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Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fai
by rootusrootus 6mo ago
Despite all the online rhetoric, and the popularity of mis-naming political movements, sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves.
- senderista 6mo agoI think that's broadly true: both sides want America to fail when the other side is in power in order to prove they're right.
- gcanyon 6mo agoI don't want "the other side" to fail, and I absolutely don't wan the U.S. to fail when they are in power. I want the U.S. to succeed, and for "the other side" to be competent and fair.
- krsw 6mo agoClassic enlightened centrist take. One side yells when the other dismantles the institutions that let the country work, so both sides are equally bad.
- californical 6mo agoBoth bad, and one is more bad than the other. They’re not equally bad but they are both very bad
- chipsrafferty 6mo agoYes the US is more bad, agreed
- disillusioned 6mo agoThis is a bit like saying a hangnail and a gangrenous amputation are "not equally bad but they are both very bad". One is literally chopping things off to permanently alter them. The other is, at times, uncomfortable and frustrating. The false equivalence of doing the "both bad!" song and dance serves to so radically under-emphasize the absolute wanton, orders-of-magnitude-worse levels of corruption and evisceration of norms of one side by reducing it to "more bad than the other but they're both very bad." It allows the window to shift to normalize the sort of destruction of systems we're seeing by hand waving away how "the other guys aren't great, either!" It's borderline discourse malpractice at this point, and should be called out as such.
- rootusrootus 6mo agoThe enlightened centrist take is not entirely wrong, though. The left definitely has some blind spots, among them their purist dedication to perfect morals and a willingness to tell anyone who does not perfectly agree to piss off. While the right is comfortable holding their nose when white supremacists hang around because it gets them a bigger coalition, the left will excommunicate someone for saying out loud that they think trans women are not exactly equivalent to biological women. This shrinking of the coalition is how we ended up enduring another Trump presidency. Not to mention the complete fiasco that was the 2024 presidential race. We should have thrown out the entirety of DNC leadership several levels deep for letting that happen.
- cestith 6mo agoThere’s a bit of a duality about perfect agreement within the voters for the party’s candidates and somewhat within the party membership itself. Yeah, there’s a lot of telling each other to piss off. There’s a lot of jockeying for the platform and the primaries. But come the general, it’s a minority of the voters who will sit it out or vote for a minor party. Sometimes it’s a large enough minority to hand things to the Republicans, though.
- crote 6mo agoA massive problem in the US is that the completely broken two-party system has essentially killed the political spectrum. People more-or-less vote against the party they dislike more, not for the party they want. To see any form of change you need someone like Trump to completely take over a party in one go and kill the old one from inside. From an outside perspective the US does not have a political left. The policies proposed by the Democrats are roughly in line with the mainstream right-wing parties in the rest of the world. A mainstream left-wing party would look an awful lot like someone like Bernie Sanders - and we all know the Democrats would rather platform a wet paper towel and lose than see him gain any kind of power!
- drfloyd51 6mo agoStrong disagree. One side is clearly interested in helping others simply because they need help. The other is clearly interested in help others that they can relate to (look like themselves) and have earned the right to help (such as believing in the right god.) or only helping people that can help them back.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- NoMoreNicksLeft 6mo agoQuite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are. And we can even falsify this hypothesis a bit... such people would, I speculate, be more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping. They'll tend to arrange the help in such a way as to garner the most publicity. And, most of all, they'll allocate their efforts such that they're vocal about how they're the good guys doing all the helping more than they're actively helping. Just to make sure everyone notices.
- ImPostingOnHN 6mo ago> Quite a few on one side seem to want to "help others" so they can demonstrate publicly how awesome and righteous they are Being awesome because you help those in need? How horrible! > more interested in the appearance of helping than in the substance of helping This is a common and tired talking point: "virtue signalling". It often comes from people who are less helpful than others, and resent how more helpful people receive accolades. Their own personal judgement about whether something actually helps isn't authoritative, and is usually motivated reasoning anyways.
- ryandrake 6mo ago"Government shouldn't help people" is such a bizarrely popular take in the USA.
- elzbardico 6mo agoIt is not a matter of hate or love. But the fact that people in charge doesn't give a fuck at any other thing beyond their personal interests. But this problem is not exclusive to America.
- ben_w 6mo agoNah; last but one job I had an Iranian coworker, and I asked if the way the regime calls Israel and the US the "Great Satan and Little Satan" was serious or a quirk of translation. Apparently the regime is quite serious about the US being the actual devil.
- drowsspa 6mo agoI think the issue is about our not believing what religious people themselves tell us about their reasoning
- actionfromafar 6mo agoHegseth reasons? I don’t see it.
- IAmBroom 6mo agoGod's angels typically don't bomb your little girl's school. All I'm saying is, I could see how someone who believes Satan influences the world would come to that idea.
