7 ms·
Some of us are not USians. I'd say if your goal is to make people elsewhere in the world love the US, then CIA dirty tricks isn't the way to do it. Dirty tricks
by incompatible 10y ago
Some of us are not USians. I'd say if your goal is to make people elsewhere in the world love the US, then CIA dirty tricks isn't the way to do it. Dirty tricks by other governments wouldn't do much if the US was a genuinely beneficial influence in the world. At the moment it's not so clear that the US is beneficial, with it doing some things that are useful, but which Trump seems to want to eliminate as soon as possible, and other things that are questionable.
- Cookingboy 10y agoNope, the goal is not to make the rest of the world love the US. It is to further our own national interest while fucking over our enemies. Just like any other countries that ever existed in the history of human civilization.
- incompatible 10y agoThat seems about right. You have to wonder what "national interest" really means though. Something to do with making US billionaires richer than their foreign competitors, I think.
- learc83 10y agoCurrently our national interests can be defined as whatever the latest talking head Trump was watching on Fox News said they were.
- cat199 10y agoMaintaining the use of the USD as default fiat currency for key commodities which in turn implies geopolitical leverage through access to USD and the banking system which supports it, with participation in this state of affairs defining what is and is not the 'accepted' system. See also: BRICS & recent political turmoil in Brasil, Ukraine
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- mmjaa 10y ago>Just like any other countries that ever existed in the history of human civilization. Self-Godwin'ed. Nice!
- learc83 10y agoThe accepted demonym in English is American. I don't go around dictating what inhabitants of other countries are called in their language. In the English speaking world, North and South America are considered 2 separate continent, and the single word American is universally understood to refer to citizens of the United States of America. We have referred to ourselves as American for over 200 hundreds years and we are the only country with the word America in the name.
- incompatible 10y agoWell, I'm a programmer and the ambiguity of "America" and "American" disturbs me. Maybe "US American" would be better than USian though, since it matches the name of the country.
- learc83 10y agoThere is always some form of ambiguity in natural languages. I get the desire to avoid it, but unless we want to communicate in Lojban, that's not possible. In the English speaking world, there is no continent called "America" there is only North America and South America. If you want to refer to both we would normally say "The Americas" or maybe "The New World". Since there is no "America" commonly used in English other than the country, there is for all practical purposes, no ambiguity. Use is what gives language meaning, and if you look at the numbers "American" is almost always used to mean a resident of the US. Attempting to force a fix on a perceived issue is never going to work. By the way prescriptivists have been trying to force manufactured demonyms on us for years and none of them have ever become mainstream. I've met several South Americans who insist that they are "American", but after investigating further, even in South America, the word "American" is almost never used in English to refer to people who come from what we call North and South America. When you think about it why would anyone want to refer to themselves as basically coming from the Western Hemisphere? There is no shared language, no shared culture, no shared government. It would be like saying "I'm from The Old World", when that applies to people from France, China, and Zimbabwe. It's pretty much a useless distinction. And language use patterns back that up.