7 ms·
Systemic racism and sexism (bigotry in general, and America to this day is overflowing with it - for Muslims, LGBT, Hispanics, Africans, Chinese, etc..), histor
by zanny 7y ago
Systemic racism and sexism (bigotry in general, and America to this day is overflowing with it - for Muslims, LGBT, Hispanics, Africans, Chinese, etc..), historical revisionism / fantasy, American exceptionalism, ideological imperialism, cults around jobs and work, corporate personification, the pervasive and toxic "I got mine, screw you" mindset, idolization of the rich, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, and anti-expertise cultures.
- NickBusey 7y agoNot sure why you are being down voted, this is a fantastic list of things this country desperately needs to improve upon.
- kortilla 7y agoBecause it’s an unfounded list of complaints. Other than American exceptionalism you could easily argue that all countries have sub cultures with those exact same problems.
- ITILitating 7y agoI feel like that doesn't stop them from being problems that we hope we can fix someday.
- bobthepanda 7y agoDoes the problem existing in other places make it an unfounded one? If my house is burning down it's not made acceptable by my neighbor's house also burning down.
- derefr 7y agoIt makes it a likely human-cultural universal problem that can't be fixed at the level of national politics (but rather requires something like transhuman genetic engineering to change the way our minds work, or something.) Better to focus on the problems that we have at least one constructive proof of being something other than an irreducible part of the "human 1.0" experience.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoBullshit. A huge chunk of the world used to not let people vote on their governance, or basically gave no rights to women. Turns out that declaring war against England solved part of that, and other actions have made huge headway around the world. The civil rights act had huge effects, despite it being a big problem in many other places.
- derefr 7y ago"A huge chunk of the world" and "literally every human being throughout history" are very different things. Like I said, a problem is potentially solvable politically if you have at least one constructive proof of people not doing that. If you don't, though, then it's likely one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal. If, for some reason, you thought that—to use a random example from the list—people having names was a bad thing, would you try to use politics to get people to stop naming their children? No; that'd be insane. People aren't going to give up doing that as long as they're still human beings in any sense we recognize. Even if you outlaw it, they'll still do it; it'll just be a secret. Same goes for many good things, but also for many bad things. You'll never be able to erase the human concept of e.g. people having things that are more "theirs" than someone else's (even in a communist totalitarian regime) or sexual jealousy (even if there's a central educational authority raising everyone polyamorous), or arbitrary etiquette fads (even in the context of a concrete replacement for them, like a military code of conduct) or people valuing kin over strangers (even if Effective Altruism propaganda were to be broadcast from loudspeakers on every corner.) You can't make a world without these things in them, without making a world without humans as we know them in them. There are problems amenable to politics. Maybe most problems. But some problems just... aren't. (These problematic aspects of humanity may be amenable to other solutions—potentially many! It's just that a political solution requires the majority of people to want it; and, by the fact that these are universals, the majority of humans will never want them gone.)
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoYes, cultural universals exist, but in the interest of staying on topic, you'll notice a distinct difference between e.g. people having names, and things on zanny's list or cultures that work overtime too much.
- kortilla 7y agoNice gish gallop. Those aren’t culturally ingrained in the US on any wide scale. It’s not the expectation to be racist to move up in the corporate ladder in the US. We’re talking about common culture across the majority of the group. Not even American exceptionalism is common in workplaces (e.g. see every big tech company). About the only thing that is common is that people think the country is fucked up because of “the other political party”.
- orpep90nxkfo 7y agoYou made connections between things and the workplace that the parent did not imply to my eye. It was an array and you started making a dict, assuming whatever connections you wanted. See Americans are trained to not be so gaudy but quietly believe in these things. I see it all the time when I actually push people to share their political views. Democrats and liberal minded folks totally ok with bombing the Middle East and making life cheaper and easier for America. So I guess it’s something of a ymmv, depending on whether you actively dig or just idly observe. I think what the internet has shown is we all have wildly varying ideas of what being free means at an individual scale but at a macro social like scale pretty much just follow the corporate drum beat.
- orpep90nxkfo 7y agoPush for universal services. IMO that’s the concrete way to begin to normalize away from the bulk of the things you describe. When we show the aristocracy we can peacefully organize around our own interests, that will have them properly concerned.