Just FYI.
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Yeah, for sure. The Russians have been busy in all countries. The reason things got out of hand in the states is because you have a two party system. You only need to control a few people to control enough to take over the country.
That being said, Americans need to take a page out of the French play book at this point.
If you try to make a Frenchman work an extra half hour a week, Paris will burn. That's the level of outrage you need here. Nothing short of that will be effective. Don't protest, riot! A few people hanging about with plakards isn't going to cut it when the government is deciding which TV shows they'll allow, threatening politicians, protecting pedophiles, killing witnesses in federal custody, detaining people without cause, deporting/imprisoning people without trial, and deploying combat troops against peaceful protesters.I'd like to point out that all this shit is not normal and Americans need to understand how deeply fucked up the situation is. From where I'm standing I'm not sure most of them do. Yeah it's regrettable that fascism took hold in the states despite the rest of the world screaming at them to stop, but what's really alarming is that they're just kinda going along with it.
As a leftist American, you're right. There's a simply incredible amount of the population who refuse to participate in politics at all, then another huge swathe who gets all their news from social media or a single source which never gives the whole picture. I've protested, I've written my leadership, I've changed family and friends to the side of sanity but it feels like there's just no winning like this. I'm ready for a general strike, to stop paying federal taxes but it's all self harming if done alone. Our leaders have failed us basically across the board and I'm hoping that they've fucked up enough in the eyes of the general public so there's a correction and we can get this country far more socialized and kick corporations off welfare.
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I think what’s pissing me off about the US most right now, is even through the dumpster fire and their idiotic elected leader, Americans are STILL moraizing, looking down on others and being the world police
For the record, we average citizens don't want to be the "world police". This is what President Eisenhower was referring to as the "Military Industrial Complex".
Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re-payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending.
This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.
So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these payments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.
- Except from the Beginning of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years
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For the record, we average citizens don't want to be the "world police". This is what President Eisenhower was referring to as the "Military Industrial Complex".
Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re-payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending.
This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.
So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these payments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.
- Except from the Beginning of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years
The young left has become the world moral police and it has nothing to do with the military, right wing uses the military. The young left is just using shit slinging. But Americans need to get to the back of the line when it comes to moralizing or leading global issues, the rest of the world doesn’t want to hear it from Americans
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The young left has become the world moral police and it has nothing to do with the military, right wing uses the military. The young left is just using shit slinging. But Americans need to get to the back of the line when it comes to moralizing or leading global issues, the rest of the world doesn’t want to hear it from Americans
I don't understand anything you just typed. Who's "young left"? The global "young left"? You think only the "right wing" uses the military?
And who should be leading global issues? Europeans? Chinese? Russians? Indians? G8? G20? UN? Who?
Or is it that Americans are the only ones who can't or shouldn't be allowed to "lead" or "moralize"?
Genuinely confused.
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I don't understand anything you just typed. Who's "young left"? The global "young left"? You think only the "right wing" uses the military?
And who should be leading global issues? Europeans? Chinese? Russians? Indians? G8? G20? UN? Who?
Or is it that Americans are the only ones who can't or shouldn't be allowed to "lead" or "moralize"?
Genuinely confused.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yes, Americans need to shut up, we don’t wanna hear it, fix your damn country before you start criticizing others. You only cheapen a movement by leading out and infecting it with your toxicity.
It’s hard to explain who the “left” is in the US right now because you all think the left means just you and your group of friends. You are all punching left and fighting each other while the right is united and you guys let them win.
You’re all so weird and you can’t see it from the inside, but the rest of us around the world don’t want to hear your opinion anymore -
For the record, we average citizens don't want to be the "world police". This is what President Eisenhower was referring to as the "Military Industrial Complex".
Starting in the 1980s, the United States, which insisted on strict terms for the re-payment of Third World debt, itself accrued debts that easily dwarfed those of the entire Third World combined — mainly fueled by military spending. The U.S. foreign debt, though, takes the form of treasury bonds held by institutional investors in countries (Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Gulf States) that are in most cases, effectively, U.S. military protectorates, most covered in U.S. bases full of arms and equipment paid for with that very deficit spending.
This has changed a little now that China has gotten in on the game (China is a special case, for reasons that will be explained later), but not very much — even China finds that the fact it holds so many U.S. treasury bonds makes it to some degree beholden to U.S. interests, rather than the other way around.
So what is the status of all this money continually being funneled into the U.S. treasury? Are these loans? Or is it tribute? In the past, military powers that maintained hundreds of military bases outside their own home territory were ordinarily referred to as "empires," and empires regularly demanded tribute from subject peoples. The U.S. government, of course, insists that it is not an empire — but one could easily make a case that the only reason it insists on treating these payments as "loans" and not as "tribute" is precisely to deny the reality of what's going on.
- Except from the Beginning of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Nobody else appointed the US as "world police".
