• @[email protected]
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    3611 months ago

    Guess I’m the only one who is happy living in the US. We have our fair share of problems but so does everywhere. I’ve lived in 4 different countries over the past 40 years and I’m good here. Lemmy is so hateful toward Americans

    • @[email protected]
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      1811 months ago

      Our government fucking sucks and has a HUGE influence on the world. People need to separate their hated of a country’s government and its people.

      • @[email protected]
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        911 months ago

        It also sucks to live in the US. A lot of Americans repeat the same “best country on Earth” line without ever having left or only having been out of country as a soldier. You know what other countries make children do some kind of allegiance pledge? North Korea… China has something similar. Good luck naming another one. Oh yeah, and that salute? Go google the “Bellamy Salute.” My dad was forced to do that shit in the 50’s like they were still doing that shit after the Nazis lost the war.

        I left after I got shot by a fascist terrorist for protesting a Nazi collaborating transphobe. A few months before I left there was a shoot out with the cops across the street. I lived in the nice neighborhood. The US is fucked. If you’re a cis white man, you still have opportunities. If you’re not, you probably live in fear every day. The average income is higher than most of the world, but the income disparity is like the developing world. There are massive houseless camps because rents keep going up. Fascists regularly talk about rounding up houseless people and murdering them.

        The US is rapidly becoming like Brazil or Costa Rica, where rich people drive around in armored SUVs and poor people get run over by those SUVs and shot. Some people still have opportunities, but a lot of people are legitimately fleeing for their lives and should be accepted as refugees. The fact that countries issue travel warnings for their citizens to avoid parts of the US should give you a hint that things are not OK. And migration among middle and upper class folks is reversing. Europeans and Canadians used to want to come to the US, now they’re going back and Americans are moving out.

        The American dream is dead for most people. It’s been dead for almost everyone born after gen X for a long time. People used to come to the US for a better life, now they’re leaving it. The only people who want to be in the US are people escaping climate crisis and political instability (often created by the US), people who are well enough off to take advantage of the collapse, and people who still believe the propaganda.

        I don’t expect the US to still exist in 20 or maybe even 10 years. This is just the beginning. I just wish those who can’t escape didn’t have to suffer though what’s happening now.

      • @Drewelite
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        811 months ago

        But I think we can criticize our government without acting like we live in a 3rd world country. America is among the highest quality of life for the average citizen. Imagine how we must sound to someone in an actual 3rd world country. Like a BMW driving trust fund kid complaining that daddy is a billionaire and we’re only millionaires. I agree that policies here affect the rest of the world. So we should do everything in our power to make this place better. But it’s disingenuous to act like we don’t still have a lot of opportunities.

    • @[email protected]
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      1711 months ago

      It’s always “____ is hateful towards americans”. I remember people saying the same in:

      9GAG (before it went to shit)
      Twitter (before it went to shit)
      Reddit (before it went to shit)

      Maybe it’s not about the social media? Maybe “Americans” (specifically US) has done so many terrible things, and continue do do them, is the problem?

      I don’t see people being “hateful” towards Canada…

      • @[email protected]
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        1011 months ago

        The Canadian government is so nice but fucking complicit in some bullshit. Sure our society isn’t as fucked as the US but we shouldn’t be free from criticism either. Our track record on indigenous issues is shameful.

        • @[email protected]
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          511 months ago

          I’m aware, sadly. But those are more internal issues, that don’t really affect the outer cuntries much. You also don’t go about shouting that Canada is the best country in the world and everyone else is a commie socialist lib etc. That the Canadian way of living is the only right way of living… I could go on.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        That’s an extremely wild take, and one I’m surprised to see voted highly.

        While I don’t think America is a bad place to live, you definitely don’t have the best reputation across the world when it comes to your standard of living. You have to pay obscene amounts for healthcare, your food safety standards are below other countries, your school system is known not for education but for target practice, you have religious nutjobs everywhere, you worship a constitution that basically every other country has, and you have a huge wealth divide.

