4 ms·

To the people asking the point of this list: because it's perfectly fine to be proud of the place where you live. The United States is something to be extremel

by blhack 9y ago

To the people asking the point of this list: because it's perfectly fine to be proud of the place where you live. The United States is something to be extremely proud of. The way we treat workers, our regard for human rights, our regard for individual freedom, and our willingness to overcome adversity. I'm proud of my country. I think it's cool to buy products that support it's continued prosperity. Yes, there are countries that are better at many of these things individually. On a pragmatic level, pride in where you live translates into emotional investment in where you live, which benefits EVERYONE. In the case of the US, that everyone is a global term.

ekianjo 9y ago
> our regard for human rights I'm fine with the general idea of "being proud" if that's what you are into, but don't include human rights in that list when you have more than 2 millions of people in jail as we speak.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  I'm all for calling the US out for the many ways in which we get human rights wrong, but I also think it is misguided to ignore that the US has (until very recently) been among the most consistent and almost certainly the most powerful voice in support of human rights around the world. Even if we're hypocrites (and we often are), just talking the talk on this is useful.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    If the US is preaching a human rights message, it is entirely undercut by hypocrisy. I would argue that advocacy by the United States actively harms efforts to advance human rights in many parts of the world, because the US so transparently fails to practice what it preaches. This hypocrisy and selective attention deprives the term "human rights" of any universal value and turns it into a political weapon. The message is clear. You need to sign the human rights convention that we drafted, but we don't need to ratify it because our domestic laws are perfectly sufficient. You can't torture your citizens, but we can extraordinarily render them to black sites and have someone torture them for us. You can't detain your political enemies without trial, but we can lock ours up indefinitely in Guantanamo. You can't interfere with our democracy through Facebook advertising, but we can riddle your government with CIA agents, abduct your president or bring about "regime change" by means of a "humanitarian intervention". There's an entire Wikipedia article entitled "United States involvement in regime change". The list of democratically elected leaders who were replaced with tyrants with the full support of the US government makes for sobering reading. It's clear that there was never a point in US history where the bolstering of democracy abroad took precedence over US interests. If you want to argue that the US is no worse than average, then I'm not going to argue too strenuously. If you want to claim that the US is a beacon of liberty and justice, I want to see some evidence. All I see is the banner of "human rights" being used as a cloak to protect US national interests and discarded whenever it's inconvenient.
    - sanderjd 9y ago
      I don't think your comment contradicts my comment. My point is that all the "you need to"s and "you can't"s in your second paragraph are still useful, regardless of our own actions. There are two solutions to hypocrisy, you can either stop doing the thing you say is bad or you can just stop saying it is bad. Is the second solution better? All else equal, a world where the US attempts to hold other countries to a higher standard than it holds itself is better than a world where it keeps its mouth shut entirely.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  Human rights is broader than incarceration, and incarceration rates need not reflect poorly on human rights (though if you wish to claim that people are in prison who should not be, your case would be improved).
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    Well putting folks in jail for victimless crimes (such as drug offenders) is, for one, very wrong in terms of human rights.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
      And that I may agree with. I objected to the vague "people in jail is bad" argument, but there are more specific versions that are compelling.
Aloha 9y ago
> I'm proud of my country. I think it's cool to buy products that support it's continued prosperity. For me at least, its less of pride, and more of ensuring that the next generation has opportunities. I think keeping as much manufacturing here as we can is good for all of us overall.
wavefunction 9y ago
The things you've listed are inconsistently respected in this country. I love it since it's mine and it's home but there's no need to be inaccurate about the state of this place.
djsumdog 9y ago
Great? Really? The country that flys predator drones, runs the School of the Americas, orchestrated the Bay of Pigs, sold guns to the Contras to fund a war in Iran, funnels tons of guns and buys tons of drugs out of South and Central America, driving people to flee their homes? I'm not proud of this country. This isn't even a democracy. It's an oligarchy. Only the opinions of the top 10% of income earners even remotely match policy decisions. This isn't new now, it's been this way for longer than I've been alive and longer than my parents have been alive. Whether it's the Rockefeller funded WWF kicking tribes of their lands in Africa to preserve "wilderness areas" or phone companies outsourcing building phones to China so their countries turn into polluted wastelands instead of ours, the high income countries of the world are only "great" because they exploit everyone else.
- Aloha 9y ago
  Without sounding like an asshole, either be part of the solution, or kindly find some place more suitable for your world outlook - if you have solutions for some of these problems, I'd be glad to hear them. In the mean time, I'm going to be proud of what my country has accomplished, even if I often don't like my government very much, our history is unique, our culture rich and varied, so while yes, everything in that first paragraph you said is true, I'm still proud to be an American overall.
  - drb91 9y ago
