[WikiEN-l] Re: Rules vs. Anarchy

Wed Jun 30 20:01:41 UTC 2004

On Tue, 29 Jun 2004 22:51:54 UTC, Timwi 
<timwi at 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.