This is Ba Sing Se levels of delusion for some people.
Also I've seen it before here not many year ago with comments like "can only compare US to Brazil not any Europen country"
To what extent do these, not uncommon - even here, sets of beliefs contribute to the problems of violence in policing? Not something that seems to me like a good idea to pretend does not exist or is minor or fringe.
Can you explain why you feel that's terribly unfair? I don't know why somebody would pick Brazil specifically, but you might easily say "compare the US to countries with a similar income inequality". Take the gini coefficient for simplicity [1] and compare the US to Côte d'Ivoire, Argentina, Haiti, and Malaysia or Mexico, Madagascar, El Salvador, and Rwanda, depending on whether you take the CIA's numbers or the World Bank's. If you look at the list, you'll see that the European countries are closer together and in a different area of the list, the US isn't in their group.
Wouldn't that be a better indicator for "similar countries" than average internet speed or NATO membership status?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...
Where I live, we drive cars, but we don’t fight the overseas oil wars. We’ve outsourced all that brutality to the US. That lets us smugly reap the benefits and point fingers at Americans for the violent, backwards, gun-toting culture.
So what though? Do European countries like the UK (that are usually with the US when it's time to bomb somebody in the Middle East) outsource their domestic violence?
Really, you need to provide some evidence for "we have less crime, less murders, less police violence because the US has more". "The US has more income inequality because it has to fight wars for the European countries" doesn't follow either, so please don't.
Your belief is (?) that the US aggregate violence/whatever is in no meaningful way confounded with the levels you measure in (say) EU nations: any confounding is small enough to make no difference?
We have a population of 200 (nations) of very diverse size and age, all related by historic and present competition and cooperation. Is there any fair shot at comparing apples to apples?
What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
But that only works for super powers? Why is there no trend visible for countries like Switzerland who are traditionally neutral and never fight wars with neighboring countries like France who or Germany who have a larger active military, do engage in NATO wars etc? Why aren't the Chinese shooting each other on a similar scale? Why weren't the Germans during the early 20th century when they were very militaristic? Why were the US already at similar levels in the first half of the 20th century, before becoming a global super power that others may have "outsourced" their wars to?
> What sort of “evidence” would you reasonably concede to?
Minimum requirements: has some sort of rule that allows predictions that can be falsified other than "it's only true in this super specific narrow case of the USA in last 5 decades of human history, but not in any other place or during any other time".
It feels like looking for super complicated reasons that require American Exceptionalism (as in "does not apply to any other country") to explain something that is explained by well-studied phenomena that do not require US citizens to function fundamentally different than other humans in other places or other times.
A theory where every nation is a data point can’t get you anywhere. All the nations interact meaning we should reason about the system as a whole.
I say something about a nation, you expect me to back it up with other nations. But there are very few data points, and they are interconnected, and the problem has a huge number of dimensions.
It’s like I claim opposable thumbs are good for tool making and you ask me to show five other body parts where that applies.
Sure, but there's little/nothing that suggests the effect you speculate about, it seems to have no parallel in history although empires have existed before, there are counter examples ... so it seems not too likely that that is the cause. Of course, no two days are the same, no two countries are the same and no two countries are even the same with regard to their not-same-ness on two different days, but countries and cultures move slow enough, and countries and humans are similar enough that we'd see such obvious and large patterns, I believe.
On the other hand, we have other explanations that have supporting evidence, apply to multiple situations etc, so they seem more likely. When you present a new theory, claim that it cannot be falsified because no two countries are exactly the same (and therefore no relationships between countries can be the same), I think you should offer some evidence to support that theory instead of asking others to just accept it.
I’m not asking you to accept anything: I don’t evangelize. In particular I have no theory that generalizes over nations. It seems very limiting. Like ignoring a mechanism I see work in my apartment because it doesn’t hold true for buildings writ large.
Edit: Probably shouldn’t have written “the superpower” posts ago because that makes it sound like a general claim.