The realpolitic of international relations very often follows the words of the British prime minister, Lord Palmerston: "We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."

This is not to say we shouldn't be having conversations about good practices, but it's really important to also understand and talk about the context that makes them good. Those who have read The Innovator's Solution would be familiar with a parallel concept. The author introduces the topic by suggesting that humanity achieved powered flight not by blindly replicating the wing of the bird (and we know how many such attempts failed because it tried to apply a good idea to the wrong context) but by understanding the underlying principle and how it manifests within a given context.

The recommendations in the article smell a bit of premature optimisation if applied universally, though I can think of context in which they can be excellent advice. In other contexts it can add a lot of redundancy and be error prone when refactoring, all for little gain.

Fundamentally, clear programming is often about abstracting code into "human brain sized" pieces. What I mean by that is that it's worth understanding how the brain is optimised, how it sees the world. For example, human short term memory can hold about 7±2 objects at once so write code that takes advantage of that, maintaining a balance without going to extremes. Holy wars, for example, about whether OO or functional style is always better often miss the point that everything can have its placed depending on the constraints.

Anyway, only because something feels intuitive, it doesn’t make it true. In this instance the original claim seems to contradict the article which states imaginary friends are not the result of loneliness but the process by which children explore the complexities of real relationships… i.e. a form of subconscious thought experiment.

Also it's not clear what "Even Donald Trump now admits..."is intended to mean here. Donald Trump has always repeated Kremlin talking points so I'm not sure why anyone would think of this as novel.

Pretty much everything else you said confirms just how ingrained the attitude under discussion is in this country. Which is hardly surprising. If it was perceived as aberrant by the majority then it wouldn't be commonplace.

On average, Australian culture views anyone, who even passively demonstrates any significant level of achievement, with a high degree of suspicion. Australians make a national sport of cutting down people who excel in any way. Sure, there are sub-cultures there which can vary considerably from this general trend, but even they feel the influence of this prevailing attitude. The end outcome is that Australians tend to go to considerable effort to hide the things that may single them out as excelling among their peers, and emphasise those things which make them similar. (A few months ago the CEO of the most powerful retail company in Australia gave an interview attempting to reduce public ire at their price gouging tactics, dressed in the uniform of a shelf stacker from their supermarket chain. I'm not saying this could not have happened in America, but there it would have probably been seen as a stunt or a statement... in Australia dressing any other way would have raised eyebrows, and in fact most people initially failed to even notice it for the PR manipulation that it was.)

Geographic proximity will always play a role in bringing cultural norms together, and while the US is a big place, the US population throughout the 20th century had incredible mobility, going where the jobs were, which helped to tighten up that bell curve.

Now we've already agreed that it's not the US's mandate, and I suppose you could argue that it is not the mandate of any of the US's opponents ether. Whether there are any geopolitical entities who don't seem to have the same balance of criticism vs. praise as the others, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

I wonder if there's a difference between various types of self employment where some are on net less stressful than others. In my cousin's case as a co-founder, there may still have been a lot of pressure from other team members, which is only marginally better than having a boss. Also, if there are effective strategies one can employ to limit issues that can have a negative impact in a self employed context, then further studies to elucidate such would be incredibly valuable.