[cperciva]

The USA has a male genital mutilation rate of 79%, about 5% of African American males are incarcerated, and the vice president wants to defund HIV research in favour of funding "conversion therapy".

It's easy to cherry pick facts to make a country look terrible.

[jnky]

I agree with everything you said in principle, but I disagree with your conclusion.

I don't have to cherry pick facts to make Kenya look bad, I just picked a bunch of pretty bad ones about Kenya to illustrate my point.

I also find it telling that, instead of cherry picking positive things about Kenya to disprove my point, posters in this thread resorted Whataboutisms with respect to the US.

I really don't like being in this thread, arguing viewpoints that I myself consider borderline bigotry, but the notion that Kenya is somehow on par with the US or even any other developed nation is preposterous.

[cperciva]

I didn't think you were cherry-picking facts deliberately; but there's an inevitable amount of accidental cherry-picking when we evaluate other countries based on the factors we consider to be important. It's like the "paradox" that 90% of drivers consider themselves to be better than average drivers; people who drive fast praise themselves for driving fast and people who drive slowly praise themselves for driving slowly, because in both cases how they drive is driven (pun not intended) by what they consider to be "good" driving.

I absolutely agree than Kenya and the USA are not "on par" with each other; but before jumping from that to describing Kenya as "a proper shithole" I'd want to talk to Kenyans and find out how Kenya measures up under their standards.