Submitted 6 months ago by balderdash9@lemmy.zip to [deleted]
https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/168e6b74-2f7c-49a3-b1fc-2ecad667b33c.webp
As recently as 3 years ago I was inspired by huge investments in renewable energy and climate change, starting to work on a huge backlog of infrastructure work, there was hope for high speed rail, incentives to bring manufacturing back to the us, support for unions, we had an ethical fact-based government, the rule of law and primacy of the constitution, respected all people and were working on quality of life improvements ……
Remind me again why we voted to tear all that down?
When has the United States government ever been ethical? The older I get the more I realize that I live in the Death Star.
Historically separation of powers worked. We’ve never had such a naked power grab by the executive branch, so many illegal orders, ignoring the courts, a sycophant congress. Agency leaders were generally competent and tried to fulfill agency missions. There’s never been such blatant bribery, spite based action, conflict of interest, profiteering off government roles, insider trading. Previous administrations mostly followed the constitution.
Sure we have our share of unethical actions by the government but they generally stayed within the legal structure of the government and were somewhat accountable.
Pretty sure the way we as the American people chose to receive this beating was that at one of the billionaire orgies between 2023 and 2024 Musk, absolutely trashed, turns to Soros and says “you think you’re so good for getting Obama elected in '08, well hold my beer and watch this!” The rest is redacted history that will make an excellent documentary in about 10-20 years
Before the human species arrived 4 sure.
Before the colonists arrived.
Native Americans are still people, and it’s a universal truth that people suck.
All the horrible things people do to each other are just easier at scale when you’re not stuck using stone-age technology.
So i think i can post this without getting banned for anti-white racism here, lets see: readstettlers.org
Ding ding ding, we have a winner!
I’m not even American but I laughed at this
Spicy take incoming: it’s pretty great right now. We’re a continental country rich in natural resources. We’re very friendly with our only two major neighbors, Canada and Mexico, so tits hard to imagine us being attacked over a land border. We have tropical beaches and snow sports 365 days a year, and they all speak English and take dollars. Our universities are some of the best in the world and graduate Nobel Prize winners in arts, sciences, and mathematics. Yes the current American experience sucks but for a lot of people it always has and has even sucked worse. We’ve experienced massive civil rights expansions over the past three generations.
If you think America sucks you’re right, and always were, and always will be, but if you can’t think of anything nice to say about it then you’re just not paying attention.
Fuck you fascist. JD, please do you magic.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana, Spanish-American philosopher
We’re very friendly with our only two major neighbors, Canada and Mexico
Your fascist in chief isn’t
The president is the leader of one branch of our three branch system. Cooperation between Mexico and the USA and Canada and the USA is generational and extends across various diverse dimensions like scientific cooperation, infrastructure protection, border security and law enforcement, fire protection and prevention, trade, and food safety, among others. It would take much much more than one presidential administration much longer than four years to make meaningful progress toward the goal of destroying all these cooperative agreements at all levels of government that took generations to build.
Donald Trump sucks but he isn’t America, nor should we be judging any country by the actions of its corrupt billionaire leadership.
Back between September 2, 1945 (WW2 end date), and November 1, 1955 (First day US involved in Vietnam).
It was probably pretty chill before a bunch of chodes came over and named it America.
Viking settlements. Or the dutch?
the vikings called it “vinland”, and stayed there for a very short time before fucking off back to greenland/europe
their settlements amounted to a very glorified camping expedition
Ehhhh, fwiw the Native American people had some fairly warlike cultures and long held beefs, we have documented genocides they did on each other.
Humans, generally, suck.
I think we’re more acutely aware of how much we suck because since the Internet took off and we should be able to communicate with anyone on the planet (within reason. Obviously madfrit tribes with spears in the jungle dont) we should have reached a new age of peace and enlightenment. Scientists can share ideas instantly so science goes through the roof, and commoners across borders can talk so we know eachother is being fed propaganda and nobody really wants to send their sons to die killing the other ones sons.
Unfortunately it somehow seems to have turned into a propaganda machine itself and gives us outlets to be awful to eachother with relative anonymity.
We could have had it all…
The moon landings were pretty great. Let’s just not mention the contributions made by all those ex-Nazis.