    What does pride even mean if you choose only to think of the things of which you approve? You have pride for something that does not exist. It only makes sense to accept the totality of your nation, including all the ugly aspects. I mean I love this land, and my neighbors, but the government I’m almost completely ambivalent about. This is hardly a recipe for patriotism.
    - Aloha 9y ago
      I make a distinction between my government and my country, I'm proud of my country but somewhere between indifferent and hostile to my government.
new299 9y ago
I think it's more than that actually. I don't live in the US, but I'd be interested in buying good made in the US if the US continues to provide a good working environment for its workers. If the same item, of the same quality, is made in the US and China I might prefer to buy the US item if I felt the US workers were treated better overall.
tensor 9y ago
Your medical system treats people as beasts. On world good, there are many other countries who contribute to world good as much as the US. As a Canadian, my impression is that most of the US genuinely only cares for themselves and has an over inflated ego. I'd sooner see resources poured into countries that really give a damn about the world.
- RhodesianHunter 9y ago
  > I'd sooner see resources poured into Countries that really give a damn about the world. Lucky for you, you are free to spend your money where you please.
- adventured 9y ago
  > On world good, there are many other countries who contribute to world good as much as the US. As a Canadian, my impression is that most of the US genuinely only cares for themselves and has an over inflated ego. No, very measurably there is not in fact. According to Bill Gates - who I guarantee knows more on the subject than you do - the US is by far the greatest contributor to: general global aid, global medical aid, global medical research, and public health research, with (again per Gates) the NIH and its connected branches representing over half of the world's public health research. Americans for over a century have been by far the world's most charitable people. That isn't even something up for dispute, it has been universally recognized in the charity world for half a century at this point. US tax dollars are currently keeping millions of people in Africa alive. America's richest routinely give away all of their wealth (frequently to the poor outside of the US); they're the only country in world history that has ever done anything even remotely that. From Rockefeller & Carnegie to Gates & Buffett. America's era of super power dominance has simultaneously been the most prosperous and safest the world has ever seen, with the fewest major wars. Famines are at record lows. Global poverty is at a record low. The global standard of living is at a record high. Global education levels are at record highs. The global median income has climbed dramatically over 4-5 decades. Germany, Japan, South Korea - three of the most prosperous, peaceful major nations in modern times, all kept safe and shepherded by the US over decades, including as it pertained to their government systems and defense. Those three are pillars of the global economy and important pillars of global political stability. Americans have kept South Korea safe for six decades from several communist regimes that desperately wanted to destroy it. Americans kept Western Europe safe from the Soviets marching further west after WW2. They did that for decades at extreme cost. They could have just gone home, West Germany would have collapsed, who knows where the Soviets would have stopped. Iraq? Shouldn't have gone in there. The US didn't take their oil, the US didn't annex their territory, and then the US proceeded to vaporize a trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to keep the Iraqis from killing each other in civil war, the context of which dates back hundreds of years; and when they asked, the US left. What other empire has ever behaved like that? What other empire wouldn't have just tried to annex Japan, South Korea, and parts of Europe? For a century the US has had the world's wealthiest, largest economy, and for a century it has given more charitably than any other nation. What other empire has ever behaved like that? For 70 years the US has had by far the world's most powerful military, and yet it has annexed how much territory through military invasions and conquering in that time? What other empire has ever behaved like that?
schrodinger 9y ago
>I'm proud of my country. I think it's cool to buy products that support it's continued prosperity. Its! (No apostrophe) :)
rayiner 9y ago
Thank you for this post. In hipster terms think of it as localism. Recently, I’ve been trying to buy all my eggs from local Maryland farmers instead of ones in Virginia. I don’t care if I’m being provincial, it feels good to support the people near me.
partycoder 9y ago
A powerful statement, but it is not true. I empathize with you, since I see where you are coming from and I've met people like you, but I do not sympathize with you. While there are decent, hard working people with solid values, you need to be honest and take a look at the entire picture. Sometimes it is easy to have a better perspective from the outside, as a foreigner, where you can see more clearly what the US does to other countries, and what are the costs of the American way of life not simply the benefits. Sometimes it is easy to realize this as an ethnic minority. How many people had to be enslaved, lynched, tortured, assassinated, incarcerated, prejudiced upon, extrajudicially killed, physically removed, ethnically cleansed so you can be where you are today?. Just going to leave this quick reminder here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un... Going to highlight one relatively recent event, the Massacre of Greenwood, Tulsa in 1921: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3Fxe4mDP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3Fxe4mDP4 . We could also mention the mass sterilization program in Puerto Rico, and countless other horrible events, but let's stop there. I think I've made my point. Many countries have acted unfairly in their history and that cannot be changed. But what can change is the acceptance of past mistakes and showing an intent to change. Sweeping everything under the historic rug only makes things worse.
tonyedgecombe 9y ago
Which is fine, the problem comes when you tell everybody it's the best country in the world. This is the same as saying everywhere else is worse. Frankly the rest of the world is a bit sick of hearing that.

