party' is in power (at least not in the sense that you often hear that talked about, where everything went to hell because party X did/n't get in, or we hate such and such candidate), but instead because we sat around calling each other fascists and nazis so often that the people in charge of the political landscape of the country were pushed into more and more extreme positions in response to the perceived demands of their constituents to do something about all the horrible and dangerous authoritarians in the other party.

After all, what's the first thing that Hitler and Co. did, psychologically, to the bulk of the Germans that laid the groundwork for the 'final solution'? He made dehumanizing Jews into the default approach that the society should take to its myriad of problems in the post-WWI context. Everything bad became somehow the fault of the Jews, and everything good would come with their elimination. If we're honest, we've probably heard something very similar come out of our friends' mouths or maybe even our own mouths (or maybe only in our brains) about "the other side", because they/we hate _____ so much. It doesn't bode well for the future of our society.

 

[SimplyMe]

This thread appears to be a strawman of sorts, since it appears the OP has trouble accepting that some people don't believe the US is the "Greatest Country." The problem is, and what makes it a strawman, is that most here believe the US is great, just that it is particularly arrogant, to claim were are greater than anyone else. The point is not to say that any other country is greater -- particularly when the OP won't define what "greatest" means in this context; the point is that there are a number of great countries, but that each has its own issues and "greatness."

In the spirit of the OP, a partial list of countries that are probably on a similar level of greatness to the United States: Germany, France, Switzerland, (and most of the rest of Northern Europe), Canada, Australia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, etc. I won't claim that any is greater than the US -- particularly without a clear definition of "greater." Again, each of these countries have there own things they are great at and their own issues that they want to fix -- just as the United States does. OTOH, it is likely to defend a position, for most of those countries, that they are greater than the US -- though again, it depends on the criteria being used to define greatness.

Now, if the OP wants, particular with his idea of the US being the "greatest" -- tell me how the US is greater than all of those other countries and defend that position, particularly with so many Americans in prison, our infrastructure problems, our stagnated and divisive politics. That would be how you would prove the US the "Greatest" -- not a thread asking others what countries are greater, particularly without any type of criteria about what makes a country great.

 

[Shiloh Raven]

I don’t see the point of the thread.

I think its purpose is to adamantly insist that America is the greatest nation on the face of the Earth, despite all the documented statistics, actual facts, and other evidence that clearly proves otherwise.

 

[Occams Barber]

Well, the Australia’s asylum policies—which see asylum-seekers languishing for years under inhumane conditions in offshore detention centers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. That is definitely not better.

The unemployment rate is almost twice that of the US.

Cost of living is 8% higher. Perth compared to Tulsa

Personal income tax is higher

Demography of Australia - Wikipedia

Not exactly a diverse culture, virtually zero African and Latinos at all

Australia does not have explicit freedom of speech in any constitutional or statutory declaration of rights,

There are no gun rights



But it does have a population 1/13th the size of the US.

I would never claim Australia is 'the greatest' although we usually rate fairly well on a variety of comparative scales.

I don't wish to get into a peeing competition with you about your selective data but this one deserves a response:

Not exactly a diverse culture, virtually zero African and Latinos at all

We may not have many Africans and Latinos but we're generally recognised as one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse countries in the world. African migration has increased in the last decade with migrants from Ethiopia and Somalia :

• 29% of Australians were born overseas
• 46% have one parent born overseas
• 20% speak a language other than English at home

Languages include:

• Mandarin
• Arabic
• Cantonese
• Vietnamese
• Plus a variety of European, SE Asian, Pacific and Indian languages.

OB​

 

[JacobKStarkey]

America has the great lobbyists in the world for private prison corporations and guard security unions in those prisons.

 

[ToddNotTodd]

I think its purpose is to adamantly insist that America is the greatest nation on the face of the Earth, despite all the documented statistics, actual facts, and other evidence that clearly proves otherwise.

USA! USA! USA!

 

[Shiloh Raven]

America has the great lobbyists in the world for private prison corporations and guard security unions in those prisons.

The United States has the highest prison and jail population (2,121,600 in adult facilities in 2016), and the highest incarceration rate in the world (655 per 100,000 population in 2016). According to the World Prison Population List (11th edition) there were around 10.35 million people in penal institutions worldwide in 2015. The US had 2,173,800 prisoners in adult facilities in 2015. That means the US held 21.0% of the world's prisoners in 2015, even though the US represented only around 4.4 percent of the world's population in 2015. Comparison of United States incarceration rate with other countries

 

[mama2one]

following

 

[MyOwnSockPuppet]

Great Britain. Used to be 'Great' but not any more!

Great Britain isn't strictly a country, it's a geomorphological term rather than a gropolitical one - it's the biggest island off of the Brittany peninsula in what is now France.

 

[Lost4words]

Great Britain isn't strictly a country, it's a geomorphological term rather than a gropolitical one - it's the biggest island off of the Brittany peninsula in what is now France.

 

[RDKirk]

Doesn't make a difference to a citizen of Heaven.

 

[essentialsaltes]

There are lots of metrics by which the US is not #1.

If you pick military power, then the US is #1. If you pick income equality, the US is not #1.

It depends what you mean by great (and what other people mean when they say great.)

For myself, there are plenty of countries where I think I could live happily, but I'm not going anywhere until Trump's third term.