I have sympathies for the point of view in your drunken rant (although I end up coming down on the opposite side on many of the issues you raise). Does that mean I’m drunk when I’m sober?
It’s amusing to see so many people compare averages in the UK or Albania with SD, and I often do it too. But the various members of my family live in many of the places that are being compared here and others (downtown London, Brussels, Stockholm, Nice, Dublin, Bermuda, Mumbai….) and they live lives remarkably similar to middle-class people here in OC, regardless of the incomes of the homeless or billionaires around them.
I’d be happy to live in any number of those places, and I prefer OC over Nice, for example, only because the weather here is slightly better and my professional qualifications cover the US only (and my French is terrible!)
A person who reflexively expresses the point of view that the country they grew up in is better than everywhere else is shedding more light on the shape of their own mind than on the merits of various places, and once you see that shape, there is no more useful information to be gained on that topic.