Apparently when white men ran it, women stayed in their place, gays stayed confirmed bachelors, and minorities stayed under the table.
Anyone who has seen The Village knows how this ends. It’s actually like The Jetsons out there. We were the North Koreans/Sentinelese all along.
June 6, 1944. Been downhill slide ever since
No country has ever been great…especially the U.S. Its greatest period was probably 2015 just before the orange dust settled. Not great, but its greatest.
Im Latino indigenous, I grew up in a war where Americans are funding death squads and bombing half the country to keep Russia out of this hemisphere. After America bombed my country and nothing was left, we moved up to the US to follow my country’s stolen wealth to the empire that took it. There we were called wetbacks and spics and told we were streaming jobs and weren’t welcome, go back to your country they would say, you know the country that’s filled with American craters. Move on to Canada eventually and never got over Americans being such monsters. These past few years have been wild as even the amaerican leftists have turned racist. I’ve called out a few young people on their anti colonial hypocrisy and anti war stance but only on some wars, etc. Not even against their views, just trying to point out their own colonial past, and I’ll get called all sort of slurs.
Sorry about all that, but line had to go up. You understand.
Now those Americans who wanted Russia out, are sucking Putin cock, and we’re still being rounded up like cattle!
Well, of course. America is nothing if not a country built on segregation. And there’s nothing more cemented in the modern civilized man’s consciousness than national borders. You can do anything to a person on the wrong side of a border - beat them, shoot them, enslave them - and its never a crime.
The modern Russians aren’t running around Latin America villainously implying that native peoples are owed civil rights or that the laboring class has some kind of collective right to their surplus. So of course we’re cool with them again (and have been since Yeltsin’s coup in Moscow back in 1993). Meanwhile, y’all keep thinking you are entitled to basic standards of living just because you’ve been ludicrously profitable for the domestic economy. Yuge problem!
These past few years have been wild as even the amaerican leftists have turned racist. I’ve called out a few young people on their anti colonial hypocrisy and anti war stance but only on some wars, etc. Not even against their views, just trying to point out their own colonial past, and I’ll get called all sort of slurs.
The problem with the internet is that you’re going to have communities that are labeled “The Left” and “The Right” and “The Center”. But when its on a platform like Reddit or Facebook, it’s largely the same moderators pushing the same neoliberal socio-economic views with some partisan pastiche sprinkled over the top.
People come out of these communities thinking that they’re Woke because they don’t want to see every gay couple arrested. Or Based because they want industrial era standards of living. Or Radically Centrist because they enjoyed going to college. In the end, they’re all a bunch of liberals who mostly hate each other because the TV told them the other two groups were eating babies.
As soon as you come in with an actual outsider viewpoint, all that partisanship falls away to reveal the hard angry nut of American Nationalism.
Incidentally, this is why you’ve got a lot of Reddit expats on .world and its affiliates who really fucking hate the folks posting on the Unmentionable Fediverse sites. Anyone who doesn’t think the United States is the shinning beacon of righteousness and liberty is an evil foreigner who wants to run Americans over with a tank.
Meanwhile the US is fueling up their tanks getting ready to run you and everyone you know over for funsies.
Exactly, only dumb America hicks think America was ever some great nation. They’re just the biggest bully on the block and they can’t stop patting themselves on the back about it.
We are great! At killing the environment, brown people, and women’s rights.
Back when they were fighting Nazis instead of being them.
Indigenous and African Americans beg to differ.
You mean the days when black people weren’t allowed to ride the bus?
We only caught German Nazis. In America, Nazis were in power or the heads of major corporations (See Henry Ford).
We only caught German Nazis.
And when we caught them, we brought them back to Hunstville, Alabama to make ICBMs for Eisenhower. The fascism was fine, just so long as it was deployed to kill the real enemy - Communists.
Shit, after operation paperclip it was pretty obvious that high level leadership didn’t have that much of an issue with Nazi ideology. It was true then, and it hasn’t become any less true as time has separated us from the atrocities they commited.
Sadly there were Nazis in the US government before and during WW2.
The Dullas brothers are the prime examples. They spearheaded operation paperclip, which rescued Nazi scientists and moved them to the US.
