Greatest country in the world

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I think we're running up against a 'best' and 'greatest' distinction here. America's the greatest, for the reasons that Clarence and realisticidealist articulated, but there are quite a few areas in which it's not necessarily the best.

Also, Canada gave us Anne Shirley, Leonard Cohen, and poutine.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't know why American right-wingers continue to reflexively love a country that has rampant abortion (that alone makes me despise the modern US) and spends an ungodly amount on hand outs and "humanitarian intervention" and all that other garbage. I have more respect for pre-downturn Ireland or Liechtenstein or one of the "asian tigers" or something like that.

Pre-downturn Ireland was, as the left in Ireland has started pointing out, voluntarily sacrificing its sociocultural framework by inches on the altar of profit, which is why the downturn happened. Then if you go further back you find that that sociocultural framework was itself Inksed-up in many ways. I love Ireland but it's not a country that seems to really admit of having 'golden ages'. Unless you go back to Brian Boru.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't know why American right-wingers continue to reflexively love a country that has rampant abortion (that alone makes me despise the modern US) and spends an ungodly amount on hand outs and "humanitarian intervention" and all that other garbage. I have more respect for pre-downturn Ireland or Liechtenstein or one of the "asian tigers" or something like that.

Pre-downturn Ireland was, as the left in Ireland has started pointing out, voluntarily sacrificing its sociocultural framework by inches on the altar of profit, which is why the downturn happened. Then if you go further back you find that that sociocultural framework was itself Inksed-up in many ways. I love Ireland but it's not a country that seems to really admit of having 'golden ages'. Unless you go back to Brian Boru.

The left (whoever they are) have hardly "started" to point that out. And by the way, despite the downturn, it is still doing that.

Do you mean the left (again, such as it is) has been pointing it out for longer than I've been aware of it or that it hasn't actually started to be pointed out in any meaningful way? I'm going mostly by the new President's statements on the subject here, which I hadn't been hearing much of before him in years of following Irish politics with greater or lesser (admittedly often lesser) degrees of involvement.

I'm completely unsurprised that it's still going on. My point was that pre-downturn Ireland wasn't somehow all roses, because there is a reason why it turned into, well, post-downturn Ireland.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I don't know why American right-wingers continue to reflexively love a country that has rampant abortion (that alone makes me despise the modern US) and spends an ungodly amount on hand outs and "humanitarian intervention" and all that other garbage. I have more respect for pre-downturn Ireland or Liechtenstein or one of the "asian tigers" or something like that.

Pre-downturn Ireland was, as the left in Ireland has started pointing out, voluntarily sacrificing its sociocultural framework by inches on the altar of profit, which is why the downturn happened. Then if you go further back you find that that sociocultural framework was itself Inksed-up in many ways. I love Ireland but it's not a country that seems to really admit of having 'golden ages'. Unless you go back to Brian Boru.

The left (whoever they are) have hardly "started" to point that out. And by the way, despite the downturn, it is still doing that.

Do you mean the left (again, such as it is) has been pointing it out for longer than I've been aware of it or that it hasn't actually started to be pointed out in any meaningful way? I'm going mostly by the new President's statements on the subject here, which I hadn't been hearing much of before him in years of following Irish politics with greater or lesser (admittedly often lesser) degrees of involvement.

I'm completely unsurprised that it's still going on. My point was that pre-downturn Ireland wasn't somehow all roses, because there is a reason why it turned into, well, post-downturn Ireland.

The first one. Criticism of the Property-Finance-PolitcalParties-Vulgarity axis did not begin in 2007. At least the vulgarity has somewhat gone.

I remember being astonished by just how lowbrow Sean Gallagher came across, and especially that it at times seemed to be intentional. It reminded me vaguely of George W. Bush but in some ways seemed even more pronounced, at least from my side of the Atlantic, because the man was literally a game show host. Though he, of course, lost the final round in a landslide (or what seemed like a landslide, there have been enough uncontested Irish presidential elections that I'm not entirely sure what constitutes a landslide in elections to the office) to a former sociology professor who writes poetry.