by blhack 9y ago

ekianjo 9y ago

> our regard for human rights I'm fine with the general idea of "being proud" if that's what you are into, but don't include human rights in that list when you have more than 2 millions of people in jail as we speak.

sanderjd 9y ago
I'm all for calling the US out for the many ways in which we get human rights wrong, but I also think it is misguided to ignore that the US has (until very recently) been among the most consistent and almost certainly the most powerful voice in support of human rights around the world. Even if we're hypocrites (and we often are), just talking the talk on this is useful.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  If the US is preaching a human rights message, it is entirely undercut by hypocrisy. I would argue that advocacy by the United States actively harms efforts to advance human rights in many parts of the world, because the US so transparently fails to practice what it preaches. This hypocrisy and selective attention deprives the term "human rights" of any universal value and turns it into a political weapon. The message is clear. You need to sign the human rights convention that we drafted, but we don't need to ratify it because our domestic laws are perfectly sufficient. You can't torture your citizens, but we can extraordinarily render them to black sites and have someone torture them for us. You can't detain your political enemies without trial, but we can lock ours up indefinitely in Guantanamo. You can't interfere with our democracy through Facebook advertising, but we can riddle your government with CIA agents, abduct your president or bring about "regime change" by means of a "humanitarian intervention". There's an entire Wikipedia article entitled "United States involvement in regime change". The list of democratically elected leaders who were replaced with tyrants with the full support of the US government makes for sobering reading. It's clear that there was never a point in US history where the bolstering of democracy abroad took precedence over US interests. If you want to argue that the US is no worse than average, then I'm not going to argue too strenuously. If you want to claim that the US is a beacon of liberty and justice, I want to see some evidence. All I see is the banner of "human rights" being used as a cloak to protect US national interests and discarded whenever it's inconvenient.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    I don't think your comment contradicts my comment. My point is that all the "you need to"s and "you can't"s in your second paragraph are still useful, regardless of our own actions. There are two solutions to hypocrisy, you can either stop doing the thing you say is bad or you can just stop saying it is bad. Is the second solution better? All else equal, a world where the US attempts to hold other countries to a higher standard than it holds itself is better than a world where it keeps its mouth shut entirely.
yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
Human rights is broader than incarceration, and incarceration rates need not reflect poorly on human rights (though if you wish to claim that people are in prison who should not be, your case would be improved).
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Well putting folks in jail for victimless crimes (such as drug offenders) is, for one, very wrong in terms of human rights.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    And that I may agree with. I objected to the vague "people in jail is bad" argument, but there are more specific versions that are compelling.

Aloha 9y ago

> I'm proud of my country. I think it's cool to buy products that support it's continued prosperity. For me at least, its less of pride, and more of ensuring that the next generation has opportunities. I think keeping as much manufacturing here as we can is good for all of us overall.

wavefunction 9y ago

The things you've listed are inconsistently respected in this country. I love it since it's mine and it's home but there's no need to be inaccurate about the state of this place.

djsumdog 9y ago

Great? Really? The country that flys predator drones, runs the School of the Americas, orchestrated the Bay of Pigs, sold guns to the Contras to fund a war in Iran, funnels tons of guns and buys tons of drugs out of South and Central America, driving people to flee their homes? I'm not proud of this country. This isn't even a democracy. It's an oligarchy. Only the opinions of the top 10% of income earners even remotely match policy decisions. This isn't new now, it's been this way for longer than I've been alive and longer than my parents have been alive. Whether it's the Rockefeller funded WWF kicking tribes of their lands in Africa to preserve "wilderness areas" or phone companies outsourcing building phones to China so their countries turn into polluted wastelands instead of ours, the high income countries of the world are only "great" because they exploit everyone else.

Aloha 9y ago
Without sounding like an asshole, either be part of the solution, or kindly find some place more suitable for your world outlook - if you have solutions for some of these problems, I'd be glad to hear them. In the mean time, I'm going to be proud of what my country has accomplished, even if I often don't like my government very much, our history is unique, our culture rich and varied, so while yes, everything in that first paragraph you said is true, I'm still proud to be an American overall.
- drb91 9y ago
  What does pride even mean if you choose only to think of the things of which you approve? You have pride for something that does not exist. It only makes sense to accept the totality of your nation, including all the ugly aspects. I mean I love this land, and my neighbors, but the government I’m almost completely ambivalent about. This is hardly a recipe for patriotism.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    I make a distinction between my government and my country, I'm proud of my country but somewhere between indifferent and hostile to my government.

new299 9y ago

I think it's more than that actually. I don't live in the US, but I'd be interested in buying good made in the US if the US continues to provide a good working environment for its workers. If the same item, of the same quality, is made in the US and China I might prefer to buy the US item if I felt the US workers were treated better overall.

tensor 9y ago

Your medical system treats people as beasts. On world good, there are many other countries who contribute to world good as much as the US. As a Canadian, my impression is that most of the US genuinely only cares for themselves and has an over inflated ego. I'd sooner see resources poured into countries that really give a damn about the world.