The Dullas brothers are the reason why the US loved arming South American dictators from the 50s onward.
They also pulled a Japanese war criminal out of prison and put him in power in post war Japan.
before 1492
1491 and ¾.
"Great" is subjective. For them, america's greatness came from the KKK lynching black people without repercussion before coming home, rape their wife and beat up their children
I mean how many people are fleeing America to other countries for asylum(Haiti, China, North Korea, Columbia, etc) ? How many Americans are being bombed daily(Gaza, Ukraine)? How many Americans are being killed because they are in the wrong Tribe(Africa)? How many Americans are arrested for social media post(UK)? How many Americans are getting sick because of no sanitation standards (India)?
Americans have already been breaking immigration records into other countries this year.
Americans may not be getting bombed, but the national guard is being called in to enact brutality on protesters in cities that are left leaning. Historically, this type of escalation leads to bloodshed, and is an illegal and heavily fascist tactic.
People get arrested for social media posts all of the time, virtually everywhere. I don’t even know what you’re trying to imply here.
Americans are being deported without due process to facilities in other countries where they will likely die due to being the wrong skin color.
Americans are getting sick because the current administration has been destroying the EPA, removing the ability to get COVID vaccines, and continuing to prop up a healthcare system that is solely motivated by greed.
I’m not even touching the xenophobia of the last point, not that any of the points you made were either salient or made in good faith. You’re just parroting alt-right talking points.
Now you’ll reply back with some goalpost moving or an ad hominem attack without addressing that you’re caught in a lie.
How many Americans being taxed to pay for illegal migrants arriving by boat loads (UK)?
Racist cunt.
It's easier not to get bombed when you're the one doing the bombing
Is your point that America is better than other countries? Or that every country is bad?
At this point I can’t see Chuckie X without thinking of the holocaust beam.
Which… is generally what the magats are thinking of…
oh, about 6,700 year ago
That's an illusion.
America 7 millenia ago might have been empty enough of people to be peaceful (though I highly doubt that) but people died young of easily treatable diseases because they didn't have vacc....
Nevermind...
and if i understand correctly there were no horses
The more history I learn the more I understand that every country is awful, and people have been terrible forever.
Yes but 1 thing I believe the American people have against them is the propaganda. Their elders were brought up with such heavy propaganda that american n1, america the best, america is the only free country etc. They can not think differently, and the younger gemeration, still bombarded with hollywood movies, is trying to break free but they don’t hold the power and the money.
People didn’t have propaganda when they slaughtered 95% of men and subjugating women after discovering agriculture.
Happened pretty much everywhere, too.
Most people understand that becoming a billionaire requires a ruthless pursuit of your own interests. Regardless of the impact on small business owners, the environment, employees, etc. the billionaire does what it takes to beat the competition. And even though everyone has done good and bad things, the propensity for billionaires to harm millions of people in search of endless profit makes them particularly immoral.
In this regard, global superpowers are like billionaire but on the world stage. American atrocities are particularly bad because American geopolitical hegemony has harmed millions of people both domestically and abroad. We can acknowledge this history while agreeing that every country has done immoral things.
Ordinary people have done terrible things, too.
We’re all a bunch of bastards and have been since we invented agriculture
As I got older and I reflected on all the grumpy old men waving at the cloud and complaining constantly about this-or-that being better in their days when I was a kid, I realized why.
Now I'm the old man and I avoid becoming bitter my reminding myself of the following truth:
When you're a kid, the world belongs to the grown ups - your parents, adults of authority around you.
When you reach teenager years, the world starts being yours: you've developed tastes for things people your age do and create. As you go through puberty, your identity is reinforced with things of your time, and other young people your age with which you do the same things. You all have a bright future in front of you.
When you get out of puberty, hopefully you get our of school and start working: the world is fully yours. The trendy things in the world are things you find trendy too. Other people speak like you. You're not a powerless kid and you're not weaker old guy/gall yet. You're fully part of it and it suits you. You may not like the world, but it's yours. It shares your values and your values are what makes the world go round at that point in time . Your personality, your cultural identity and the cultural norms you respect, and your value system are fully developed.
