{"id":211,"date":"2004-03-31T11:06:11","date_gmt":"2004-03-31T18:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=211"},"modified":"2004-03-31T11:06:11","modified_gmt":"2004-03-31T18:06:11","slug":"europe-and-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"Europe and America"},"content":{"rendered":"

More insightful commentary<\/a> from Steven Den Beste on the gulf between European and American culture, and the persistent misunderstanding by Europeans of Americans:<\/p>\n

Too many of Europe’s opinion makers are living in a delusional world anyway. They believe that raising taxes and increasing social spending doesn’t stifle economic growth, and that labor laws which prevent layoffs increase employment. They think they can catch up to the US economically by 2010. They think all disagreements can be settled through negotiations and that no one needs or should have a military any longer. They think all citizens should rely on the state to protect them from criminals, and any who try to protect themselves should be punished.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They think they’re still important, and they think that the world views them that way. Amidst that great sea of delusion, it’s hardly surprising that they also think America is becoming more and more European as it finally grows up, and that deep down we admire them and want to be more like them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nor will it be surprising that they will continue to find our behavior bewildering and infuriating as they continue to botch their dealings with us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I continue to maintain that a large part of anti-Americanism is aesthetic in nature. The fact that American popular culture is largely trivial and vulgar make people think that Americans will be that way in all areas, and need European sophistication in politics as well as art.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, not only is American popular culture virulently contagious, the trivial, vulgar, happy-go-lucky Americans have the bad habit of actually buckling down when things get serious, and dealing with problems (usually the cultured, sophisticated European habit of massacring each other or trying to conquer the world) without anyone else’s help. <\/p>\n

You’d think they’d have learned to be all noble and arty after having saved the world three times in the past century, but no, it’s back to monster trucks and Sex in the City<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More insightful commentary from Steven Den Beste on the gulf between European and American culture, and the persistent misunderstanding by Europeans of Americans: Too many of Europe’s opinion makers are living in a delusional world anyway. They believe that raising taxes and increasing social spending doesn’t stifle economic growth, and that labor laws which prevent … Continue reading “Europe and America”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balafon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}