And while Trump’s recent tantrum about the US as a “broken, third-world” country can certainly be filed under the expansive category of Distastefully Kooky Things Trump Has Said, there is also an unintended element of truth to it. Like it or not, the US fits the third-world stereotype in many respects — and not just in terms of its oligarchic style of governance.

The US advertises itself as being at the vanguard of global “development”, but the nation’s healthcare, poverty and other indicators suggest a policy of wilful counterdevelopment instead. Back in 2017, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the US for two weeks. At the end of his trip, he issued a statement on how he found the country “exceptional in … ways that are shockingly at odds with its immense wealth and its founding commitment to human rights”.

Despite managing to spend more money on “national defence” than China, Russia, the United Kingdom and a bunch of other big spenders combined, the US had some “40 million people” living in poverty amid glaring “contrasts between private wealth and public squalor”.[/quote

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022 ... dium=email

....Trump’s recent tantrum about the US as a “broken, third-world” country

cabron wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 1:49 pm

John Bingham wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 10:13 am As an American, I believe you should use the term "developing country" as the term "third world" became redundant when the Cold War ended in the early 90s.

That is a problem now, we cannot say anything, third world country, banana republic, shithole, May offend someone.

John Bingham wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 2:45 pm

cabron wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 1:49 pm

John Bingham wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 10:13 am As an American, I believe you should use the term "developing country" as the term "third world" became redundant when the Cold War ended in the early 90s.

That is a problem now, we cannot say anything, third world country, banana republic, shithole, May offend someone.

The problem is not about offending anyone, the problem is using redundant terms that have lost their original meaning.

The “three worlds” model of geopolitics first arose in the mid-20th century as a way of mapping the various players in the Cold War. The origins of the concept are complex, but historians usually credit it to the French demographer Alfred Sauvy, who coined the term “Third World” in a 1952 article entitled “Three Worlds, One Planet.” In this original context, the First World included the United States and its capitalist allies in places such as Western Europe, Japan and Australia. The Second World consisted of the communist Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. The Third World, meanwhile, encompassed all the other countries that were not actively aligned with either side in the Cold War. These were often impoverished former European colonies, and included nearly all the nations of Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.

Today, the powerful economies of the West are still sometimes described as “First World,” but the term “Second World” has become largely obsolete following the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Third World” remains the most common of the original designations, but its meaning has changed from “non-aligned” and become more of a blanket term for the developing world. Since it’s partially a relic of the Cold War, many modern academics consider the “Third World” label to be outdated. Terms such as “developing countries” and “low and lower-middle-income countries” are now often used in its place.