It's a role that they gleefully took on so they could go around telling others what to do.
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I'm an American who moved to the Netherlands in July of '22. I spend a lot of time going back and forth. My then fiancé, now my wife, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the pandemic. Given the obvious price difference for medication to treat the disease, I decided to move in with her instead of her coming to the US.
I find it disheartening to see what the rest of the world thinks about Americans up close. I am competently multilingual enough to hold conversations. I have to admit now that I understand why other natively born Americans pretend that they're from Canada outside of the U.S.
Despite my embarrassment about the body politic and discourse from my country, I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe. Either that or they've always been here to begin with. To me, the difference is that the scale is much smaller.
I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe
America's worst export.
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Yes, Americans need to shut up, we don’t wanna hear it, fix your damn country before you start criticizing others. You only cheapen a movement by leading out and infecting it with your toxicity.
It’s hard to explain who the “left” is in the US right now because you all think the left means just you and your group of friends. You are all punching left and fighting each other while the right is united and you guys let them win.
You’re all so weird and you can’t see it from the inside, but the rest of us around the world don’t want to hear your opinion anymoreOpinion on what? Your country? The world? Geopolitics? What Americans are moralizing about anything to you? And about what? The young left? Who is the American version of Greta Thunberg?
I moved to the Netherlands from the US in '22 out of necessity due to my Dutch wife's medical diagnosis. I'm not here for the fun of it. Furthermore, I've been to 12 countries in total and I speak four languages, 2 of them fluently.
I've noticed something.
Every rural shit-heel out here in the Dutch countryside complaining about Moroccans and Turks sounds like a typical MAGA pussy to me. This breed of mouth breather has an iteration specific to every country I've been in. I'm sure I'll find versions in Japan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Angola, Paraguay, and everywhere else someone says "god damned
<insertEthnicSlurHere>, breathing up all our air."So don't preach to me how fucking "enlightened" the rest of the world is when the conservative puritanical nationalism that is in every conservative talking point globally got its birth right here in this part of the fucking world (Europe) before the United States even existed.
I don't know where you're from but this tide of authoritarianism is global. The United States is a dumpster fire politically. But that fire did not start there and it's clearly not the only trash receptacle burning right now.
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I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe
America's worst export.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Bold to claim we had to export it. This is like someone saying "yeah, we've got black mold, but it obviously came from our neighbours, and has nothing to do with the raw sewage we've left in the basement for the last eighty years!"
Literally none of those things first gained traction in the Americas. As a US citizen, I think we need to be doing a general strike with riots in the streets and shutting down interstate trade with our bodies marching on the highways.
But you need to see to your own houses, because while the mold is running wild over here, it didn't start with us.
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It's not "whataboutism". It's about understanding historical context and threads that tie history and geopolitics across time and oceans.
Yes, I'm an American and it's bad back home. Arguably worse than ever before. And the American flavor of conservative techno-feudalism certainly has its own unique stench. We have much to fight, and we suck at it (currently).
However, I live in the Netherlands currently, since July of 2022, and not exactly by choice. My (Dutch) then-fiance-now-wife got an incurable diagnosis during the pandemic, preventing her from moving to the U.S. But before, I've been all over Europe. I've read plenty of "Western Civilization" history textbooks in high school and university as well. I see all of the right-wing conservative macho bullshit here in supposedly "liberal Northwest Europe" that I see emanating from MAGA pussies back home. In the Netherlands, that would be the BBB and the PVV.
The mentality I'm referring to is from here. In Europe. EVERYthing in modern US conservative talking points can trace its roots right back to puritanical European
Christian white supremacist monarchism/fascism/authoritarianism,"WE'RE-IN-CHARGE-FOREVER-BECAUSE-WE'RE-'CIVILIZED'"-ism."God, Gold, and Glory" was a thing long before U.S was. The American flavor of it has its roots here, so, please, as an American not of European descent, cut the fucking bullshit. Don't throw stones from your supposedly manicured glass houses. Or, if I'm wrong, invite some Roma people or economic migrants from
<insertFormerColonialTerritoryHere>into your home, with all of that holier-than-thou "love" in your heart.wrote last edited by [email protected]Thank you for your posts in this thread. Your work correcting these people is not unnoticed. They've got 300-year-old raw sewage in their basement, see their neighbour's house has a black mold problem, and then when they find specks of mold in their kitchen, they scream that the neighbours have brought the plague. If they fail to clean their kitchen for one week, the rot will seep in to a degree that their neighbour's house could never achieve, and it is only by the cleaning habits of a small minority of their household that the house remains livable, but the person screaming is too preoccupied with the spectacle next door to actually clean house. What, do they think that the person next door isn't trying to clean? Next door is a much bigger house, and the sewage has started leaking through the now-septic foundations from the burst pipe in the screamer's basement.