[CMay]

I didn't make an exceptionalist argument, but if any country's behavior and values can be measured compared to others, you will always be able to make some kind of decision about where those fall in terms of goodness or badness. Do you not believe in good and bad?

[frognumber]

I believe in good and bad.

I don't believe in US good, non-US bad. I also don't believe the same about my religion or my political party, for that matter.

How you measure depends on weights you assign (cultural system of values) and what information you use (media bias).

You can rank in the extremes (e.g. North Korea as worse than Belgium), since they come out that way by almost any set of information and values. Comparing the US to most other countries, there isn't a clear ordering. If you believe the things you wrote, I think the other comment summed it up well: "You sound like you've swallowed pro-US-propaganda hook, line and sinker."

Most countries have similar propaganda, by the way.

[CMay]

Most countries have some kind of story they tell about themselves. New Zealand doesn't have any illusions that it is a superpower. It doesn't have the resources, the talent pool or any of that to even begin to dream of it. That is natural. If New Zealand was powerful, then it would find itself in a position of greater responsibility.

You cannot compare countries that barely have the option of ambition with something like the US and even begin to imagine that it is meaningful. You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US. You can rewind history to name other civilizations.

These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale. They have to answer about what the reasons were when things went wrong and whether they agree things went wrong. If people are even allowed to talk about it.

It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people. You can always find counter-examples, but how influential are they in the larger picture?

[frognumber]

> These kinds of countries are the only ones that matter, because they're the ones that have to answer about what people were thinking when they chose to make use of their power in a way that is relevant on a larger scale.

This is an extreme claim, and incorrect. If you'd like to see counterexamples, you'll see many corrupt regimes in Africa, which did extreme harm to their own people. You'll see many regional powers.

One does not need to be a global superpower to be good or evil.

There's also nothing magical about Germany or Japan. Many countries had similar resources. Both chose to invest those resources into industrial militarism.

One can make the argument for a handful of countries which our outliers for land area or population, but in general, if any country chooses to invest in military and attack its neighbors, it has good odds of success.

> You have the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China and the US

Germany was an outlier, on the evil end, but otherwise, it's a selection of which facts one picks.

A comparison would require deciding which facts to compare on. For the US, the "evil" argument comes back to things like slavery and the genocide of the native peoples.

One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...

The US does pretty nasty things, even if they don't always make US news or grade school textbooks.

> It's very cheap to label anything as propaganda without taking the time to appreciate whether it has any merit in terms of the overall behavior of a country or its people

This is an ad hominem, and a poorly placed one. You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.

Many of us were where you are when we were younger.

[CMay]

It's largely correct, but you're missing the point. For many countries, it does not matter whether they are good or bad on a grander scale, because their power is so limited that they are largely confined. Countries that exist on the lower end of the intellectual development scale are expected to fall apart.

Not all countries are structured the same, are at the same stage of development, or resourced enough enough to arrive at a sense of responsibility.

That is why these countries are different. The US is the most different, because it is the only one of its kind. There is no other country you can compare the US to.

A lot of negative things about the US are being misrepresented or inflated by propaganda without sufficient context. It isn't all positive, but the US is a huge country and our history didn't begin 250 years ago.

> One can pick hundred of examples like Guantanamo Bay, fake vaccines in Pakistan, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the Tusla massacre, police violence, corrupt court, ...

I could come up with way more examples than that, but for each example you have to ask the questions. You don't simply label an event and point at a face to say "bad, they did it and this is who they are". Is it true? Why did they do it. What were they thinking. Was it an accident, intentional, what was the context? What else was going on in the world, and what was the world like then? What were they up against? Was the choice easy or hard? Was the badness mitigated, or was it unmitigated badness?

> You're discounting what people are telling you. A lot of the people here went through the US school system, learned "US rah rah rah" propaganda, and only deconditioned themselves as adults.

Your unbalanced schooling is not a compelling argument for why I am wrong as much as it is a piece of evidence for why you lost perspective when you got older.