So Let's Be Absolutely Clear For Once
I am surprised that non-US members of the forum haven't caught on with what really drives some of the US based members (most notably dc denizen and crawford), when Canadian or Australian or any other non-European members post anything related to the virtues of their local cities. Major Australian and Canadian cities such us Sydney, Melbourne, Toronto, Vancouver, etc are consistently featured at or near the top of international lists of major cities with the highest standards of livability, safety, diversity, etc, etc.
You see, American cities can never (nor will ever) make it. There are many reasons for that: they are too economically and racially segregated, too spread out and suburbanized, with little public transit to speak of (and usually used only by the poor). American cities have higher rates of crime, and are far more violent on a per capita basis. There are huge issues with homelessness. Los Angeles alone has about 60,000 (take a tour of LA's Skid Row, right in downtown, in the safety of streetview). In all certainty, no city in the world is perfect, but that kind of poverty and crime is really appalling considering the amount of wealth in the country (of course the number of the ultra wealthy, the 0.001% really skew the statistics. In many ways, American cities remind me of Latin American cities.
It all goes against the mythology of the US as the be-all and end-all shining city on the hill. Even as the world watches it crumbing (the mythology) on a daily basis in the nightly news.
So, of course these guys come out of the woodwork to undermine anyone posting anything highlighting the positives of their cities, using any argument they can grab on to from the internet: "Oh Vancouver growth must be spill over from US West coast tech industry and H1B visa restrictions", " Australia owes its quality of life to the Chinese and their money", "it's economic complexity is very low", etc. etc.
These guys are really in denial - they need to have the heads checked for once, because the average American reaps zero benefits from a system that allows the billionaires to pay almost zero taxes (as Warren Buffet famously pointed out), while you have no Universal Health Care, and permits the NRA to run show when you have mass shootings every-single-day of the year with a 3rd-World-level of corruption in Washington and so many other ills I have no time to write about.
Keep self-deluding yourselves guys; you ain't fooling me or anyone that has the eyes wide open with your BS arguments, half truths and smoke screens.
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There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov
Last edited by PFloyd; Dec 17, 2019 at 3:40 PM.
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