No Stupid Questions

The new American Dream is to get the fuck out of here.

Every government everywhere passes bad laws l, Canada past laws requiring exposure on online media to be a certain percentage Canadian, but then didn't give a way for "small" online creators ( non company run) to join the system. The UK is straight up attempting to ban encryption. The French President told the people of the country "no fuck you" after they protested for months about a law to increase pension age. No country is perfect, every nation has active issues. Anyone saying America is the worst, is on aware of what is going on elsewhere in other countries.

No. The US has its problems but it's not the hellhole people like to make it out to be.

It helps to look at the US in parts rather than as a homogeneous block. The country is huge and varied with 300M people in a land area larger than Europe. Laws can be wildly different from state to state, especially on hot topics like abortion or gun ownership or drug possession. Some states are filthy rich and others are depressingly poor. Some places are perfectly safe and others are dangerous.

For example, take a look at these maps comparing US states to European countries. Depending on the metric the US can look great or awful compared to Europe.

Mass shootings, although there are indeed many, are a small percentage of the gun deaths in the US. Most are suicide, next most common are arguments outside bars. Most common weapon in gun homicides is a handgun.

Research shows that income inequality causes crime and you can see that more unequal nations (Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Israel) have more violence.

The problem with the US is it's a sanctuary for capitalists, capital and capitalism. Worse than anything that the US does or allows to happen to its own people, is what our government/corporations do to "developing nations". Invasions, supporting coups, fighting to suppress labor rights and wages, extracting natural resources with little compensation, overthrowing governments that try to stop any of that, supporting genocide, committing genocide, chemical warfare, biological warfare, nuclear warfare. Any socialist country they can't overthrow they'll try to starve through embargoes.

Anyway, the worst states are ones where abortion is outlawed, lawmakers fight access to public health care or any public resources that don't go to the wealthy. Usually these states are controlled by the wealthy, like coal bosses running West Virginia into the ground. Capitalists have been using evangelical christianity in north and south America to scare voters into voting right-wing on culture war issues like abortion and transphobia. They use reactionary tendencies like hatred of foreigners, hatred of gun control, hatred of schools teaching the history of how our country treated black people, etc, to keep people voting for the right-wingers who also happen to be the friendliest to business.

Both major political parties are right-wing pro-capitalist parties. Some states do have some social safety nets for health care and welfare but being poor is a horrible experience in every state. 50,000 people die yearly from lack of health care access, not including COVID deaths. There's really no state you can live or party you can vote for to get away from it.

I've lived in a few less right-wing states. A friend of a friend was killed by police while he was suspected of shoplifting, trying to run away. Some kid killed himself in my high school while i was there. I live in a town where there's lots of homeless people and syringes all over the place. 3 people in my family died of COVID.

Basically the US is a fascist country. Fascism is when the wealthy consolidate their power over government, in the face of growing violence and instability from growing inequality. The point of fascism is to protect capitalism from these growing threats by creating a police state, deflecting blame for hardship onto minorities, and handing off chunks of the government to the wealthy through privatization. The wealthy and the government essentially merge, they become the same people with the same goals.

In 2015 I was in Niger doing NGO work and the founder of the NGO said to me that the most important thing about America is the peaceful transition of power. That next year that transition of power came under direct attack and then again in 2020.

From my travels and the people I talk to, we have been under attack since at least 2008. From domestic terrorists working with foreign governments. Factions in spy agencies actively engaged in domestic espionage to help elites take more power. Cultist religious mega churches spreading misinformation and conspiracies in rural areas for decades priming for a “revolution”.

Billionaires that you hear about daily are also in on it.

You better fight for your democracy by showing up to every town meeting you can America because you will absolutely lose everything. Support unions and delete that extreme individualism in your programming that capitalist America wants to instill in each person so you never organize against them.

This is the time to get out in front of 2024 and fight for your rights and a reasonable society not this psycho bullshit we are stuck in right now.

Yes and no. Better than a lot of places in a lot of ways, worse than a lot of our peers in a lot of ways.

It’s not as bad as they say it is. And yes it does vary from region to region a great deal.

There are lots of worse places to be, but it definitely isn't "namba wan". Remember, it's a country of extremes and superlatives. "Everything" is "always" the "worst" or the "best". There's "never" a middleground.

Also, out interface with the US is online and the media. Online, people often express their unfiltered opinion or an extreme opinion + behavior, simply because they aren't face to face with others. It feels much less intimate and thus people behave that way. This has been going on long enough that the opinions online have taken a foothold IRL and the US is a good example thereof (from my outside view).

Also, don't forget, there are many people speaking English and talking about the US that do not actually live there and weigh in on stuff. Some crazy af opinions might not even be coming from a person physically in the US.

I've lived in the US for over 50 years and yes, in many ways it's really shitty here. I look at how other countries function and wonder why we can't do the same thing. The US is "supposedly" the greatest country in the world and yet, there is so much wrong with it.

Granted, there are good things too (depending on where you live and your status, of course.)

Yes and no.

We do have mass shootings, but we also live in a country of 330 million (humongous population size), but every mass shooting makes national news, so it seems far worse than it is. Also, most mass shootings are gang violence that get lumped in with what we normally consider "random mass shootings" to pump up the numbers and scare people.

Healthcare could definitely be better, but 67% of Americans are satisfied with their insurance. I would still much prefer a universal healthcare system.

Overall, America definitely has its ups and downs, but a lot of the "AMERICA BAD" rhetoric is just part of a reddit-style circlejerk where people get socially rewarded for trashing it.

Expect this comment to be downvoted from the same crew.