- Gun culture
- Making houses out of wood. To me, someone from a country where houses are made of brick, this is like living in a shed. Also, the USA is the hotspot of tornadoes, so it makes even less sense
- One of the richest countries in the world, and universal healthcare isn't a thing
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Living here, I will tell you that the insistence on building houses in a neo-colonial style in tornado alley, hurricane prone areas, or in a middle of a yearly flood plane, baffles me. We should have completely different architectural styles adpated to withstand the elements at this point. You know, what housing is supposed to be for in the first place? /rant
all their culture about being lovable good guys who do a goof and like their music
IRL they are the most joyless, dispassionate people who inflict nothing but misery on the world and each other
i say dispassionate but they do love
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caging people
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abandoning their sick and elderly
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poisoning their own children
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bombing hospitals
Yes and I'm sure you're exactly the same as the worst people in your country.
The real crazy part is the elderly voted to be abandoned
hey, shut up
Nothing but facts
From my outside perspective, it's the pledge of allegiance.
Do you really have your kids stand up every morning and swear an oath to your flag? That's some real cult shit.
I had a teacher in elementary school that taught us that when a flag falls on the floor, you’re supposed to kiss it.
Yes, seriously.
It was just part of the normal flag-worship we were ~~taught~~ brainwashed with.
I was taught that if a flag falls on the floor you are supposed to burn it.
Nothing could be more American than that pledge: it was something that was first propagated by a flag company that was trying to sell more flags.
And then berate them for thinking that the ideals espoused in that pledge are real in any way.
First thing that comes to mind for me is the huge number of people who are religious fanatics here, which is unusual for a Western country. This is also a big part of what led us to the fascist government we have today.
I think you’ve kinda missed the lede - religious fanatics. We’ve got plenty of those. Other western countries have quite a few religious people, but they aren’t often in-your-face cross wearing, “I’m a Christian”, openly judgy Karens like they are here.
in Europe, someone tells me their are Christian or are wearing a cross, it's no big deal.
in the US, it's a massive red flag
Over there it’s usually as part of a conversation. Here it’s a cudgel.
I specified religious fanatics because they're the problem, not religious people in general.
Look at the nutjobs that were the backbone of what became America. Basically a bunch of puritan nutjobs who didn't like how laissez faire England was becoming so they hopped on the boat to America so they could make their puritanical paradise.
Y'all are just noticing it now which is a failure of the education system. Then again we already know this.
Thoughts and prayers to America 🙏🏾
You’re not wrong. It wasn’t for “freedom of religion”, it was for freedom of their religion.
Yup. They fled to escape religious persecution and then promptly did it themselves when they got here.
The puritans were run out of England after how badly they ran it during the interregum. It was the Netherlands from whence they fled religious tolerance.
Fuck you, Jerry Falwell. Fuck you.
I hope Joel Osteen dies tomorrow
MKULTA and COINTELPRO were pretty wild. Operation Northwoods as well. And the FBI basically admitted to assassinating Dr King. By the 1990s they learned to eliminate the paper trails, so probably no telling who actually knew what regarding 9/11 or the 20 trillion dollars that vanished into thin air during Iraq and Afghanistan
Operation Northwoods
One thing that's often missed about this in the hero-worship of JFK is that Kennedy's administration desperately wanted to intervene in Cuba militarily - just because Castro was a Communist - and they had been pressuring the CIA hard to find something to justify an invasion. This was the context in which the CIA finally said "well, we can't find anything, so how about we fake attacks on US citizens and blame it on Cuba?" It wasn't like the CIA came up with this plan on its own out of the blue and presented it to Kennedy for approval.
To their discredit, the CIA would certainly have done this happily if Kennedy had given the go-ahead, but he said "uh, that's a little too far."
don't forget the CONTA scandal, illegally financing violent drug cartels to flood black streets with drugs, to sell missiles to Iran and fill private prisons with black people for slave labour.
it sounds like made up BS.
Oh yeah, fairly recently (last 10 years or so) a private jet owned by a CIA shell company went down stuffed to the gills with cocaine. They were 100% responsible for the crack epidemic and the “war on drugs” aka war on POC
Ronald Reagan switching sides on the war of drugs such a twist.
and he was right "we do not negotiate with terrorists" he meant he doesn't negotiate, he just gives them what they want
I've always maintained that we let 9/11 happen to drum up public support to spin up the war machine and further the conservative plot to take over the country. I don't think we orchestrated it, but I do think we knew and looked the other way.
