(sorry in advance for stupid spelling errors, this keyboard has hard keys =/)
I refer you back to my earlier point: you can't exactly see your own faults if you've been brought up in that type of society. We can, and boy, it's horrible. From this thread, I've seen countless statistics, all of which have been retorted rather badly. I've seen passionate posts from Satchmo, Alex, Elof (and me, teehee) and I've seen nothing from the opposition.
True. From someone who's lived in the US for his entire life, I definitely can't recognize our faults and identify them. I don't exactly like to pick them out in other countries, either, although I know many people who like to express...disapproval of many of the world's other countries (with stupid and stereotypical views which are obviously false.) On the flip side, though, you have to realize that a lot of the faults directed at us from other countries are sometimes stereotypical as well. (ie, all Americans are fat and stupid and republicans.) There's a lot of liberal Americans these days, and they're intelligent. There's a lot of nice Americans. We (as people, anyway) aren't terribly different from the UK or Australia, I suppose. It's all in the governments and political views.
The world is revolving around fear these days. It's quite sad that there's a lot of people who can't see through it. The ones who actively debate and question policy and what the government says are labeled terrorists or threats to national security. It's almost like 1984. It's scary. There's no such thing as true free speech anymore. Sure, you can disagree with policy and laws but they don't care about that. It's all in the bigger picture.
Mass media is part of the problem. If you repeat the same thing over and over, get a staged "expert" on a subject to talk about how serious things are getting, and how problematic something is, and you just go on and on and on people get almost brainwashed. For example, if you read the newspaper (at least my local newspaper, the Denver Post) there's usually just bad news every day. Two children gunned down in a mistargeted gang attack, a hit-and-run, a murder-suicide. If you devote a fair portion of a page to the details and only print news of that nature you're pretty much making it seem like everything's bad and there's gangs killing kids everywhere and you shouldn't cross the street because you'll get hit or blah blah blah. This scares people! What they don't realize is that it's a very small percentage of a population, and it's inevitable. Crime will never truly be eradicated. In fact the crime rate in the US has been consistently dropping since the 1990's, yet mass-media seems to make us think that every day more and more people are getting killed.
Just goes to show you what the media and government are capable of doing with technology.