While it’s easy to bash our mentalist authoritarian government, at least we don’t live in a country where the police pay fit women to entrap teenage boys into selling them harmless herbs [*], or where it’s illegal to help a girl to get an abortion. Or where they execute the mentally ill.
How can anyone who isn’t an authoritarian extremist prefer the US to the UK? This never fails to mystify me. I mean, I could understand it if there were actually any *benefits* to living there, but (aside from it being one of the few places which is Different and Abroad without you having to learn the language), there aren’t.
Not unrelatedly, this is insane. Anyone who disapproves of vaccinating young girls against HPV should be beaten with an iron chain until they have no skin left. Although strictly, this isn’t a US/UK issue – I vaguely remember hearing homegrown mouth-breathing fanatics objecting to it as well. Bastards.
[*] Admittedly, the press sometimes does – but even then, the police are sane enough here not to press charges.
I dunno, I’d probably prefer living in one of the big blue-state cities – New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, etc – to most of the UK. But then I am living in a particularly rubbish bit of the UK at the moment…
Out of interest, John b, have you lived there?
How can anyone who isn’t an authoritarian extremist prefer the US to the UK?
Because if you’re relatively well off, the economic benefits of living in the US far outweigh any (extremely unlikely) risks of running into that authoritarian streak. Besides which, they’re a lot freer in many ways than we are, they just take a weird stance on some moral issues. We’re rapidly legislating our way into totalitarian-style mayhem anyway, so we’re hardly ones to crow.
Yes John, if you’re rich… you can get very very rich?!? And if you’re very very rich, you could get very^15 rich… Or at least, you can dream about it.
Isn’t this worth something?
Surely they’ll appeal that drug conviction. How does that not count as entrapment? The judgement is clearly insane.
Jimmy – No. However, I’ve spent around 3 months there, and have several (English, USan and other) friends who have lived there full-time.
Andrew/Matt – not particularly crowing, hence my "While it’s easy to bash our mentalist authoritarian government" start bit; there are a great many places other than the UK where I’d move if I could speak the language as proficiently as I can speak English (the jobs I’m capable of being paid well for require excellent written and spoken language skills, and I’m not willing to move abroad to be poor). Would be interested to know ways Yanks are genuinely freer than us, other than the economic one (paying 38% of GDP in taxes and healthcare costs instead of 45% – wahey!)
Steve – I suspect they might if they were adults (not sure exactly how US law works here, and I imagine the girl was careful to only *imply* she wanted drugs). But since they’re kids, their parents are likely to make them plead guilty on the grounds that Drugs Are Bad, Mkay.
Andrew,
Erm, care to explain the economic benefits? Certainly I haven’t seen any in NY… And in what ways are American’s "a lot freer"? Unless you count being able to carry large guns as a useful freedom
–Matt
I’d like to see fit American policewomen befriending high-school loners, filling their heads full of nihilism and gun-fetishism, and *implying* that they’d like them to perform a Columbine style massacre. Then hey presto the police have "cracked a murder-ring".
Nah, boring: that’s the sort of thing that our filth do already.
I don’t think getting rich is much of a reason to move to the US; tax rates here in Canada are delightfully low for the wealthy, & we get to grow pot in out garages, drink before age 21, have abortions, vote in actually democratic elections, marry one’s gay partner, walk around topless etc etc AND our freedoms are better protected than theirs since the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms hasn’t been undermined by astonishingly illiberal ‘terrorism’ legislation. The only reason I can see for moving further South is if one’s prepared to trade many of these things for buying as many guns as you want and being able to threaten people with them without going to jail for it.
At $60 an eigth, the economic advantages of the US seem quite unclear to me.
Well, NY has high local taxes, so of course it’s not more economically advantageous. Try New Hampshire.
As for freedoms – several of them are enshrined in the constitution, in the ways ours most definitely are not.
Habeus Corpus?