We did it with Pearl Harbor, so it's 100% within the realm of possibility that we did it with 9/11.
Can you elaborate about the Pearl Harbor?
What am I gonna do about it?
Listen here you bastard: Nothing, that's what!
Oh wait, that's probably why they keep doing it.
Sure, but just because some conspiracies are true, does not mean all of them are.
The vast majority are false and will never get a declassified file.
Probably the greatest thing the CIA ever did; make "conspiracy" synonymous with "bullshit that didn't happen".
After WWII when amateur radios became popular sharing information also grew. Even if the government was now having a harder time getting away with bullshit, all they needed to do was invent 9 bullshit stories for every 1 correct one out there and then everyone would conclude (rightly) that "vast majority are false". And then when they do encounter a real one, again, they rightly think "most are bullshit" but that implies "so this one is probably as well", for all of them, always.
"Conspiracy" means nothing more than something illegal being purposefully orchestrated by two or more people.
That.... Wasn't the point at all?
The point was that no one cares to hold the horrific shit accountable.
CIA needs to be abolished, and everyone in the CIA who did anything illegal or incredibly unethical needs to be prosecuted for it (if they did illegal stuff in allied nations then extradited).
Unfortunately, running on this as a campaign promise would get you killed. What you need to do is promise amnesty on the grounds of "healing the nation" and then revoke that amnesty once you're in power. As Sun Tzu wrote, never surround your enemy on all four sides.
yhea, if the CIA doesn't want you dead, are you really doing anything with your life?
As a German I don't understand why the USA basically do have two political parties. I know there are technically other parties but they have no impact.
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Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.
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Because Americans didn't listen to George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against "alternate domination" of a 2 party system.
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Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.
And because now that it's entrenched, the two parties will collude even past the death of the country to keep it that way
This comment from another post here on Lemmy says it all.
I was listening to the 5-4 podcast recently and they repeatedly stressed the point that Trump has lost ≈90% of lower court decisions and won ≈90% of Supreme Court decisions, which is an absurd swing. I’ll try to dig up a source on it though. Still it’s blatantly obvious that the SC has completely abandoned the rule of law and the constitution.
Without rule of law, we're no longer a country.
Reading actual SCOTUS rulings can be pretty wild. The one for the 2000 presidential election basically said "we're giving this to Bush for no particular reason but this is a one-time decision that should never in the future be used as a precedent" despite the fact that precedent from previous rulings is pretty much their whole thing. Even the stay they issued to stop the recount in Florida early in the process basically said "the recount must stop because it would impair the legitimacy of a Bush presidency".
The ruling against Roe v. Wade was just comedy. They were using English law from centuries before the United States even existed as precedent for their decision.
There’s some structural reasons (the senate, primarily) that American politics will almost inevitably devolve into two parties.
If I could do one thing to fix American politics it would be to abolish the senate, which gives low population states an insanely unbalanced level of influence over national politics.
It drives me ls me crazy that Alaska gets the same amount of senate votes as California when we’re fifty times their population.
Wyoming too, which has even fewer people than Alaska.
Because they don't do proportional voting like you Germans or we Austrians do, most of their elections (and all federal ones) have one winning candidate in a state or congressional district.
And there is mostly not even a requirement for 50% of the vote, but the candidate with most votes wins. That creates the two party system.
The parties in the US are much broader than in our countries, it's very common for different members of the same party to vote against each other.
It is actually 2 flavors of the same party. The USA is a one-party state, controlled by the capitalist party.
EDIT: lol you can downvote me while you decide whether you want to vote for the Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border or the other Israel-defending-capitalist-that-ran-on-"securing"-the-border 🤪
That they live in the 18th century with 21st century things. Religious fanatics all referring to the devil in him and Jesus saved him - separation of church and state but there's references to god everywhere and politicians don't get elected until they're reciting lumps of the Bible in every speech.
Weirdest thing? It's the guns. Definitely the prevalence of guns in the hands of civilians.
Oh. And also how they eat as if their healthcare was affordable.