yes i am an american.
but the general sentiments i see online about americans are wildly ignorant and it genuinely pisses me off how the global rising tide in fascism is == america in a lot of people’s minds. guess it’s just easier to engage in the same idiotic nonsense the fascists do than to engage in any critical thinking.
two primary points:
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americans aren’t just fucking lazy and aren’t just “letting” things happen. some victim blaming bullshit if i ever heard it. it also very much demonstrates that despite your “european worldliness” you’ve never left your tiny village/corner of the earth and seen anything different in this world besides the one time you went to monaco as a teen. americans don’t protest for a variety of socioeconomic and political factors, not one of which is “they don’t give a shit.” most americans live in cities that are incredibly far apart from one another and, in the context of a single given city, usually pretty demographically consistent actually. a given city won’t vary much inside that city, but might be very different from another city. this means americans, limited by their lack of walking infrastructure and their cities being massively spread apart in a spatial sense, really can only choose to effectively spontaneously protest in their local city and neighboring municipalities. most people there already probably agree with you to a degree, it’s preaching to the choir. seats of political power here are hundreds of thousands of miles away from most people. it would be like, a literal fucking LOTR scale and size adventure for most americans to go protest their government. and this is intentional. that is why they don’t. not because they don’t want to. not because they’re ignorant. not because they’ve given up. it is because they physically, economically, and even rationally; just can’t do it. they’re as much a victim as anyone else. this is something being done to them, not by them.
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this stupidly fucking ignorant notion that somehow americans are single-handedly responsible for western neofascism. guess what? for decades, you guys lazily sat and got fucking fat on corpo cheese too; it isn’t just americans who fell prey to this centuries spanning grift! europeans have exactly all the same problems with entrenched corporatism in their societies and feel too proud to notice it or do anything about it before the same things happening here happen there; except this time in an entirely homegrown sense instead of being imported from america. americans just, for better or worse, did capitalism more and better than anyone else in history. our collapse and reckoning happened to come first chronologically, for that reason. make no mistake, though, friend. we all have our hands in the collapse-pot. this is something much bigger than just a nation state or people. this is the end of nation states, the end of an existing world order. those who recognize this will do well in this life, those who don’t won’t.
sorry for my unhinged babbling rant i just got lots of feelings, ideas, and thoughts and nowhere to have discourse.
hope not to offend anyone. love all the european homies.
EDIT: at exactly 16 upvotes and 16 downvotes on this post rn. proud to have said something truly divisive lmao ;)
I don’t think all Americans are ignorant / facist / etc. But the last election shows that enough are and enough of the rest are at best apathetic about it…
Just like I don’t think all my fellow Brits are dumb, but Brexit and the rise of our own “poundshop Trump” idiots like Farage shows that enough of my fellow countrymen have the same issues.
And we’re far from alone.
Maybe an even better idea than thinking “some people are dumb” is to work out why there’s such a large number of people out there apparently totally disenfranchised by traditional politics in their own country to the point where extremism becomes attractive. Understanding people probably starts with stopping lumping them together as “dumb”…
seats of political power here are hundreds of thousands of miles away from most people
Not to nit pick, but definitely picking nits, there is no place on this planet that is “hundreds of thousands of miles” away for anywhere else on the planet. The circumference of the earth is approximately 25,000 miles and I don’t think any of our seats of political power are on the moon.
Even “babbling rants” are easy to read if you just Capitalize. The. Sentences.
haha. that’s fair. i’m a zoomer. seems really popular with younger english speakers to forgo the initial capitalization; it’s part of how they codeswitch to see who is or isn’t hip, or as the kids might say, “lit/cool/etc.” has it’s origins in like, early internet AOL, IRC, etc. and never seemed to die off going into modern forum/texting/internet culture. it promulgated into long-form writings with the pervasiveness of sites like facebook and reddit in the 2010s.
obviously, tho, you’ve been alive long enough to be making comments on lemmy so presumably you are aware of this to at least some degree and this whole comment is just more shittily capitalized sludge to sift through so i will digress.
i can see how if you are entirely used to reading english with proper capitalization rules it would be annoying and difficult to parse.
however, this style is definitely something that transcends myself or my personal trappings. i would recommend getting used to it because a large corpus of modern english media going forwards will feature it to varying degrees, like it or not.
