Do you really need data to know that the part of London north of the Thames is wealthier than south of the Thames? Or that
QPR supporters have better manners than Milwall’s?

If you really have to have data, I’m sure there’s ways to create proxies or look it up. But the point being is they are the data.

No, I don’t live in London now, but yes I used to (actually alternating between London and Amsterdam) recently enough.

This would be based on what data?

“…the UK thought it could get around this by acquiescing to multiculturalism, but that didn’t work.”

huh? by what criteria? And I’m just taking a random guess, but you don’t live here, do you?

This is the problem with this discussion, and why it’s pointless–it’s long on stereotypes and myths and blather, but short on facts.

Not quite.

First of all, during the Lebanese War (and the present) the lion’s share the UK press wrath was directed at _Israel_ not America. In fact it was something of a respite from Iraq where UK public opinion _does_ blame America. Second place (in the Lebanese war) was the UK itself for obviously being unable to do anything and third was the US.

Forgive me for putting it this way, but one of guidelines in Steven Covey’s book is that you have to have some balance between what he calls a person’s Circle of Influence versus his Circle of Concern. The UK is out of balance because it wants to concern itself with things that it decreasing influence over.

The dirty little secret is that the UK thought it could get around this by acquiescing to multiculturalism, but that didn’t work. That was the whole point behind Cool Britannia and all the rest of it. It’s only the square Churchill/Kipling types who had to care about projecting power and all the rest of it. Now that they’ve been renounced, we find that the UK public still (desperately) wants to project power, they’re just humiliated because they lack the means to do it.

I don’t know if wuf means this or not but it doesn’t help his argument either way. Everybody paying attention knows that US major cities are safer than European ones (to say nothing about the countryside). It wasn’t always that way of course, but we went through things like Giuliani in NYC and the broken windows theory, etc. which would be essentially out of bounds in Europe.

Before 9/11 al Qaeda and other militant Islamists were killing Westerners throughout the world. Europeans were routinely kidnapped and sometimes killed while traveling in the Yemeni hinterland. German tourists were butchered while touring ancient sites in Egypt because they were Western. 9/11 happened before the invasion Iraq. The first attempt to knock down the World Trade Towers happened in 1993. Theo van Gogh was murdered not because of George W. Bush or the Iraq War, but because his art defecated on Islam.

To say that if Bush had only not invaded Iraq or not adopted an aggressive security policy in light of 9/11 fails to speak to the immense hatred many Muslims and Islamists have for the West and its culture. I’ve lived in Europe and I have even lived in a predominantly Muslim immigrant part of town. There in fact Muslims who would kill Westerners simply for being Westerners. Bombs were placed on trains in Germany even though Germany didn’t participate in the invasion or occupation of Iraq? Why is that? Only Germany’s participation in Afghanistan you think? Or to kill Germans for the sake of killing Germans and trying to gain cultural concessions from terrorist acts?

It’s infantile and unfair to think that Bush alone has somehow made it more dangerous for Westerners in Europe or abroad, because it was simply dangerous well before Bush ever was in office, and even before 9/11 happened. How much more pissed off could Islamists get than they were on 9/11?

Obviously, Daniel can jump in here if he likes but the first thing to note is that, especially as to the part I commented on, Daniel doesn’t have a line of argument as much as some random anti-Bush vitriol. (Certainly Daniel would not take seriously the proposition that the US President is responsible for West European security except for rhetorical purposes such as this.) You “agree” with Daniel because you both share visceral antipathy to Bush.

And let me repeat and clarify, I absolutely agree with you about Europeans’ resentment of Bush. Where we disagree is that GWB is that this resentment has anything to do with European security, as opposed to an expression of envy writ large. Of course, nobody is jealous of GWB personally, but the United States is clearly relevant on the world stage in ways that the UK, France or Germany isn’t.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article541957.ece

For example, I was in Poland for a decent part of 2006, and I remember very vividly the animosity and bitterness of the UK press regarding the Israeli-Lebanese War and I’m sure it’s no different now with the Hamas thing. Clearly the esteem of the UK has zero stature in Israel’s mindset whereas the esteem of the United States is crucially important. For a people raised on the cultural legacy of Kipling, Churchill, Queen Victoria or whoever thats a very bitter pill to swallow. Nonetheless, it’s clearly not GWB’s problem or his fault.

