Lol. Who’s the shithole country now?
I wouldn’t call the US developed. There is development, with the sky scrapers, mega companies and billionaires, but there are also palaces built in South Africa, North Korea and Turkmenistan. North Korea and Turkmenistan have better infrastructure than the US. But I wouldn’t call insane poverty rates, insane inequality, autocracy, oligarchy, insane incarceration rates, corrupt government and legal system, institutionalized racism and still legal slavery any form of modern development.
Developed
Not civilised
I’d watch US shows where sometimes people would get fired on the spot in in a dramatic way and thought it was just artistic license until I realized Americans literally have no protections and can be fired at will for no reason at all. It is horrifying. What’s even worse is that people celebrate this as a “fluid labor market” , as if placing people under chronic insecurity is a virtue.
So you say, that the US has the purest capitalism while everyone else has diluted it with some soviet communism?
America has always been behind the rest of the world. They still do slavery for fuck sake.
So does Europe. Modern slavery just doesn’t use chains.
all cool for down with murcia but please tell me where actually is. Yeah we have underpaid workers but slavery?
You should be embarrassed for not knowing about the 13th amendment.
Ha, you think the rest of the world doesn’t profit off slavery…
Who said that? There a ghost in here? Which countries have it baked into their constitutions? 13th amendment.
Hungary also did that under Orbán, but we were told once we will have enough “national billionaires”, the money will start to trickle down. When the billionaires arrived and we asked when the money will finally trickle down, we were told money is not everything, and we’re acting like “spoiled children”.
and guess what folks, the countries that have things like Universal health care, the citizen rights is taken away big time. Many of these countries that are supposed ahead of America, eating food is not a right, having children is not a right, etc.
No one is this dumb. Get your ragebait out of here haha.
You’re an idiot
Don’t breed
It’s not socialism
Bro, it’s socialism.
Some of it is national socialism, so maybe don’t get too enthusiastic about how the Brits segregate out their health care services or the Germans treat unemployed immigrants or the French handle non-native speakers trying to form a union.
But all of this has socialist economic organizing at its foundation.
It’s not actually though. you’re confusing nordic welfare states for socialism, there are even variants of socialism like market socialism with none of these.
Socialism is strictly about worker owned means of production.
you’re confusing nordic welfare states for socialism
Nordic states reorganized themselves from feudal agrarian military economies into industrial social welfare economies over the course of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Their party politics and bureaucratic reorganization was explicitly informed by socialist theories and economic models devised during that time.
Socialism is strictly about worker owned means of production.
Strong unions, state owned industries, and Democratic governance gives working Scandenavians direct say over and profit from their local economies
It being inspired by socialism doesn’t change the fact that the workers don’t own the means of production there and it is therefore not socialism. Them having more say because they have unions is not the same.
Lol.
We got fed so much propaganda about this country growing up. Basically North Korea Lite.
I can’t fathom how anyone is against free healthcare. CHILDREN have to go without healthcare FFS CHILDREN. How can anyone justify that?
The problem is there’s a false scarcity. Healthcare is expensive for people in the US right now, so the idea of paying for someone else’s healthcare via universal healthcare doesn’t sound like a good thing, it sounds like taking the money you need for your healthcare to pay for someone else’s.
It’s NOT like that, but people have it in their heads that it is. And it’s very hard to change a made up mind when there are people rallying against it to protect their own private interests.
That’s no reason to not have universal healthcare.
Sure, some people think as you describe, but they are the minority. We’re supposed to be a representative democracy.
- 90% of Democrats want universal healthcare. (30% of voters)
- 70% of Independents want universal healthcare. (40% of voters)
- Even 40% of Republicans want universal healthcare. (30% of voters)
(many polls, pick your favorite)
bOtH pArTiEs think otherwise, unfortunately
Oh no I totally agree with you. Not saying it justifies it or even that the math makes sense, but it feels that a lot of times when you have people who dissent against universal healthcare the reason I stated is why.
They believe rights are a pie. And if someone else gets a piece of that pie, they will somehow end up with less pie.
I don’t have kids so why should I pay for their healthcare
That’s how they justify it. They’re fucking ghouls
Even within free market logic free healthcare just makes sense. It enables people to more comfortably quit their job to start a business or take any better job. It also allows people more freedom to choose medical professionals based on their merits rather than on who their insurer says they can use.
It’s also cheaper for everyone, and results in much better outcomes on average. It’s truly win/win/win.