The Auth sweep is happening the world over. Be vigilant. Yes it was worse because we’re dumb but its not impossible else where
Didn’t Italy literally elect Mussolini’s granddaughter to parliament a couple years ago? And for all the stuff about Trump/Musk, a openly neo-Nazi political party is carving out massive support in Germany.
i just see so many europeans online under the impression that the situation in america is uniquely american and not like, the rational end conclusion of a capitalist society (like the ones they also live in omg :ooo)
this is dangerous to think.
this exact rhetorical mistake is why my country has fallen to the fascist. don’t let it happen again
As a german, I can assure you that most people are not blanket-blaming you guys on anything yet. The internet is not representative IMO, and I think most people hope for a literal Luigi moment, to give us all peace again.
But the hatred against trump, musk, vance, and the other nazis is on another level.
your response genuinely meant a lot to me.
sanity needle in the insane haystack and all.
good luck from across the pond. you guys are in one of the least forgiving geopolitical positions on the world-stage. whatever the future holds for germany, it is significant.
i dreamed as a highschooler of “amerexiting” to germany in order to complete a program at one of the hochschulen. i’d be lying if i said i didn’t still fantasize about it. i have an associate’s degree and am working on a bachelor’s here. maybe getting out is still possible, idk. i want to fix my home. not to be lame but i genuinely cried a little writing that. i don’t want to leave. i want things to be better here, the people i care about to be cared for.
that seems less and less possible as the days drag on.
America as a whole can’t be fixed. But parts of it can. To put it in Lemmy terms, blue states need to defederate from the US. The US system is broken and it’s too large to be fixed. It will always be dragged down by the lowest common denominators. In the West, we can have Cascadia, and the NorthEast can become it’s own thing. It just takee the balls of leadership to decide to actually secede and stop playing this failed experiment.
Let the conservatives have middle America and the South.
i see a lot of people suggesting succession on both sides of the political aisle here nowadays.
it actually really hurts to read, hurts my heart, hurts my soul. every single time i see the opinion espoused.
we are one people.
i dont disagree with the general sentiment that the union shows signs of age, is falling apart, and for the most part serves to prop up places that are generally 3rd world shit holes (i.e alabama, the south) using the wealth of some of the richest economies to ever grace the earth (nyse, the entirety of california and the valley, etc.). in many ways, the union is an expression of imperialism over the american continent.
but again, we are one people.
to break apart the union would be tragic. millions would never see their dads and moms, brothers and sisters, family; ever again. many still yet would likely be forced to kill those very same people in order to wrought to reality the will of the “leadership with the balls to stop playing this failed experiment.” it is a mockery of the value of human life to compare something of this gravitas with defederating a Lemmy instance, but i can see why you would want to make the comparison. it really isn’t so easy, tho.
again, again, again; we are one people.
i will stand against secessionist rhetoric as long as i live. maybe some places in world would be better off without the union, for a time. overall, however, we as a people are far too intimately connected, far too ingratiated in each other’s lives for secession to ever be a valid argument again. the number of lives ruined and extinguished is far too great a cost to make pursuing a breakup of the union worthwhile within our lifetimes.
we don’t have to keep our relic from ole '76 forever, that isn’t what this means.
it just means a rote breakup of the union is such a bad idea as to be idiotic. maybe the states would be better served by european union style confederacy. i don’t know. i just know our destinies are extrinsically linked and we cannot change that;
we are one people.
We are not one people. We never were. We were always disparate populations.
And we need to be allowed to do our own thing. We are “one people” in the same way that Britain and France are “one people”. You can still accept the humanity of others and visit other countries. Secession doesn’t necessarily mean we become North and South Korea. But pretending the American identity is some sacred thing that shouldn’t be broken is childish imo. This country has only existed for 200 years. It’s not sacred. And it’s rotten and deserves to be dismantled.
I am American and I give blame where blame is due. A lot of our citizens are fucking idiots and close to half of them are okay with and/or voted what we have in.
Sure there’s some blame to go around to lack of media literacy and conservative efforts to dismantle public education but we all have the entirety of human knowledge at our fingertips and most of us still can’t be bothered to not be outright hateful fuckwits.