        The latter is why immigration numbers are high. America is a very hard country to migrate to, but people will try because for many you can earn enough in a few years in the US to retire in your home country.

          • @[email protected]
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            611 months ago

            I’m literally not American. Most of us do, whereas many Americans either don’t venture out of their bubble, or have idealised versions of the world.

            • @[email protected]
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              211 months ago

              Most people in the world don’t travel nearly as much as Americans, and most are just as ignorant as Americans. I don’t care if you’re American or not.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          There are plenty of valid criticisms of both, and regardless, propaganda usually is based on truth.

    • @[email protected]
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      611 months ago

      It’s not perfect, and it’s far from perfect for a lot of people. Some times, we’re doing alright. But there are many moments where we resemble a tire fire with the best PR department on the planet. The optics don’t line up with the data, and that’s frustrating. That doesn’t mean that we’re all unhappy, but rather we’re wrestling with the dissonance around knowing it could/should be better, especially for those worse off than ourselves.

    • Cowbee [he/they]
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      611 months ago

      Lemmy is made up of majority Americans, so it makes sense to call out problems with America.

      • @[email protected]
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        511 months ago

        Ah, so it must be the American majority calling for nuking the USA on hexbear pages. Makes perfect sense.

        • @[email protected]
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          1111 months ago

          TBF, Hexbear is packed full of degenerate bozos and the clinically insane. It’s the intellectual equivalent of Wal Mart.

          • @[email protected]
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            211 months ago

            Been to a few Walmarts, never seen anyone trying to convince other patrons that they should be disintegrated by a wall of neutrons because they were born/live in the wrong hemisphere.

            My point is that not even close to “half” of the hate towards Americans is coming from Americans. I’d say maybe half is coming from bot farms but that’s a stretch.

            • @[email protected]
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              211 months ago

              I actually did witness a methed out good old boy yelling at some brown people about nuking Iraq in Walmart.

              They seemed more confused by it then anything, I’m pretty sure they were Indian.

            • @[email protected]
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              11 months ago

              I’m not disputing your argument, I’m simply pointing out that Hexbear is basically a shit-storm of yammering cretins and unlettered buffoonish morons. What one makes of that fact is their own business. I just don’t see how they are relevant to anything, regardless of how much hate they broadcast towards The West writ large.

              If they account for more than half the “hate” towards Americans on Lemmy, fine, but no one is obliged to take their nonsense seriously.

              They are not intellectually serious people and do not deserve to be viewed as such.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 months ago

      Agreed. Leaving should be a last resort. This is my fucking country and I’ll be damned if I won’t stay here and put up a fight for what I know it could be if we were more true to what we say we believe in. There are many hundreds of thousands of others like me, and maybe we lose in the end, but by God the fascists are going to know they were in a fight. Figuratively I mean. I don’t see actual violence as playing any real role in guiding the future of the US.

      Also, I live in the Pacific Northwest which is unlike anyplace else on the planet. I don’t want to live anywhere else. I guess I could move to BC , but they probably don’t want me and besides, I have an ex up there who I’d rather avoid.

      • @[email protected]
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        311 months ago

        Yeah, buy a bullet proof vest if you’re staying. I decided to stay and fight after Trump got elected and I got shot. A lot of people got shot, some for just being brown or queer. They will bring the violence to you and if you try to stop them from hurting other people, they will try to kill you. That’s their scam. It’s always been abuse others and claim the victim, all the way back to Hitler.

        I wish you the best of luck. The Pacific Northwest would be a wonderful place if it wasn’t part of the US. It was incredibly hard to leave, but there’s absolutely no way I could stay. I hope you win the fight. I’d love to come back some day if it’s ever worth coming back to.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          The Pacific Northwest would be a wonderful place if it wasn’t part of the US.

          Cascadia Now! Yeah, totally not happening at least until the US implodes, but one can dream.

