loudspeaker - 6:21 pm on Dec 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

As a side note, I am personally glad that Europe is much more critical than the U.S.; that really is the cultural divide. There was a point in my life where I wanted to live in the U.S., but not any more. I'm happy being old-fashioned and critical, slow and not as money-driven as (some of) the U.S. folks. I enjoy my freedom of speech which is essentially protected by various E.U. and country laws.

As much as I am critical of the "simplistic" US approach exemplified here by several posters, it's also wrong to put the entire country in one pigeonhole.

There are *a lot* of critical voices in the US and yes, most are from cultural industries. If you're interested in this topic, I suggest you catch up on the discussion as followed in The New York Review of Books. It seems that almost every issue recently has a big article on Google / its Book Search project.