Which is why John Oliver is in Gitmo right now. /s
Nah, the right wing in this country knows better than to try to use legal force against those whose speech it disapproves of. Easier to look the other way and let the people do it themselves, with knives and cars.
America granted women the vote before most European countries (French women weren't enfranchised until 1945!), rebuilt numerous countries devastated in World War II, is one of the most diverse countries on the planet, has made countless innovations, and remains one of the global leaders in free speech.
We shouldn't sugarcoat America's flaws and misdeeds, but there are legitimate reasons to be proud, at least in my opinion. If you don't think so, that's fine. I'm not some ultranationalist who thinks criticizing America points to some kind of underlying character flaw. I love my country, warts and all.
The first point really depends on how you define the word "most". In terms of population, a large portion of Europe's feminine population was in fact able to vote before America passed the 19th Amendment in 1920 (Germany, Finland, Russia, Poland, the Netherlands to name a few). I will grant you that we did a pretty good job in rebuilding Europe and Japan after the big war. That's definitely a good thing. Of course, everyone who was involved in that is now dead, and our current government over the past generation, well... we managed to start several wars in the middle east, I'm living under a nuclear umbrella from Korea, we still don't have capable healthcare, we still don't have high-class infrastructure, and our current Congress has spent the last six months trying to dismantle what little progress we've made towards a stable, affordable health care system, basically ignoring everything else in their quest to appease their donors. I mean, should we really be proud if our last great moment was 70 years ago?
As was already mentioned, of course, there's a difference between loving your country and being proud of it. If you have a son who's a dropout and doing drugs, you can love them, but you're probably not going to be proud of them. And I sure don't see a lot to be proud of in America.
All countries where you can get arrested for criticizing Islam. They might as well bring back blasphemy laws.
I could question your use of the article you linked, wherein the only sourced information stating that any criticism of Islam is illegal links to another article on a profoundly right-wing, pro-nationalist site. But in truth, that whole deal is irrelevant, because to be proud of a country doesn't mean that it it perfect, or that it has no blemishes. You seem to be implying that being proud of a country like Germany or the Netherlands is equated to believing it can do no wrong, but that isn't true, and I never said any such thing. We could instead talk about Germany's leading role in holding together a difficult-to-hold EU, their honestly startling economic recovery starting in the early 50s, or the fact that they have one of the best health care systems in the world,
right now. Or we could talk about how, while we yelled at Australia over 1,200 people that we'd
already agreed to take in, Germany was doing their best to take in a million Syrian refugees, which I would at the very least call extremely brave, if a little reckless (Germany didn't have the infrastructure for that and it showed). Those are things to be proud of, and they're not something that ended 70 years ago.
You mean the country that still calls its Korean population "foreigners"? Japan is still very xenophobic for a first-world country.
This has already been answered, so I'll let Askold's answer stand. In response to the claim that voter ID laws have been struck down, this is true, but it doesn't excuse the fact that they're being put up in the first place.
