> Have you really opened your eyes to how some countries have much, much better governing systems? Many Scandinavian countries have a higher population than most US states, yet somehow they seem to function better in so many dimensions.
So if you're comparing a government the size of a US state to the US federal government, and saying the states do better, yeah, sure, but it's not a fair comparison. You can find US states that do better than the US as a whole, too. A much better comparison is the EU.
The US is the geographical size that is almost twice the Roman Empire (9 million km^2 for the US, 5 million km^2 for the Roman Empire), with widely varying climates and therefore economies, and a diverse set of cultures. To suggest that the solutions for a Scandinavian country (relatively homogeneous culture and climate, population roughly the size of a major US city) is unhelpful.
It's easy to say "these other people with a completely different history, geography, culture, and population" do it so much better, but it's just not helpful. Let me know hen you figure out how to apply Scandinavia or NZ to New York, the South, Utah, California, rural Iowa, and Alaska, and you can figure out a way to convince everyone it's in their best interests.
GP’s argument wasn’t that the Scandinavian model is better, they were instead forcefully rejecting the idea that everyone is as bad or worse than America. It is very common for liberals to point at Scandinavia as the ideal model, but that is not core at all to their argument.
Furthermore, while you might have a point about the geographic size of the US, as an individual it’s not clear why I should care. Living under corruption sucks, regardless of the root cause. The size of ones nation doesn’t really provide a lot of psychological protection against country specific negative experiences.
> You read the GP’s comment through the concept of a ‘core’ argument, which excludes some parts of what the GP said as simply examples. I think the parent reasonably doesn’t use that concept, and sees more than one argument being made.
This discussion would have gone much smoother if you'd just gone with this argument rather than jumping straight to gaslighting.
Please stay out of tit for tat spats no matter how badly someone else behaves. They're tedious, nasty, and not what this site is for. I know it's not easy, but it's important given the intention of the site.
I was responding to some plain old bulverism/gaslighting.
It’s toxic, and I’d prefer that we don’t ‘smoothly’ gloss over that.
If you hadn’t led with “I think you have missed the point, the GP’s argument wasn’t...”, it would have gone a lot smoother. The rest of what you said stood entirely without them.
Can you say what value those phrases added other than to just undermine the person you were responding to as a way of establishing your interpretation as ‘correct’?
I see I’ve been flagged for asking if you were gaslighting, but frankly the comment I was replying to fell foul of the site guidelines too.
Perhaps I should have just flagged it, but my sense is that it wasn’t enough to warrant that.
You can interpret the question about ‘gaslighting’ as some great insult, or you can take it as real observation about a toxic conversational gambit that it seems like you unintentionally engaged in.
Please stay out of tit for tat spats no matter how badly someone else behaves. They're tedious, nasty, and not what this site is for. I know it's not easy, but it's important given the intention of the site.
So if you're comparing a government the size of a US state to the US federal government, and saying the states do better, yeah, sure, but it's not a fair comparison. You can find US states that do better than the US as a whole, too. A much better comparison is the EU.
The US is the geographical size that is almost twice the Roman Empire (9 million km^2 for the US, 5 million km^2 for the Roman Empire), with widely varying climates and therefore economies, and a diverse set of cultures. To suggest that the solutions for a Scandinavian country (relatively homogeneous culture and climate, population roughly the size of a major US city) is unhelpful.
It's easy to say "these other people with a completely different history, geography, culture, and population" do it so much better, but it's just not helpful. Let me know hen you figure out how to apply Scandinavia or NZ to New York, the South, Utah, California, rural Iowa, and Alaska, and you can figure out a way to convince everyone it's in their best interests.