I do hate everybody.

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

I've been trying to piece together what it is I enjoy or don't because Italy does conveniently throw this paradox my way.
In India for example, the slide from one of the most endearing cultures to one of the most disgusting (and I'm not talking about hygene) and annoying was so rapid that if you were in an elevator you wouldn't even have time to say 'I love...' before you went squish into a biological stain.
And then Thailand where the 'land of the smile' seems to live up to it as people come up and welcome you in the street, still moneygrubbing but vastly friendlier than any other tourist attraction I've seen. India they all act like the are running some kind of classy joint, where the only place I got really good customer service was in the jewellers in the slums.
Everyone else took pains to ask me for money, remind me to pay them a tip and so fourth or follow me 8 city blocks on foot asking for money, or throw a tantrum that I wanted to walk instead of take a taxi some neglible distance.
And Italy I have to admit is incredibly low on the arsehole front, yes the Euro is bleeding me slowly dry but people are genuinely unresentful.
The kicker is that the euro is so expensive despite such poor economic performance from Italy, I suspect if tourism went there wouldn't be anything left to prop the country up.
Anyway I have come across one tired bitch in my entire customer service experience of Italy and that was at my lodgings in Venice.
And everyone else has been delightful, if anyone tells you Indian customer service is great, they are wrong, it is exhausting, and how is that service?
And then of course there's the tourists.
They change, I think though the rule could be expressed something like this - 'The more tourist attractions a place has, the less enjoyable'
For example, in Verona I met Alessandro, Marco and an American guy called Tom. They were all cool, Marco and Alessandro also riding around on bicycles (I'll come back to that) and Tom who had gotten sick of being a nightshift grocery store manager and just booked a flight to Europe until the money ran out.
And I enjoyed their company.
Then you go back to Genoa, a place where the old city center gets very dark very quickly at night, and despite its beauty I suspect is one of the least popular tourist destinations.
The tourist superhighway I suspect through Italy is Venice to Rome via Florence. So when you get off the highway things get better, though Florence is a better tourist scene than Rome or Venice.
Venice is fat americans, whinging poms and old people with of course Jpack tours. Florence is young people who would pay to see Renaissance art (more on that too later) and then Italian high school kids, old people and so fourth, Rome is tourists and almost no Italians (which is kind of true of Venice aswell) but numerous youth hostels for one stop kids to get trashed in and so fourth.
And it goes back farther, I enjoyed Nagoya, Shizuoka and Takematsu more than Tokyo and Osaka (although Tokyo aside all of Japan is pretty enjoyable when you speak the language) and I suspect more than Kyoto.
Why? I have been trying to figure it out.
The first perplexing question was this, my lowest of lows was my flight to Istanbul that left me in a funk that had me walled up in my hotel for half a day. It was brought on by ridiculous British Accents, why are there so many of them? Britain is so phenomenally geographically small, and the BA flight was the worst thing I ever endured albeit one of my shortest flights. Because I had to listen to people talking loudly 'That is rubbish' in the most ridiculous voices and Bryce confirmed it when he was there and whilst 'you have to see it for yourself' isn't quite the right sentiment because you are better off never seeing it, it is to say British People really are phenomenally ugly.
Being caged in with them had me digging my claws into my armrest and I just couldn't dodge the stupid lady behind me even when it came to luggage collection and customs, she was everywhere.
There I thought, after hours of exposure to the tripe that is British Journalism and looking at the news of bank collapse after bank collapse, 'who gives these people money' before going to my stopover in Heathrow I had thought Britain one of the most progressive countries in the world.
Then flashforward to Venice, where the strip from the train station to my hotel (300m) has me in no less than 40 encounters with Inane American tourists. Fat so I can tell at some point they are going to bitch about the lack of escalators and/or expense of water taxis in Venice at some point over the weekend and I thought 'who gives you people money?'
That is the question. I keep asking with so many tourists how they got so rich, how they can afford this? how the fuck did they get employed and manage to save enough to get here?
I mean it may just be I have the wrong perspective, that these people are instead racking up massive debt on their credit card and will return home to house reposession.
And that would be darwinian but it threw me into the other side of the globalization debate. These people that get on my nerves with their loud, inane, inconsiderate announcements to the world as to how stupid they are are what Tom Friedman refers to as 'the fat' that is such a disadvantage in a flat world.
These are people who rail against dolebludgers, not realising that the extremely exemplarary work of the top 3% of American/Australian/European/Japanese entrepreneurs have for so long left them largely unaccountable for their own actual value contribution.
Yes that's right I'm saying the work of one Steve Jobs probably employs more deadweight in 'real jobs' than his income tax gets siphoned off into welfare, and if he starts choosing to reallocate those wages to someone more competitive, educated and intelligent in India, thats his prerogative. Infact that's ethical.
That I think sums it up, there's a lot of fat in the modern world from behind trade protectionist barriers for so long has left us with a completely artificial concept of entitlement.
A sedistic part of me is game for this recession just to see who survives the darwinian competition.
Except that I rely on people and could get steamrolled by overseas communities. What I'd much rather see is my own community stop whining and start competing.
Not because its necessary but because its fun, its much funner than being some fat spoilt blob that sandwhiches me in queue at the Uffizi gallery and makes unbelievably ignorant comments about renaissance art whilst I'm just quietly trying to enjoy.
And that's who I don't like, but what of the people I do.
First comment is the ratio for every 10 people I meet that I don't like (and that doesn't mean I carve 'die' into their flesh when they are sleeping) I meet roughly 1 that I do like. But it isn't random, its predictable. For example, I wander around Venice for a day and pass hundreds of people I know would struggle to have a meaningful or mutually beneficial conversation.
I crash in a hostel in Verona and meet 4 people at breakfast I'm happy to hang out with for a day.
So I've already said, the further off the tourism superhighway helps. Then bikes are a big giveaway for me, a bike says an incredible lot about people generally though that isn't to say their aren't a fair share of pretentious posers in the bicycle world. But they at least suggets a person knows the basics of economics, has patience, appreciates to some extent mechanics and engineering, enjoys 'atmospheres' more than destinations.
Another indicator, a big indicator is books, if people read it means they as George Clooney puts it in 'Oh Brother Where Art Though' usually have the capacity for 'Abstract thought' and that makes you, my blog reader all right in my books. They are usually higher educated, have some kind of profession of interest that facilitates common ground. They are self financed or pay debit not credit. They usually have a backpack rather than anything you'd call luggage.
These people I like, but if you did the numbers I bet you'd find that:
people who voluntarily ride bicycles as transport are in the minority
people who read books for leisure are in the minority
people who don't have credit cards are in the minority
people happy to live out of a backpack are in the minority

I'm sure if it was a real study of all the starving possesionless people of the world the numbers wouldn't reflect a minority due to the 'I'll read a book if I can eat it afterwards' effect. But at anyrate it all points towards one thing, that on average if I were to meet someone, chances are I wouldn't like them.
Its not all bad though, fortunately there are ways most of us associate close to only with people like ourselves all our lives. The ABS can demonstrate this and terms like 'white bread' allude to this fact.
Real estate prices suggest it too or are proxy's for the other things that contribute to them, such as access to schools vs crime rates and so fourth.
So Jefferson is 100% right, and I hope I can live in this natural aristocracy for a good long time once I'm done travelling.