> Living in a country or visiting it is no grounds at all for claiming
> knowledge of the country as a whole.
Sure it is, just as long as you do the hard work of additional research -- studying languages, history, journalism, culture, etc. to flesh out those personal experiences.
Just one anecdote: trying (and failing) to get a travel visa to go to Russia in 1995 (eventually, I did get one through other means). I was in the Berlin embassy, and watched a Russian citizen approach some surly bureaucrat who was in charge of these things. What followed was an amazing theater of power: certain kinds of body signals, movements, gestures, one the language of supplication, the other the language of the nomenklatura. It made me realize how political power is not just figuratively but literally embodied, in our very fingertips.
-- DRR