is America the new Rman Empire?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Phil

You actually believe that Australia would LIKE to be like America?!

Australian culture, and the experience that made it, are indeed similar to the American -- which is why Australians and Americans get on very well together. Consider that both are a fundamentally English society, with English expectations, transported to a very wide, hotter and drier land, with agrarian national beginnings and industrial development later -- both even have less than completely creditable relations with the indigenes. These leave similar stamps upon their peoples. Where American culture diverges from this is that it's more polyglot, each nation having taken respectively different paths there.

To use the "they're all descended from criminals" cliche displays a snobbery and unjustified attitude of superiority the world has come to expect from certain people in the US.

And it happens to be about as true in the US case as in the Australian -- see how the state of Georgia was founded. Nor, in either, did the influx end with the end of the penal colony -- what sustained both these nations was the continued seeking of improved opportunity.