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Mr. S's avatar

Yep, I agree with all of this and have for at least a decade and a half. America is a shithole and has been made that way by the things at the top that look (more or less) like people.

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Gerald Lombardi's avatar

As someone who splits his time between New York and Tokyo and also spent years living in Brazil, I find myself agreeing with the main points of this piece, and at the same time thinking, "But so many other presumably advanced countries have their own massive flaws -- sometimes it seems like a coin-toss which place I can stand to live in". Japan, for example: yes it's clean and neat and polite and has a great healthcare system and fabulous public transportation etc etc etc.... But ask my wife, who is Japanese, a sociologist trained at the U. of Chicago, how she feels about the years of relentless sexual harassment she's had to endure inside her own academic department; or how foreign-trained scholars like herself feel about the discrimination they suffer at the hands of resentful provincial colleagues who think "good scholarship" means submitting to the whims of the gerontocracy. And that's just in the university setting; the rot is everywhere. Japan is a corrupt, rigid, terminally ingrown, fear-driven, woman-hating society that she can't wait to leave forever. But where do we go?

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