America is not a good nation

[Hel_Books]

America started out as a genocidal slaveholding nation. Since then we've very gradually been getting better, in a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of way, but we still have a long way to go.

I've never quite understood this American need for self-flagellation. Yes, terrible things happened in the past in the USA, and are continuing even up to the present (you seem to be marinating in hundreds of millions of handguns nowadays, killing so very many every day, for example).

But, it's hardly fair to compare America to some Platonic ideal, is it? Brazil outlawed slavery more than two decades after the USA did. Women couldn't vote in Switzerland until 1971. Everyone living on the planet is living on land taken by conquerors at some point in the past, often the very recent past, if you look at, say, the India-China border or the Russia-Ukraine border. We could go on and on, cataloguing the Hutus with their machetes, the Saudi prince having a journalist dismembered, the Chinese Communist re-education camps in Xinjiang, the Tamil Tiger suicide bombers, Qatar using migrant workers as slave labourers dying of heat stroke to build a stadium for the World Cup. Even the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas were tribes, often quite proud of their warlike heritage, who conquered other tribes and took their land: complaining now about having it done to them seems a bit ironic.

Just ask yourself, why are so many people scrambling to immigrate, legally or illegally, to your horrible nation? Reminds me of the famous political cartoon of a belligerent border-crosser confronting a border patrolman, screaming, "I demand to be allowed to live and work in your racist country you fascist bastard!"

 

[Typo Fu Master]

Just ask yourself, why are so many people scrambling to immigrate, legally or illegally, to [America]?

This is the $64,000 question. If it's so bad, why are so many people trying to come here as opposed to some other country? America, where people are "living the dream." It always sounds so glamorous, though when I'm doing the daily grind to earn my pay its anything but. Still, this is my home and I don't want to live anywhere else.

Its also easy to say, "Don't like it here? Move!" but the reality is that the vast majority of us don't have that option.

Even most of the people complaining don't want to move either.

 

[Philthy_Phil]

Only the dumbest of the dumb think America is a good nation.

 

[Fuzzy1975]

This is the $64,000 question. If it's so bad, why are so many people trying to come here as opposed to some other country?

If you reversed the physical locations of Canada and USA, it would be Canada they migrate too. The USA physically borders on second world countries.

The only thing special, is the geography.

 

[Politruk]

This is the $64,000 question. If it's so bad, why are so many people trying to come here as opposed to some other country?

Because they can earn more money here than they can at home.

That's about it, really.

 

[Politruk]

Mike Lofgren writes:

True or not, those theories disregard the bedrock fact that rises like an Everest before us: Having been confronted with unrelenting evidence of who Donald Trump was through three election cycles, a constitutionally sufficient number of Americans chose a narcissistic egomaniac, convicted on multiple felony charges and indicted on many more, whose pathologies were visibly exacerbated by an obvious and increasing senile dementia.

I posit that the electorate did not vote for him in spite of all that; they voted for him because of it. The last taboo of American politics is something I am now going to break, because the evidence is painfully obvious.

Even as the media intermittently deign to perceive that the GOP as an institution might be authoritarian, or that money might rig the system, or that billionaires just might not be our friends, there is one actor that is invariably held harmless. In fact, it is regarded as virtuous, possessing a homespun wisdom that infinitely surpasses the sophistry of academia and so-called experts.

It is the American people, the fawned-over pet of every gassy idealist from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Thornton Wilder to the hack editorial writers of the present age. The “good sense of the people” is responsible for each bit of favorable fortune, and absolved of every disaster. I recall an interview with George F. Will (a consummate hack if ever there was), wherein he was asked about the implications for democracy of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

"That wasn’t the American people," was Will’s pat and smug response. Well, then, George, who were they? New Guinea highlanders? Martians? They were Americans, all right, right down to their Camp Auschwitz T-shirts and their s**t on the floor of the Capitol building.

So-called progressives are especially prone to this delusion. They have built an entire edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of corporate or governmental control and repression, it is somehow unconnected with the moral character of the people the system administers.

 

[BrightShinyGirl]

Mike Lofgren writes:

True or not, those theories disregard the bedrock fact that rises like an Everest before us: Having been confronted with unrelenting evidence of who Donald Trump was through three election cycles, a constitutionally sufficient number of Americans chose a narcissistic egomaniac, convicted on multiple felony charges and indicted on many more, whose pathologies were visibly exacerbated by an obvious and increasing senile dementia.

I posit that the electorate did not vote for him in spite of all that; they voted for him because of it. The last taboo of American politics is something I am now going to break, because the evidence is painfully obvious.

Even as the media intermittently deign to perceive that the GOP as an institution might be authoritarian, or that money might rig the system, or that billionaires just might not be our friends, there is one actor that is invariably held harmless. In fact, it is regarded as virtuous, possessing a homespun wisdom that infinitely surpasses the sophistry of academia and so-called experts.

It is the American people, the fawned-over pet of every gassy idealist from Walt Whitman to Carl Sandburg to Thornton Wilder to the hack editorial writers of the present age. The “good sense of the people” is responsible for each bit of favorable fortune, and absolved of every disaster. I recall an interview with George F. Will (a consummate hack if ever there was), wherein he was asked about the implications for democracy of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

"That wasn’t the American people," was Will’s pat and smug response. Well, then, George, who were they? New Guinea highlanders? Martians? They were Americans, all right, right down to their Camp Auschwitz T-shirts and their s**t on the floor of the Capitol building.

So-called progressives are especially prone to this delusion. They have built an entire edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of corporate or governmental control and repression, it is somehow unconnected with the moral character of the people the system administers.

Donald Trump won because the electoral college favors rural white voters. Most of America looks like L.A. -- multiracial, liberal, ethnic and diverse. One out of every 35 Americans lives in L.A. County. LA all by itself is bigger than 40 of the 50 states. Once we stop being ruled by the regressive whites, we'll be able to see what America really looks like.

 

[Politruk]

Donald Trump won because the electoral college favors rural white voters. Most of America looks like L.A. -- multiracial, liberal, ethnic and diverse. One out of every 35 Americans lives in L.A. County. LA all by itself is bigger than 40 of the 50 states. Once we stop being ruled by the regressive whites, we'll be able to see what America really looks like.

But in 2024, Trump won a majority of the popular vote too.