Is America the greatest country

[Silver]

So i know this is from a television series, but this is circling the web under the title "The greatest 3 minutes in television history".  Take some time and watch it and I'd be curious to hear people's opinions about what Jeff Daniels characters says about America.

The Newsroom was a great show, but unfortunately they prematurely canceled it during the third season.

I remember this clip being the very reason I added the show to my list to watch because I agreed completely with his sentiments that America is clearly not the greatest country in the world.

[Tiberius]

The internet bit the  US department of defenses created what would the internet technically. I say technically because ARPA Net.

But the protocols that made it work efficiently were brit Tim Berners Lee's.

Not true. The US invented the Internet and the protocols which make it work. Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, which sits atop the Internet, and is the most widely used part of it, but he didn't have anything to do with inventing the Internet or Internet Protocols at all.

If the Internet was a road system, the US built it and painted all the lines on it to make it easy to drive on. What Berners Lee did was invent a really popular car that people can use on the road system.

[Minimalist]

Daniel's character has a little too rosy a view of the past.  Our history  reminds me of Napoleon's observation that "history is a lie agreed upon."

He nailed the present pretty well.

[Joods]

England is obviously the best country in the world. We banned slavery decades before the US our government is not so mired in every way. Our health service is free at point of use. Brits invented computers, Television and the internet while the US's best claim is that they invented the light bulb...a number of years after a scot did it.

Maybe so, but my daddy was a REAL rocket scientist. His title was Aerospace Engineer and he helped put Apollo on the moon. 

Dec 23 will be 20 years since he passed away. I'm proud to call him my dad because he did something great.

[Longhorn]

It's good to love the place you come from, but uncritical appraisal of a flawed government is dangerous.

And I wish we could overcome this tribal mentality of us and them. We're all people and we're all citizens of the same planet. Divisions over land seem petty to me.

[Napoléon]

HELL FUCK YEAH IT IS.

TRUMP 2016!!!

AMERICA! AMERICA! AMERICA!!!

[I_am_not_mafia]

The US are still a strangely intruguing country  to us crammed together Europeans, maybe because of its promise of possibility and free space, and a certain hard to grasp air of glamour, myth and national spirit. However, its infrastructure is terrible, the legal and prison system is a joke, gun violence is rampant, worker's rights are in a sorry state, and soo many people live in such bad conditions, e.g. concerning health and social protection. Still, having lived there, I get its charm.

I was always intrigued where Germans go when they get fed up of their country because from my British point of view, Germany probably has the highest standard of living anywhere. Better than the Scandinavian countries because of their climate. I was told that disgruntled Germans emigrate to Switzerland, which made sense. Oddly enough my dad moved to England for the freedom.

As far as I can see the only really bad thing about living in Germany is the bureaucracy. Sure there are other things I don't like, e.g. the lack of freedom (reinforced by bureaucracy), the sexism (reinforced by the bureaucratic tax system), the lack of customer service (bureaucracy with a smile) and the high tax (the most bureaucratic tax system in the world). But generally it's the ideal that most countries should aim for.

I sometimes think that bureaucracy in Germany is the equivalent to killing a Mammoth. It's how you come of age in Germany and show that you are now a fully grown human. I fully expect that in a few hundred years time 18 year olds will be presented with a complicated tax form on their birthday while their family members look on nervously. If they fail to fill it in properly then they are banished and must wander on the outskirts of society with the other untermensch. If they fill in every field correctly then they are given a certificate.

Some people think that you can judge a country by how they treat their poorest. By that standard, America isn't even a first world country. But ultimately it comes down to what you value, which is influenced by the culture that you grew up in.

[abaris]

I was always intrigued where Germans go when they get fed up of their country because from my British point of view, Germany probably has the highest standard of living anywhere. Better than the Scandinavian countries because of their climate. I was told that disgruntled Germans emigrate to Switzerland, which made sense. Oddly enough my dad moved to England for the freedom.

Switzerland? You have to be able to afford living there first. And, give, that if I'm not mistaken, 50 percent or the Germans don't pay income taxes (income too low), they certainly couldn't afford it.

[I_am_not_mafia]

I was always intrigued where Germans go when they get fed up of their country because from my British point of view, Germany probably has the highest standard of living anywhere. Better than the Scandinavian countries because of their climate. I was told that disgruntled Germans emigrate to Switzerland, which made sense. Oddly enough my dad moved to England for the freedom.

Switzerland? You have to be able to afford living there first. And, give, that if I'm not mistaken, 50 percent or the Germans don't pay income taxes (income too low), they certainly couldn't afford it.

Well that certainly explains why 50% of your wages go in income tax when they are above the threshold. I had trouble making enough money to live on in Germany because my husband couldn't find any work because he didn't have the language, couldn't even volunteer because of bureaucracy and Munich is an expensive place to live.

[Alex K]

Fucking Munich is the last place to live if you are strapped for cash literally. It really has the highest cost of living in Germany