What is it that less than 15% of Americans have only travelled abroad, ofcourse many are naive and chose not to experience other cultures and have a lack of awareness for the outside world. For the few that do travel, congratulations- you might be wiser than the remainder of your population.

Three hundred years ago the Americans made a choice. They had kicked out England-crowned financially-political burden of which outcomes accentuate everything America succeeded up to date. This society’s success is to a great extent based on individual’s own merits, not on the biologically-motivated caste belonging, “mateship” as still in the UK semi-colonies constituted.

Surely, lacking of real jobs population to do but as usual copying foreign someone with a little reference to a local reality while calculating simple math only, aggressively introduces IR / welfare changes to pave already sure way to Labor political contestants, awarding traditional supporters with tax deduction perks simultaneously.

It is interesting to hear Mr. West’s opinion regarding the USA in three-four years since these modern to Australia changes to be in place.

MichealK,

There is less social mobility in America than in England let alone Australia.

It is less about merit than money. There is an American election year coming up - it is a good chance to study this dynamic.

I am going to have to agree that Americans are woefully uninformed about the rest of the world. However I do not think that this says anything about individual Americans. We are actually incredibly caring and generous people when we are informed about issues, be they wars, genocides, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami's you name it.

I think that the person who wrote the original post should have watched our media for a while while they were here. He or she would have understood why Americans are so "ignorant" of the outside world. (Or even of their own issues for that matter.) Our media is laughable as a source for news about world events or even national events that might disturb the "powers that be." (whatever that means) To see the protests of George W. Bush's first inauguration, for instance, I had to rent a DvD. I never saw it on the news. I wasn't even aware that there were protests. Americans are not monsters. And it isnt that we just inherently don't care about other countries. After all, Americans probably have more ties to the world at large via immigration than the average country does. We have good reason to care about the lands our people came from, and most of us do, but we simply dont get news of those countries from our media on a regular basis unless that news serves some political end. (War on terror for instance.)

We never got to hear that France played a large role in stopping the genocide in Rwanda for instance, our politicians love to hate on France and so we can only hear nasty things about them on TV. America may be billed as the free-est democracy, but as Noam Chomsky points out, it may only be the illusion of freedom. Of the press or otherwise.

Bottom line, Americans are ignorant of world events. But clearly people in other countries are a bit ignorant of the American press, or they would pity us, not revile us.

http://illusionsaregrander.blogspot.com/