          • @[email protected]
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            11 months ago

            It’s really worth looking at Rojava here. Democratic Confederalism can exist within borders. So norther Syria has it’s own military and acts independently, but is still technically part of Syria. That model could be a way to maintain autonomy and build a better future even within a collapsing US.

            And cascadia as an idea is really not intended to be another colonizer project anyway. Official secession would just be further occupying indigenous lands. Democratic Confederalism could offer an alternative while also embracing Land Back. That’s just my €0.02 anyway.

    • @[email protected]
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      511 months ago

      The US is the great evil, the main cause of all issues in the world. Fuck you guys honestly. You aren’t even self-aware enough to realise this. That’s why we in the global south fucking hate you 😁

    • @[email protected]
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      311 months ago

      Yeah I honestly don’t get it, I’m pretty happy living here. It’s mostly people that have never experienced living in the US that I see the hate coming from.

    • @[email protected]
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      711 months ago

      Just waiting for Europeans to finally buck up and accept us as political refugees. Talk about school shootings, Healthcare, so many bad things about the US, things that make me never want children. But would they like me, only separated from there by a few generations, to go back with my engineering degree and have children? Help the declining birthrate and following population decline? Guess Europe only wants illegal immigrants?

      • @[email protected]
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        2311 months ago

        You had me until the xenophobic bullshit last sentence.

        Actually, I started to suspect something was off when you began talking about declining birth rates since that’s a common talking point amongst replacement theory believers and other racists, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt until you confirmed your bigotry at the end.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 months ago

          Grow up. “I agree, until you said something I slightly don’t agree with. Now you’re a xenophobic racist and I disagree with you completely.” . Please just block me if you’re so fragile.

          • @[email protected]
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            1711 months ago

            "I agree, until you said something I slightly don’t agree with

            Yeah, that’s kind of how agreeing and disagreeing works…

            Now you’re a xenophobic racist and I disagree with you completely."

            Nah, what I (correctly) pointed out was that one sentence was xenophobic. I didn’t say that it was necessarily representative of you as a person or that it made me disagree with the things I agreed with before.

            I said that I didn’t like your comment anymore because it ended with a xenophobic sentence. There’s nothing odd about that. Seems I’m not the fragile person who needs to grow up here.

      • @[email protected]
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        2011 months ago

        We have enough rightwing dipshits already. Can confirm that we would not like you and rather take some based refugees who just want to live their lives.

      • @[email protected]
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        511 months ago

        Legitimate question: what is the concern with declining birth rate? Im no expert but it seems like the world currently has way more people than it ever had before and even in specific developed nations those nations were arguably doing just fine 50 years ago when they had lower populations too. What is the risk here?

        • @[email protected]
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          211 months ago

          Look at Japan right now to see where any other country will be in ~30 years. The declining birthrate has resulted in an unstable top heavy population full of old people dependent on the few young people. Which leads to more strain on young people, which means a lower birthrate. Which leads to more old people vs young.

          The risk isn’t the pure population number, it was great 50 years ago because everyone was young, it’s the distribution of the age in the population.

          But somehow people want to disagree with each other so much this is labeled a right wing talking point because conservatives encourage having kids. No, we need kids, and now all of them are going to be raised by conservatives.

          Idiocracy becomes less of a meme and more of a documentary every year.

        • @[email protected]
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          211 months ago

          A lot of economics is based on the idea that the population will keep growing. For example, pensions will fail if there are too many olds taking money out and not enough youngs paying into it.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 months ago

        I both want to get as many people out as possible and also see people stay and fix it. The problem is that fixing the US will take several years after it starts, and there’s no way it starts until it totally collapses, IMHO… At least the way it’s going.

        Edit: Also, you know, fuck the border. Borders are fundamentally racist and stupid, so the whole concept of any person being illegal is just fucking dumb.

        • @[email protected]
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          311 months ago

          I agree, nothing will change until collapse. I don’t think I have time for that though, I don’t have another 35 years just to start to fix things. Besides why would we go outside and find common ground with our neighbors when we can sit inside and create further, deeper, more specific barriers between each other.