The only losers would be the insurance companies that would no longer exist. And fuck them.
The stupid thing is that even this isn’t necessarily the case. Even in countries that have public healthcare, there are still private options for those who want “fancier” care. The true statement is that they would only be able to rip off the wealthy, instead of everyone in the country.
That’s long term thinking you fool. How does that help my next quarter!? Think of my bonus!
Even within free market logic free healthcare just makes sense.
It doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t maximize the short term profits of a health care business.
It enables people to more comfortably quit their job
No American capitalist wants this.
You can be hired. You can be fired. You can’t go around quitting without your boss’s permission.
I can’t fathom how anyone is against free healthcare
“We CaN’T aFfOrD iT! wE wIlL rUn OuT oF mOnEy!”
Every fucking time it’s suggested. Every fucking time, you get some clown screaming about how it costs too much and it will bankrupt the country and how health care will go away if you try to federalize it.
And under this government? Maybe they’re right. Maybe American business leadership would just rip the wires out of the walls anyways. Look at what UK politicians have done to the NHS, ffs.
It’s very possible that Americans don’t have access to health care because we are simply too greedy and cruel and stupid as a population to value it above carpet bombing the Global South.
Funny how there’s always money to bomb schools, on the other hand…
And to give to Elon Musk for him to lose. He went down from 1.45 trillion to 970 billion. Like what? Half a trillion dollars lost?
I don’t even use numbers like that in a fucking video game…
“protect the children” mfs when children
Children can’t work. So they shouldn’t get any benefits actually.
The issue really seems to be old people. And where I live it’s a whole lot easier for old people to vote.
Because to them, the fight against the Others is so profoundly tied to their core identity that they would choose a rapacious trillionaire or low rent pedophile mob boss to lead them despite OVERWHELMING evidence either would gladly see them dead for a nickel.
Anyone not of their inner circle (church, Trump worship, family of they accede to the previous conditions) are the enemy. And they don’t deserve even basic human rights. Unless they’re a zygote/fetus, in which case they get a pass until birth.
I need sources.
The Index of Economic Freedom is created by the Heritage Foundation, which should tell you all you need to know about that as a source.
That is the most dystopian American-sounding thing I’ve heard all day, especially considering the source.
In this context I expect that “Economic Freedom” means “unregulated, social darwinist, robber baron playground, law of the jungle laissez-faire capitalism.”
It’s certainly does. Thank you.
The phrase “true and fully capitalist” is a sentence incongruent with historical materialism. Mode of production is not about purity of ideology. It is about how things are made.
The corrupt gop fuckers will recreate the commie folk devil that worked during the cold war, they will claim communism will end America they will turn voting for social democracy into national crisis
They are always lying
Americans also fall for it every time so that says a lot about the citizens
Americans, by and large, are, unfortunately, some of the dumbest humans to ever exist on this planet.
No doubt. Living here is to be surrounded by cynical monsters everywhere you go.
I’m hoping Mamdani can help shift people’s perspectives here.
Honestly FOX News might be the organization, which helped the term “socialism” the most in the US. When you call every good policy “socialist” then people wanting that will call themself that.
It’s the abuse of the system, the tax hikes, the standard of care given vs the biased care we can exploit now and the amount of productivity lost is bad for the US. Why? Idfk, that’s just what they tell us.
So I guess the only thing we can do is try to cha ge at least one of them.
Remember Obamacare? The socialized healthcare system where everyone had health insurance? We should go back to that.
and the amount of productivity lost is bad for the US. Why? Idfk, that’s just what they tell us.
The US would not loose productivity at all. For any health care system it is cheaper to prevent somebody from getting sick, then to pay for the treatment. So countries with such systems have good reason to have strong environmental and food regulation for example. Hence people are less sick and can therefore work.
The US has pretty decent/good air quality compared to a lot of countries both developed and under developed. At least we don’t have to deal with what India, China or Brazil have to deal with when it comes to air quality. I mean it’s not the greatest there’s still people who live with air purifiers because of pollutants, toxins and generalized pollen but you can leave your house in every single state at any given time without choking or needing PPE.
Food could be better. Food here could be a lot better but you know what it is. It’s the sickening supply and demand. Think about it we get year round produce because we ship it in. There’s an Asian market that’s near me and a (half dead) stop and shop 2 blocks from it. The Asian market has in-season only produce and has an on site butcher. A lot of other countries I hear do the same as the Asian market and I still have no idea if it’s true but we have hydroponically grown food in the off-season.
