Holy Fuck.  Time for me to host offshore, or maybe move offshore.

Reminder to self:  Be nice to the foreign relatives and remind them of how much our family ties mean to me; I may need them to claim me as a refugee!

Fatuous wrote:

Reminder to self: It's even worse over there.

What a  fantastically fatuous thing to say. The chances are very high that Fnord's relatives live somewhere infinitely better than the Puritan States of America. Almost anywhere in the world that Fnord's relatives might live (I bet it's not Africa) you'll find that the autochthones are much more intelligent, civilized and polite than the average American - and only 1 out of a 100 will be a batshit-crazy Christian or a wack-job-patriot. Most of them are properly educated, for a start. On the other hand, there's probably not as much greasy fast food, citizens probably don't attack and/or shoot each other very often, and the national weight average will certainly be under 300-lbs. All in all, it's understandable that Em wants to stay home where he fits in. (This is too easy, like shooting retarded fish in twin-tower-shaped barrels.) Why you people stay in that oppressive Puritan shithole below the 49th parallel I will never understand.

Perhaps the old American reluctance to recognize the superiorty of other cultures is rooted in the economics of the 19th Century. H.L. Mencken, a wonderful dickhead and possibly the greatest American essayist, turned down numerous invitations to live in more civilized parts of the world because: "Here the business of getting a living...is easier than in any other Christian land--so easy, in fact, that an educated and forehanded man who fails in it must actually make deliberate efforts to that end. Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read 50 good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head, and is thrown willy-nilly into a meager and exclusive aristocracy."
[Later in the same essay]
"...the United States is essentially a commonwealth of third-rate men--that distinction is easy here because the general level of culture, of information, of taste and judgement, of ordinary competence is so low. ... Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it, all of the national standards."
H.L. Mencken, On Being American
[Transcription errors, if any, are mine - I couldn't find this on the 'net. There is so much more Mencken that ought to be quoted, but I'll save it for other discussions.]

        The great man practicing his dactylography.

Auto-edited on 2020-08-02 to update URLs

WCL wrote:

[Transcription errors, if any, are mine - I couldn't find this on the 'net. There is so much more Mencken that ought to be quoted, but I'll save it for other discussions.]

Try searching here. The subject has come up before.