However your point that America isn’t the only place where the problem of the rise of fascism exists is true as well. I think Americans will rightfully get a lot of flak for it though since this movement largely and recently originates from us. We export our culture to the entire world so it’s not surprising that when we play with fascism other countries do as well. And it doesn’t help that we have billionaires with global empires pushing for the same policies and warping of mainstream media to fit conservative/libertarian viewpoints in several different countries.
Not to mention, what we do impacts the world far more than a dictator rising in bum-fuckistan because we put our fingers in so many pies and in many ways made many countries utterly reliant on us. This is partially their fault though too because maybe they shouldn’t have become utterly reliant on us.
All in all, we deserve the shit we get, but also yes others are being hypocrites as well. Congrats, we’re all fucked!
Europe is full of bigoted, racist leaders. Countries like Poland has been met with plenty of anti-Polish sentiment with their anti-LGBT+ zones and their attempted reform of the legal system. Hungary, as a country, is disliked by many Europeans for being Putin’s little pawn. Most of Europe’s governments are either assholes or hypocrites, letting Gaza be genocided while aiding Ukraine in its defence against Russia.
Most Anti-American sentiment is mostly a response to a) over half your country being stupid enough to vote Trump over literally anybody else and b) the trade wars the government you elected have started and with a bit of c) the whole Ukraine situation.
I don’t really get what protesting is supposed to do. The people voted, the majority of the people that bothered to show up proved to be idiots, so idiots rule the country. I haven’t seen any proof of foul play during the election, this is what the people wanted. You should protest against the supposed checks and balances that should be stopping Trump, but protesting Trump itself is silly. He and his idiotic policies are what the voters wanted to happen.
There was a time and a place to stop Trump, and it was at the voting booth. Not enough people showed up to make a difference. Either because some people didn’t bother to vote, or because on average, Americans really do support this bullshit.
If you’re going to take action, explain to your fellow people how they have been misled, or if why they’re wrong if they stand behind the shit your government does. When prices rise in the coming few months, explain to your Trump loving family that this is the results of tariffs. Don’t gloat, don’t say things like “I told you so”, let them protect their pride by telling them they’ve been lied to. Many of them have been.
If you somehow succesfully sabotage the system into blocking Trump through protests, the Trump fan club is going to use those exact tactics in four years time when the obligatory change of the guard puts some other fossil in charge.
Either because some people didn’t bother to vote, or because on average, Americans really do support this bullshit.
no, americans do not “on average” support this. it wasn’t just “some” people who “didn’t bother to vote,” it was the vast majority of our nation that did not vote. and it isn’t strictly because of voter apathy. how fucking stupid do you have to be to believe 2/3 of americans are simply so apathetic and careless about their lives as to produce this level of electoral non-participation? occam’s fucking razor my guy. it is significantly more likely and makes much more sense to recognize the reality that our democracy is a farce and most people practically were not allowed/given the opportunity to vote.
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslidefor-did-not-vote
americans do not “really support this bulshit.” this is the exact sort of awful fascist-apologist misinformation that spurred me to make my post in the first place.
fuck you, you fucking fascist rat. stop outright lying to people to argue your point…
for those of you who aren’t hellbent on spreading shit and misinformation, we’re all in this together. good luck in the coming years guys.
I’m all in favour of increasing voter turnout and improving election reliability (making voting days holidays, redesigning the system that allows for gerrymandering, voted ID laws with easily accessible ID, removing the requirement to register to vote at all) but your misinterpretation of how democracy works isn’t helping anyone.
Elections, unless mandatory, are a sample of the general population. In this case, the sample size is more than large enough to represent all citizens. Voter turnout during the US presidential election was the one-but-highest turnout since 1976. If anything, this has been one of the most representative elections in your country’s history. That turned into a win for the idiots, but that’s the risk of an increased voter turnout.
Most democratic countries don’t implement mandatory voting, and even the ones that do implement it often come up with less than 100% turnout. Australia only ends up around 90% of the eligible voters despite the 20/50/75 $AUD fine associated with failing to show up to vote.
Most people not showing up doesn’t mean a sample taken from across the population is bad. By that argument, every election in the history of the United States has been completely meaningless, because nobody has ever achieved 100% voter turnout, except for maybe in some suspicious elections in Soviet Russia and North Korea. Your country would not have had a legitimate government since the introduction of democracy, or ever if you only accept democracy.