The only areas in the US that actually rely on local produce are areas that have produce that they’re known for. Like Georgia Peaches, Maine Blueberries and Massachusetts/New York Mcintosh Apples and then those areas are all tourist and rely on tourism. The FDA Doesn’t give a fuck about our meat as much as we’d like to think, I mean our chicken wings can still have feathers and there’s known low quality butchers. Our beef supply is being cut like there’s no one even inspecting the fat vs lean meat ratio and everything that’s lean has a lower shelf life because its more, “fresh,” (after it’s been treated) and the odds of a grass-fed cut of meat smelling like fish is higher than a non grass-fed cut of meat which are usually starting to gray and those are unless you go to a good quality butcher BUT THEN you face a sourcing issue which they’re all known to get their meat from Costco or BJ’s.
Pork is absolute trash in this country, I’ve been trying to stay away from pork.
Nah, been going on probably before the banana republics. Soon as the people of the banana republic fought back, the American capitalist would cry socialism, then the American army would come and squash the uprising. Hey Mrs. tally man tally me banana.
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Glad to see some political commentators catching on to this too.
America is full of uneducated monsters who are too dumb to have a functional democracy
It’s more that they’re diseducated IMO. To me, throwing vitriol at people because a decades-long campaign from the most powerful people on earth succeeded feels so similar to blaming the enslaved for not freeing themselves.
It’s really frustrating and it blows to see so many people harming themselves out of hate, fear, and illiteracy, but how are they to know better? All they see elsewhere is hate against them for something they’ve been trained to identify with; no human responds to that.
I’m not trying to come off as offensive to insulting. I think the above is worth considering and might be productive :)
ETA: I want to respond to a lot of these replies but I’m at work so it’ll be a bit. Lots of good conversation to be had :)
I’m American and I know better. What’s their excuse? Right and wrong are pretty universal. It shouldn’t take years of proper education to know not to hate someone for being born a certain way.
This feels very much like the booststraps the owner class expects you to clime the social ladder with.
It shouldn’t take years of proper education to know not to hate someone for being born a certain way.
No one said anything else. My claim was that there exists a well established, well funded, and effective institution that diseducates this into people that wouldn’t otherwise have it.
Edit: formatting
Okie dokie
a decades-long campaign from the most powerful people on earth succeeded feels so similar to blaming the enslaved for not freeing themselves.
Yeah, but those people all received a public education (like I did) and have access to all humanity’s knowledge at their fingertips. And they’re still profoundly stupid. That’s not a good look.
but how are they to know better?
Self education? I know a whole lot more than I did when I stopped having a formal education. I don’t think it’s right to just assume that people are sheep by default and have to have good educators to be reasonably intelligent. Especially in this day and age. It removes the expectation of personal responsibility that we should have for every adult.
Yeah, but those people all received a public education (like I did)
Consider the differences in public school quality of experience with regard to property tax, individual performance, class size, and elected school officials, state gov’t, and decade of education.
Not saying you went to a great school or were a top performer with extra curricular opportunities or whatever, I just want you to consider the range in education quality in the US.
Yeah, but those people…have access to all humanity’s knowledge at their fingertips
As well as disinformation. Without an adequate understanding of how to use it, as is prominent in those who couldn’t afford college or were raised before the proliferation of the Internet, this can do far more potential harm than potential good.
Self education? I know a whole lot more than I did when I stopped having a formal education
There are many, many, many life factors that can make this virtually impossible to people, particularly the poorly educated. Again, how are they to decipher right from wrong when wrong is intentionally crafted to discredit right?
For some factors, consider: Poor access to mental health medicine Lack of motivation caused by the above
40 hour work weeks Demanding home life No access to library or internet (or no knowledge of the utility of either beyond paying bills)
I don’t think it’s right to just assume that people are sheep by default and have to have good educators to be reasonably intelligent
This isn’t something we need to assume, and not something I assume. I believe this is widely understood as an explanation of why environmental factors are of the greatest (and best established) predictors of lifelong trajectory including continuing ed, economic success, and general success measures. (https://www.nber.org/papers/w14884) this is a link to the first article I found. If you’d like, I can send a link to my reference doc for a thesis I wrote that had over 60 studies with an aggregate 2 million lives covered with all the same finding, as well as 2 studies that debunked the leading study with the opposite finding.
