Comment on Say what you will about Kirk, but he made some great points in his debating
Bruncvik@lemmy.world 6 months ago
My silver lining about Kirk: before he got shot, I didn’t even know he existed. After he got shot, I read up on him and his statements. The amount of bullshit he spewed and the amount of people who believed or liked him helped me understand the US better. And to realise that culturally, the US is so diverging from Europe that we should no longer treat it as our offshoot, but an entirely different (and increasingly alien) culture.
It’s European culture, too. Idk a whole lot about any of the countries in Europe, but I do know Chega came from nowhere in Portugal to become the #2 party in something like 5 years and England Brexited itself out of the EU, both of them with this same nonsense. And those ain’t the only European countries it’s happening in. It’s everywhere.
Although I don’t know how much is culture and how much is cash. Billionaires are funding all kinds of heinous shit across the planet.
The US used to export its culture, and people were eating it up. But I actually see an uptick in appreciation of local culture in Europe. As you said, there is lots of external financing to push American culture across the world, but I think that this is just a reaction to people not consuming as much of it as before. I see that here in Ireland as well. So far, we’ve rejected most of it (especially the American religious nutcases who tried to influence our abortion referendum), but it’s a constant struggle.
Calling the US culture “alien” is an easy cop out way to say it’s not our fault. But the truth is, it’s authentic human shit. It’s uniquely fucked up comparatively but it’s still a result of millennia of human civilization. We’re all partially responsible.
By “alien”, I didn’t mean any negative connotations. I meant that I don’t understand it. Ugandan or Japanese cultures, for example, are alien to me, because I don’t understand their nuances and can’t be bothered to learn them. The US, with its proud European “descendants” (so many people claim to be European even though they are the third generation to never set foot in Europe), used to be at least understandable, but it’s shifting towards something where I no longer understand how people think or what motives drive them.
Fair enough!
Tedesche@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Oh, yeah, this type of insane bullshittery could never happen in Europe. Except that it already has and continues to. You’re parroting the same, lame “it can’t happen here” crap many of my American friends were in 2016.
Bruncvik@lemmy.world 6 months ago
But of course it’s happening here, but at least where I’m sitting, there is an overwhelming rejection of this “bullshittery”. Here in Ireland we have small fringe nationalistic parties, which so far only faced outright ridicule, even though recently I heard about outright hostility (a group of such nutcases was beaten up and stripped to their underwear). We are facing political and financial pressures from the US, and so far we dispatched with them fairly easily. And even though our government’s incompetence invites the more radical groups, I’m fully convinced that it won’t happen here, unless we’re directly invaded.
Tedesche@lemmy.world 6 months ago
As I said, you’re making the exact same mistake many made in America. Dictators come to power when a population is suffering and their government has profoundly failed them. In such times, they’re so desperate that they’ll vote for a strongman outsider who promises them their wildest dreams. This is not an American error that the Irish are immune to making, and if you think so, you’re just as ignorant as the Americans you think so little of.
Bruncvik@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Ireland is a special case here. Not that the population wouldn’t be willing to vote in some extremists, but they may actually be unable. Ireland’s voting system, the single transferable vote, almost guarantees a regression to centrist parties. It would take a change in our Constitution to move allow extremist parties to gain any political power, and given our history and existing political culture, the easiest way to achieve that would indeed be a direct military intervention.