    • @[email protected]
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      1011 months ago

      Lol, the last continent I’d want to move to is Europe.

      You have some of the fastest aging societies in the world. Your energy is imported from unstable regions that require the intervention of the US to keep them flowing. None of your nations have the ability to project power at scale. Some of your largest companies like BASF are shuttering entire divisions in Europe because they are no longer competitive. The IT start up environment in Europe is a joke.

      But please tell me more about MAGA, healthcare, school shootings, expensive college tuition and how big our trucks are.

      • @[email protected]
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        1811 months ago

        Europe has fast ageing societies because our people live long and prosperous lives.

        The only reason we get energy from unstable regions is because the US makes them unstable for their own profit.

        The EU has been projecting power towards plenty of international companies to force them to do whatever we deem necessary, all in favour of the consumer. And they are abiding, because of the EU’s power.

        The EU is proof the world does not need big companies. So I don’t know why you are licking their boots as if they were a good thing. We need less big companies, not more.

        In the EU you need a coherent start up plan before you are let loose on the market. None of this fuelled by hopes and dreams. Our start ups may be fewer, but they are more robust.

        And I will tell you more about how you have an entire political party about to elect a dictator. How your elite have brainwashed tons of you into thinking you don’t need to be healthy or have the power of a union. How school shootings are normalised and how bad you guys don’t want educated people. But sure, keep destroying the planet. It is not like we all live there.

        • @[email protected]
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          711 months ago

          Man, you must be hitting some of that premium copium that tankies love so much. Every sentence in that post is a lie.

        • @[email protected]
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          411 months ago

          Yeah the US made Russia unstable…you’re just making things up and I’m an idiot for even replying to you.

          • @[email protected]
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            211 months ago

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics)?wprov=sfla1

            With the exception of Belarus, the Eastern European states adopted shock therapy. Nearly all of these post-Soviet states suffered deep and prolonged recessions after shock therapy, with poverty increasing more than tenfold. The resulting crisis of the 1990s was twice as intense as the Great Depression in the countries of Western Europe and the United States in the 1930s. The hypothesized one time jump in prices intended as part of shock therapy actually led to a lengthy period of extremely high inflation with a drop in output and subsequent low growth rates.  Shock therapy devalued the modest wealth accumulated by individuals under socialism and amounted to a regressive redistribution of wealth in favor of elites who held non-monetary assets.  Contrary to the expectation of shock therapy proponents, Russia’s rapid transition to the market increased corruption, rather than alleviating it.

            The cost to human life was profound, as Russia suffered the worst peace time increase in mortality experienced by any industrialized country.  For the years 1987 and 1988, roughly 2% of Russia population lived in poverty (surviving on less than $4 a day), by 1993-1995, it was 50%. According to Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell A. Orenstein, a significant body of scholarship demonstrates that the rapid privatization schemes associated with neoliberal economic reforms did result in poorer health outcomes in former Eastern Bloc countries during the transition to capitalism, with the World Health Organization itself stating “IMF economic reform programs are associated with significantly worsened tuberculosis incidence, prevalence, and mortality rates in post-communist Eastern European and former Soviet countries.” They add that Western institutions and economists were indifferent to the consequences of the shock therapy they were advocating as their priorities included permanently dismantling the state socialist system and integrating these countries into the emerging global capitalist economy, and that many citizens of the former Eastern Bloc countries came to believe that Western powers were deliberately inflicting this suffering upon them as punishment for defying Western ideals about liberal democracy and market economics.

        • @[email protected]
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          411 months ago

          Europe has fast ageing societies because our people live long and prosperous lives.

          People living long & prosperous lives and having a young & growing population are not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

      • @[email protected]
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        1511 months ago

        You pointing out some of the worst thing about the US does not prevent us to bring it up or invalidate the argument.

        Because we are right in doing so…

      • @[email protected]
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        19 months ago

        None of your nations have the ability to project power at scale.

        Why is that important to literally anything apart from international penis measuring competitions?