I want to be clear that diseducation is not limited to schooling in youth but also inclusive of lifelong trainings, exposure to mis/disinformation, propagation, etc. One of the most popular narratives among right-leaning young men today is that higher ed is BAD. Not that it’s a suboptimal economic investment, but that it actively harms your ability to think for yourself.
One final thing, I’m not trying to say we should forgive and forget. This is a very real issue and needs to be addressed seriously, and there absolutely is individual responsibility at play. Nuance is critical, though, and like most things the truth is in the middle.
Part of the problem is it’s very easy to blame someone else for the state of the world and think their group does nothing wrong.
I agree with you mostly but don’t agree in calling people “diseducated”, I think it removes too much personal agency. Undermining education and replacing it with religious devotion is most definitely a goal of fascist wealthy class but we aren’t there yet.
Public education doesn’t make someone mentally incompetent, so no need to infantilize them. This “hate, fear, and illiteracy” are all choices they’ve made to identify with.
No one is born MAGA, they choose it for themselves. Their lack of self-discipline and unable to delay gratification and propensity to choose the path of least resistance may be preyed upon by the system but they always have a choice.
Its very similar to the food system in this country, it’s all engineered to feel good and make you addicted and overconsume. You still have the choice to eat less and exercise more but it’s hard. Some people are also predisposed to falling into it, so I do think you make a good point even if I don’t fully agree
I appreciate your response, it’s well written and considerate.
I want to clarify that my use of the term diseducation is not primarily directed to public schools en masse, but rather the increasing role platforms like TikTok, television, and ‘alternative’ ‘sources’ of mis/disinformation play as a voice of authority in many areas of life. To me, disinformation and diseducation vary in that disinformation is intentionally misleading/false facts about a topic to form a particular stance such, whereas diseducation primarily affects a way of thinking or conducting “research” to yield more results over time. For example, I believe a religious take on something like creationism to be disinformation as it pertains to a single set of facts on a single topic, but I believe a religious framing of things like the origin of sin and human nature to be more diseducation as they affect an individual’s framework for understanding that branches beyond a particular topic. Probably not the best example; I had a long day at work
I may be misinterpreting you a bit still, but if I reframe diseducation as propaganda, then I completely agree with your point. And it also presents a challenge we will face in perpetuity in the future. The technological progress of the internet has had an enormous positive impact on humanity but also comes with an enormous human cost as the worst of us weaponize it to gain money and power.
No doubt about that.
The beauty of a library is most librarians love their job and are altruistically motivated, which can help when they spot someone regularly checking out sketchy stuff. For example, “The Prince” by Machiavelli being checked out by some 22 year old would elicit a small conversation at the counter about why he’s a bad person to learn from. Those types of small guiding interactions that encourage openness in thought don’t exist on the internet. The internet is also entertaining enough to find its way into influencing people who aren’t as likely to have a conversation like that at a library in the first place. There’s a whole list of small things like that which have previously made access to info more likely to be positive that simply aren’t in place on the internet, and it adds up a ton.
To me, throwing vitriol at people because a decades-long campaign from the most powerful people on earth succeeded feels so similar to blaming the enslaved for not freeing themselves.
It becomes more complicated when the campaign was created by propagandists from the 1940s and simply echoed through time by increasingly credulous buffons with more and more money.
At the same time, the “enslaved” keep signing up to join the military and the police, so that they can leverage their position to get access to the things they are trying to deprive everyone else of.
So it’s a cycle of self-imposed violence and poverty. And it is one that people accept reflexively because it hurts other people who are lower than them on the social order.
Not simply an issue of ignorance but of cruelty.
At the same time, the “enslaved” keep signing up to join the military and the police, so that they can leverage their position to get access to the things they are trying to deprive everyone else of.
At least in my hometown, people are trained from birth that joining the military is a high honor and one of the bravest and least-selfish things one can do. There’s a reason the military aims more recruiting effort towards teenagers than any other demographic, with 40% of the entire military (not just of new recruits) being under 25: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK547615/figure/fig_3_2/?report=objectonly
So it’s a cycle of self-imposed violence and poverty. And it is one that people accept reflexively because it hurts other people who are lower than them on the social order.
Partly, yes. Keep in mind my original comment was in response to another, not a holistic self-standing claim. My opening sentence was a comparative, not a declaration of absolute fact.
Also to be clear, my use of enslaved was in reference to slavery in the USA, not the military which is an entirely volunteer (yes, the word volunteer is a heavy lift) force.
