Equal opportunity offender
@ Welcome AC
many people in Eastern countries still have national pride (and lack the American excuse - see below); give them another 10 years of industrialization, consumerism, and subsequent outsourcing and layoffs, and they'll all be as cynical as the well-informed skeptics of the West.
@ Rusty D
most Americans are AT LEAST as ignorant about their own country, as they are about other countries. for example:
[1] they have no idea that they voted themselves a corporatist government (twice!), that is trying to tear down any laws that protect individual freedoms, any regulations that restrict corporations, and any oversight for what it and its corporate sponsors are doing; all this while methodically building a police state.
[2] they do not understand that their current economic crisis was directly caused by banking deregulation; specifically, the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was made law in 1933, to prevent another 1929-type meltdown and Great Depression. i believe that the lobbyists who made this repeal possible, should be fed to the pigs.
[3] they never consider that the US is only 5% of the human race, and therefore, it is prudent to care about what the other 95% thinks and does; many of them are also innumerate, and would have no use for these figures.
...and that's just the current events, never mind history, geography, technology, philosophy, etc. before the hurricane hit, better than 50% of the population didn't know where New Orleans was located, if you asked them to point it out on a map. some of them found out when it flooded and they saw it on the news; most still don't know, or care.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
