On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 22:51:54 UTC, Timwi
<timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
Jim Cecropia wrote:
I don't know. My experience seems to suggest
that Americans are fairy
ignorant of other nation's restrictive laws, giving rise to the belief
that other nations are uniformly at least as liberal or more liberal
than the U.S.
Oh, really? ... My impression was rather that Americans tend to think of
their own country as being the most liberal and most "humane" on the
planet. It would seem plausible, as most of the time they hear about
situations in other nations, it's in the news when some oppressive
regime (perhaps tinted with a condemning remark on communism) is
mentioned as having done something that would be unthinkable in the US.
Well, I wasn't trying to start a discussion of what Americans are really
like; quite the reverse. But I think both of these positions are largely
right, as was the one I expressed before. Here's the amazing, unheard-of
secret: not all Americans think alike all the time. That was the point of
my post.
Still, consider this: a person may believe that his country does something
better than most of the world does (to be concrete, let's take the matter
of having an independent judiciary that is largely in the hands of people
who understand the concept of due process of law and even approve of it),
and he may even be right; but when he comes face to face with the places
that really are worse, the reality may be shocking. Thus I reconcile the
two positions.