As an American, I would say USA bashing is both warranted and welcome. It’s one of our strengths - no one bashes America like Americans, and it’s healthy. We’ve got problems, and ignoring them won’t help. Patriotism does not imply avoiding criticism when something is wrong (like education in the US; that’s a valid burn. I certainly haven’t forgotten high school. It sucked and was easy as f*ck, basically Teen Prison.)
And I mean, you just know Hurricane FloridaMan here is all about “learnt” 
So using ‘learned’ instead of ‘learnt’ warrants bashing the US?
What I am assuming here is given you presented it Hogan style in a very Team America “America, Fuck Yeah!” way he assumed you could take a little ribbing on it. It’s called good natured rivalry. I didn’t read any more in to it than that.
I don’t get that at all. That didn’t seem condescending - it’s accurate. There is such a word, it is used outside the US, and it is mostly nice out here (except where it really, really isn’t. Much like inside the US.)
No, which is what I meant by “What I am assuming here…”
Well you know what they say when you assume…
Hah, yeah for sure. I could totally be wrong on that.
His name is Lane Pittman. He’s a storm chaser from Jacksonville, FL who uses his viral videos to raise money for hurricane relief.
Meteorologists step out into the storms all the time to get a shot. He headbangs and plays metal. He gets my vote! 
That’s cool! I didn’t know that. Thanks for educating me there.
Not condescending. There are a lot of Americans who have no idea what it’s like outside of this country, and thanks to “American exceptionalism” have no idea just how crappy we have it here.
I’ve lived in Europe, Asia, Central America, South America, and North America. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.
I want the US to have universal healthcare, paid parental leave, and for citizens not to go bankrupt because of medical bills. People in other countries have those things - I wish people here were aware of just how strange it is that we don’t.
Both her statement and yours can be true, you know
I’ve lived all over the US, including the South, the midwest, and the West coast. Lots of nice places, some not so nice. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t see the advantages of my current home. No way would I want to move back in the current climate, we’ll see if we can unfuck things.
Most of the US has been lied to by monied interests about nationalized medicine. It’s freaking amazing, and really eye opening once you have it. One major reason I would avoid moving back for now. We need to fix the US health care system.
There’s even YT channels devoted to it
Yea I’m not saying otherwise, I was just stating that I’m travelled and I’m not ignorant about how other people live.
I’m not saying that we don’t have issues, and yes I agree we need medical reform amongst many other things, but I still wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
We definitely have issues - I wish my country didn’t treat women as second class citizens who don’t have full control over their own bodies.
This thread seems to have gone way off the rails.
I think 83.7% of what @Barney posts are meant to be humorous. I don’t believe he was trying to offend anyone.
People all over the world take jabs at the US. Especially, people from the US. It’s okay. That’s why we all own lots of guns. (See what I did there? I made a joke about an American stereotype. 
)
Maybe, let’s back away from the politics and stick to being Bass friends.
The thing is, it can be fixed, we just don’t. And that’s why calling it out and criticizing it is important. There’s a minority making a huge amount of money on the healthcare system status quo, and they have managed to convince a lot of otherwise well meaning people that it is somehow good, when in reality the current situation is simultaneously the most expensive (both per capita and in total) and among the least effective (both per capita and in aggregate) in the first world. It’s unsustainable and unacceptable, yet we both spend an astronomical amount of money to sustain it and allow people to convince us to accept it.
Flip it around, using Japan as an example. If anything, Japan is more capitalist than the US, in that the companies and corps really call the shots here. But at the same time, the public recognizes the benefits to both society and the workforce by placing national control and limits over some things, and provide a safety net. And it works spectacularly well; I have tons of personal anecdotes that would blow you away (ambulances are free, I’ve had two MRIs with almost zero wait and billing of less than $50 each, my wife got an emergency appendectomy with a week in the hospital after in a private room with a total billing of $1500, a yearly comprehensive physical to perform preventative medicine and catch stuff early is legally guaranteed to be free, etc. I could go on and on.)
The benefits to productivity as a country by having inexpensive, high quality health care cannot be overstated. What we do in the US makes no sense, it’s all short term gain for a few at the cost of dragging down the vast majority.
I was writing the below text earlier today, to reply in the other thread from which this one was broken off, but I got distracted and it’s better to post it here:
“Learnt vs Learned” reminds me of one of my high school English teachers (late 1960s, growing up in the USA), who marked my use of “amongst” as incorrect in a paper I wrote. The reason was that it is a word/spelling used in British English, but not the U.S. I accepted that and learned. I probably was influence by a number of British English terms at the time, both from reading British books and watching British TV shows on U.S. TV.
I would venture that since Josh and the BassBuzz course are from the U.S., then U.S. English version of “learnt” (learned) would be used. But it’s an informal course, with a lot of idioms, slang, and so on, so why not use “learnt?” 
I decided to delete my original part of the post where I got off on yet another tangent, about the U.S. adopting the U.K. phrase “gone missing.” And a pet peeve of mine is when people use “between” for more than two people (over 2 should use “among”, or at least that was what I was taught, back in the Stone Age). 
[/end Grammar police mode]