And then they stay that way. But the world keeps evolving. Slowly but surely, the things you learned become deprecated. The things you like become old. The way you speak becomes strange to younger ears. The values you believe in no longer apply. The world slowly shift below your feet, but it's happening very slowly, year after year, until...
You reach an age at which you're very visibly and obviously out of sync with the world. Even you notice it at this point.
And here lies the trap: you can either reflect on how the world has changed and acknowledged that it's not your world anymore, but it's younger people's now. People who are now the age you once were: it's their turn to have a go at owning the world. You're just in it for the ride.
Or you can take refuge in your old values, wallow in the old things you've liked for decades, and bitch and moan about the world going to shit. It's not going to shit, but it feels that way to you. It's easier to reject the world around you than admit it's just not how you like it anymore, but it's poisonous: it turns you into a bitter person everybody hates.
I choose to ignore the things I dislike - which, at this point, constitute a lot more of the world than the things I like from the past - from my youth. But I also choose to not pass judgment on them because they're not from my world: they're from today's youth's world, and I have no say in it.
If you're old and angry, think about this. You might find some comfort in letting go.
This is drivel. Previous generations did have it easier than some recent ones.
Also, America sucks and always will.
This is drivel. Previous generations did have it easier than some recent ones.
Did I claim otherwise?
Of course we gen-Xers had it easier. And our boomer parents before us even more so. This is totally unrelated to what I said, which is older folks tend to think the world was better in the past than it truly was.
Also, America sucks and always will.
That is what I said. There is no better America in the past.
I can say with certainty that I had it way easier than my son.
I think the meme is more about reflection about nationalism and its ties to history…
While for some countries like Hungary to be nationalistic is just funny (I am hungarian); while other countries say Germany, Britain explicitly outline their crimes against humanity in their education; but some countries who are not revolting dictatorships like Japan or US are explicitly proud of it… The last group is very concerning…
Welcome to conservatism!
Yeah OP is delusional. “Oh well I turned {{age}}, guess I’ll just stop caring about anything.”
The only problem I see with that is, even though I’m 40, the government and corporations are all still run by people older than me.
Hell, some of the folks in Congress are older than my parents.
And they’ve been running it since your parents were younger than you now. This has got to change, get our parents politicians out of office!
That's the tragedy of government: rulers and lawmakers need to be old enough to be wise, but age also disconnects them from the needs of the world of today.
In the 1950s for white men, America was pretty great. For just about everyone else no one would say it was “great”. So when they say “Make America Great Again” they mean “Make America Suck Again For Everyone But White Men”.
1930s-1980s. So when superrich were supertaxed. Remember 91% income tax in early 1960s?
The wealthy game the system. This was always recognized, hence the high taxation.
How to show you’re white and don’t know and understand the experience of everyone else.
Others did a better job explaining that this period was far from perfect to a non-American that doesn’t always remember all the crucial caveats.
There has not been a single year in American history that was great for all groups of Americans. This country was founded on the murder of natives and the exploitation of slaves/immigrants: that foundation has reverberated throughout our entire history. Government and corporate policy, often racist and sexist, works to maintain a permanent under class of exploited workers that provide cheap labor for the ruling class (e.g., Jim Crow, redlining, denial of reproductive rights, etc.). So while I wholeheartedly agree with taxing the rich, taxation alone did not prevent injustice in the 20th century.
Not to mention the devastation that America has inflicted on the developing world. Obvious examples include millions of civilian casualties during our wars in Asia and the Middle East, foreign resource extraction that provides us with cheap consumer good (e.g., banana republics in South America, slave mines in the Congo, etc.), as well as CIA operations that have been brazenly declassified (e.g., overthrowing presidents, installing dictators) because this country can’t even pretend to live up to its professed ideals. Any serious study of American history suggests this country has never been “great” in anything beside our wasteful military expenditure and our inexhaustible favoritism of the wealthy.
That was a pretty great time for middle class white people!
Middle class white males. Though granted, white women probably had it best out of all women.
Well if we could try that era’s tax policies again, but without Jim crow this time, that would be a great starting point…
Get outta ma head Charles!
It probably wasn’t so bad and internationally disruptive pre-settlers.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
It wasn’t too bad before all those illegal immigrants showed up in the big sailing boats, I hear…