On the original point, though–Larison is right. European resentment of Bush has nothing to do with the list you offer. There is a strong belief here–not just here, actually, but everywhere in the world– that Bush, through what the Financial Times yesterday referred to as a reign of error, has made the world a more–not less–dangerous place, and that the blowback is more likely to be in Europe, not the US. We’ve already seen it, in fact–here in London (where I take the underground every day), and in Spain. And there is the persistent fear that it will continue unless there is a major change in Washington in its mideast policies. But I suspect we’ll disagree on this as well.

This is getting closer the the original point anyway. I agree with you at least as far as their perceived resentments against Bush. But the idea that Bush’s actions have made Europe less secure strikes me as being more or less ridiculous.

It’s European cultural developments over the last thirty years or so that created American exceptionalism. It’s just the reality of 9/11 that forced everybody to confront it.

Finally, nomenklatura is a strong word, and I should have applied some more context. Essentially, the Euro political class have jerry-rigged the system so that any meaningful popular control over welfare, crime, immigration, whatever is verboten. The US, as much as paleocons like to complain about it, hasn’t done this. As a result, it’s the American people, not just the political class, who have confronted a lot of the big-ticket issues in the world, and therefore America as a nation has a great deal more strength to adapt than the industrial democracies of Europe.

I recognize that I’m dealing with a belief system here, so I don’t expect to convince anyone who uses terms such as “nomenklatura.” I’ll shut up now.

Again, our GDP is higher except for just a couple of countries which aren’t representative of very much, especially as an “alternative” to the US. Ie, whereas we could hypothetically “choose” to be Europe, we can’t choose to be Norway or Lichtenstein.

The US dollar in theory ought to weaken but it’s not clear what ought to get stronger. In particular, the Euro is likely to be very weak because propensity of sovereign debt default looks a lot more imminent there than it does here. Which ties into the flight to quality and debt loads.

The fact is, the combination of American assets, GDP/capita (and a long tradition of property rights and the rule of law and such) make US denominated debt a much better proposition. Look it up. Greece and Spain are supposed to default, like next week or something. There’s talk that the UK is going to need a loan from the IMF.

Because we have had a practical sort of republicanism in place in America over the past thirty years or so, whereas Europe is essentially ruled by a nomenklatura, we retain the ability to shape our own destiny much more than Europe does. Many Europeans resent this very much, and people like President Bush end up as the scapegoat.

“our assets are greater”
on what basis? Per capita? With the US undergoing the greatest asset writedown seen for decades? Not clear I would want to push this. What’s this based on? I know of no economic data to support this claim.

“our debt is lower”
Factually questionable, or at least indeterminate, on just about every measure. Government debt for the US in November 2008 was about $37,300 per capita, with total debt equalling about 65% of GDP–and several European countries are higher than this, but a number are lower, again according to the CIA factbook. In fact, according to Eurostat, debt per capita in the European Union as a whole is a bit lower, at 58%. However, if you add household debt to this average, the US number shoots up dramatically, probably more than most European countries, mainly because European saving rates are robustly higher than those in the US. It’s actually very difficult to determine this, because it’s hard to find current data for household debt. Anecdotally, it’s worth noting that while France has credit cards, they’re actually debit cards–you need the money in the bank before you can put the charge on the card.

“unemployment is lower”
says who? Seasonally-adjusted unemployment in the EU in November was 7.2%, and this has been coming down the past few years; in the US it was 7.2% in December, and it’s been moving up sharply the past several months.

“flight to quality”
at close to zero interest rates, does anyone really believe the dollar will not weaken from current levels relative to other currencies? This is a blip. See the comments on asset devaluation above.

You may or may not be correct in your observations about the assimilation of minorities in Europe, but your economic claims are unfounded in most cases.

I wish this were supposed to be a joke, but I fear it’s not. Because it’s not only (almost) entirely wrong, but known to be wrong by anybody whose paying an iota of attention.

Our GDP/capita is higher, our assets are greater, our debt is lower, unemployment is lower. Notice that the “flight to quality” response to the economic crisis has been toward dollar-denominated assets and away from euros and other European currencies. And the economic deprivations of Europe are going to fall hardest on the Muslims there, because they never really got assimilated into those economies in the first place, like I mentioned before.

All of these things (and many others) cause substanstial social disharmony in Western Europe, and none of it has anything to do with W.