RhodesianHunter 9y ago
> I'd sooner see resources poured into Countries that really give a damn about the world. Lucky for you, you are free to spend your money where you please.
adventured 9y ago
> On world good, there are many other countries who contribute to world good as much as the US. As a Canadian, my impression is that most of the US genuinely only cares for themselves and has an over inflated ego. No, very measurably there is not in fact. According to Bill Gates - who I guarantee knows more on the subject than you do - the US is by far the greatest contributor to: general global aid, global medical aid, global medical research, and public health research, with (again per Gates) the NIH and its connected branches representing over half of the world's public health research. Americans for over a century have been by far the world's most charitable people. That isn't even something up for dispute, it has been universally recognized in the charity world for half a century at this point. US tax dollars are currently keeping millions of people in Africa alive. America's richest routinely give away all of their wealth (frequently to the poor outside of the US); they're the only country in world history that has ever done anything even remotely that. From Rockefeller & Carnegie to Gates & Buffett. America's era of super power dominance has simultaneously been the most prosperous and safest the world has ever seen, with the fewest major wars. Famines are at record lows. Global poverty is at a record low. The global standard of living is at a record high. Global education levels are at record highs. The global median income has climbed dramatically over 4-5 decades. Germany, Japan, South Korea - three of the most prosperous, peaceful major nations in modern times, all kept safe and shepherded by the US over decades, including as it pertained to their government systems and defense. Those three are pillars of the global economy and important pillars of global political stability. Americans have kept South Korea safe for six decades from several communist regimes that desperately wanted to destroy it. Americans kept Western Europe safe from the Soviets marching further west after WW2. They did that for decades at extreme cost. They could have just gone home, West Germany would have collapsed, who knows where the Soviets would have stopped. Iraq? Shouldn't have gone in there. The US didn't take their oil, the US didn't annex their territory, and then the US proceeded to vaporize a trillion dollars and thousands of soldiers trying to keep the Iraqis from killing each other in civil war, the context of which dates back hundreds of years; and when they asked, the US left. What other empire has ever behaved like that? What other empire wouldn't have just tried to annex Japan, South Korea, and parts of Europe? For a century the US has had the world's wealthiest, largest economy, and for a century it has given more charitably than any other nation. What other empire has ever behaved like that? For 70 years the US has had by far the world's most powerful military, and yet it has annexed how much territory through military invasions and conquering in that time? What other empire has ever behaved like that?

schrodinger 9y ago

>I'm proud of my country. I think it's cool to buy products that support it's continued prosperity. Its! (No apostrophe) :)

rayiner 9y ago

Thank you for this post. In hipster terms think of it as localism. Recently, I’ve been trying to buy all my eggs from local Maryland farmers instead of ones in Virginia. I don’t care if I’m being provincial, it feels good to support the people near me.

partycoder 9y ago

A powerful statement, but it is not true. I empathize with you, since I see where you are coming from and I've met people like you, but I do not sympathize with you. While there are decent, hard working people with solid values, you need to be honest and take a look at the entire picture. Sometimes it is easy to have a better perspective from the outside, as a foreigner, where you can see more clearly what the US does to other countries, and what are the costs of the American way of life not simply the benefits. Sometimes it is easy to realize this as an ethnic minority. How many people had to be enslaved, lynched, tortured, assassinated, incarcerated, prejudiced upon, extrajudicially killed, physically removed, ethnically cleansed so you can be where you are today?. Just going to leave this quick reminder here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_Un... Going to highlight one relatively recent event, the Massacre of Greenwood, Tulsa in 1921: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3Fxe4mDP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO3Fxe4mDP4 . We could also mention the mass sterilization program in Puerto Rico, and countless other horrible events, but let's stop there. I think I've made my point. Many countries have acted unfairly in their history and that cannot be changed. But what can change is the acceptance of past mistakes and showing an intent to change. Sweeping everything under the historic rug only makes things worse.

tonyedgecombe 9y ago

Which is fine, the problem comes when you tell everybody it's the best country in the world. This is the same as saying everywhere else is worse. Frankly the rest of the world is a bit sick of hearing that.