- robocat 6mo agoGod is documented as being rather keen on genocidal smiting. That is part of the exact problem. I googled two relevant examples: 1: God commands King Saul: attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants 2: When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, they were often commanded to carry out total destruction against the Canaanite nations. "they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass" I'm not into religion, but it has had a massive influence on my culture (NZ) so I pay some attention to it.
- BobbyJo 6mo agoHoly books seem to be buffets that people just pick their favorite dishes from, for the most part. At least, in the western world. I can't speak to elsewhere.
- mschuster91 6mo ago> sometimes I think the people who hate America the most and want it to fail are Americans themselves. That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that. At the same time, such a revamp is desperately needed - the issues with the status quo are reeking - and everyone knows that it is highly, highly unlikely to get that done by ordinary democratic means due to the sheer inertia of hundreds of years of fossilized bureaucracy and individual/party interests. And that is why so many people tend to vote for whoever shouts "destroy the country" the loudest - and not just in the US (MAGA) or UK ("Reform"), but also in Germany (AfD), Spain (Vox) or Italy (Salvini/Meloni), where economic inequality and perspectivelessness has hit absurd levels. Let it all burn to ashes, burn everything, even if one goes down with the fire, eat the rich, and try to build something more sane this time.
- rootusrootus 6mo ago> That's because the US (and the UK) are about the only countries in this world that haven't had the entirety of their legal, economical and political system completely revamped at least once in the last 100 years - most countries average more than that. I usually get downvoted when I make an observation along these lines, but I will go for it again -- IMO some of the reason Europe has pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy is because a couple world wars last century reduced much of it to rubble, including the systems of governance. The UK mostly escaped that, and the US escaped nearly all of it. Which is one reason we can still have a lot of old electrical infrastructure, for example, that is pushing 100 years old, and a Constitutional system 250 years old. I think a major problem with the system in the US is the difficulty changing it. There is a balance, and a lot of room for differing opinions on how flexible it really ought to be, but I suspect there is broad agreement that it is too inflexible. We rely too much on changing interpretations rather than changing the fundamentals. Perhaps we really do need to risk a second Constitutional Convention. Or we will end up with a worse alternative.
- nradov 6mo agoIf Europe has "pulled ahead in infrastructure and policy" then why do they have nothing to show for it? They can't even protect their own sea lines of communication.
- soulofmischief 6mo agoThe American government is a psyop. I love my country quite literally to death. Death plays a strong role in the concept of freedom in American philosophy: Give me liberty, or give me death (yes, I know the real context of this quote), etc. And so when my government wants to destroy my country, its land and its people, divide us, commodify us and our life experiences, and also export this kind of systematic industrial exploitation across the world, through colonies and coups and political assassinations; yeah, I hate that government a lot. I hate it to death. The American government has been an enemy to America, and an enemy to Americans. Since the beginning, with our treatment of the natives. You'd do well to separate the land, people and government of a nation; confusing them only further serves State propaganda. We force children to say a pledge to our country in school, but it's really to our government. It's political brainwashing. I have refused to say the pledge since becoming politically aware enough around age 7. I cannot tersely express the amount of institutional abuse I suffered for this position. Teachers would ostracize me, bully me, punish me, attempt to physically force me to say it, write me up for detention, get my guardians to abuse me at home over it, etc. Like I said, the American government is a psyop.
- Shitty-kitty 6mo agoThe pledge is not to some painted cloth or the current government but the community of people you are part of and the decision of who leads them, made thru free and fair elections. I really thought about its meaning as someone that chose to come here and join this community out of my own free will. IDN, Perhaps people that are taught to memorize it as children simply regard as mantra and never think about its meaning. PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge, most often to fatherland/motherland or even a King or Tyrant.
- soulofmischief 6mo agoI would love for you to explain how the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance is not a form of youth brainwashing. I've already discussed how I was personally targeted in my scholastic years as they only person in my schools refusing to participate, so you already knows what happens if you exercise your first amendment rights. > made thru free and fair elections Where? What does "free" or "fair" mean here? It is not a secret that the US is a failed democratic republic that looks more like an inverted totalitarian state today. It's hard for things to be "fair" when there exists a vast capital asymmetry between those writing the law and those "voting" for it. Lobbyists, state actors and NGOs deploy billions of dollars into brainwashing the public about the US's image and actions, both domestic and foreign. We are a neoliberal colonial state, that even in this exact moment are actively attempting to expand our colonial reach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism#Criticism > PS: There is no country on Earth that doesn't have some sort of pledge And my grandfather used to say, as he beat me viciously, "This is nothing, you should have seen what my father used to do to me." Historical presence does not justify anything, and never has.
- tranceylc 6mo agoIt might be hard to accurately tell if those who hold those opinions are Americans or not, just from online rhetoric. I’m Canadian for example.