You can call me names if you want, but it won’t change the fact that the problems both the US and Europe are facing are bigger than “oops we accidentally didn’t let enough people vote”. Being in denial about the baffling amount of people actually supporting Trump is exactly how we got here in the first place.
my initial reply to you was flippant, reactionary, and misguided. for what it’s worth, i do genuinely apologize and shouldn’t have engaged in ad hominem. i won’t delete it because, despite regretting the comment, it would be contrary to my ideas of free information (lmao that sounded cringe in my head and it looks cringe on “paper” but idk how else to say it).
i appreciate your genuine response and discussion.
you are correct in your analysis of democracy as an institution and the observation that there does truly exist a large contingent of people in the West who really do support and encourage what is going on as of late.
i shouldn’t let my own feelings get in the way. i think my qualm is less about the claim “americans want this” and more about how it is phrased and the implications of that statement. it is reductionist in the same way a lot of actual fascist rhetoric is and it rubs me the wrong way.
i think there’s actually a very interesting social/political philosophy question that will be demanding an answer during our lifetimes. we have a cultural reverence for democracy and liberalism in the west. they are strongly associated ideas. however, recent advances in statistical analysis seemed to have spurred a pushback against this assumption in the cutting edge of sociopolitical thought (i say recent but these ideas have their origins in the 60s and 70s, even earlier depending on your bar. recent in a “meta,” societal sense). maybe democracy isn’t the most liberating form of politics, maybe it inherently lends to developing neofeudal fascism; and maybe if there exists a form of organization that offers the individual more freedom and liberty, we have an obligation to attempt to overthrow democracy and establish it.
i think these were some of the most interesting ideas i was permitted to explore during college sociopolitical courses. of course, in retrospect, we very intentionally explored these ideas. because, as i said, these are questions that will likely be demanding an answer before we die, for better or worse. what do you think? how should we organize, as humans?
I thought this was gonna be about how Europeans take vacation the entire month of August and fuck off after 5pm.
But somehow I think those things and our lack of tearing the country down until we get our way are related.
nah WASP work ethic and the clock are the single greatest tools of oppression ever invented.
the propaganda of the clock is the most deeply entrenched enemy of the revolution.
if my fellow commies even recognized this i would be harping about it 24/7; but unfortunately even the crazies think you’re crazy on this one for some reason.
the clock isn’t real. it is unnatural to track minutes and doesn’t serve to increase productivity on an individual level at all. it was very, very recent in the west that the clock’s true form as the oppressor was well known and well fought against. i wonder how the bourgeballs managed to normalize schizophrenic timekeeping behaviors within 1-2 generations? not a topic that is easy to research.
Ahhh, I miss the good old days when all people of middle eastern descent were terrorists, poles were all stupid, Mexicans were all lazy, blacks were less than human, etc Good times
sure, because wanting people to recognize the exact nature of what is going on right now means i’m a stereotypical fat american imperialist pig-dog.
grow up.
it’s happening here. it’ll happen to whatever corner of this godforsaken world you had the (mis)fortune of being born to. stop it before it is too late. i know how easy it is to react flippantly. i watched people for the past 20 years of my life in america do the same thing and it led us directly down the path to neofascism. living in a world where the preeminent powers have fallen to authoritarian ideologues, you would be a fucking fool to be throwing stones.
It is called karma, Jack
But, besides that, you seem to think that things are cool until they are happening to you. I can tell from the starting point of your “reasoning” that, while people have been protesting, quite frequently, all kinds of fucked up shit that has been going on, you have been sitting on the sidelines, waiting until your personal feelings have gotten hurt, to even go so far as to post your defense of your status quo. Such a hero
You are an obvious poser, which is only more obvious from the fact that you even bothered to respond to my trolling
Get over yourself
Don’t see the first point. The vast majority of protests are happening near the places where the people live. All the protests I have been too were not at the place of our government. It was our city and the next one. No long travel time and it still works.
The rest is true though. Germany is on the best way to revive the original nazi agenda for example. Probably an AfD coalition on next vote and then the power seize. Fml
The vast majority of protests are happening near the places where the people live. All the protests I have been too were not at the place of our government. It was our city and the next one. No long travel time and it still works.
maybe i could have phrased myself better. this is essentially what i mean by the first point. you only have the option of local protests in america, for the most part. the unfortunate reality is that for the millions of americans who’s locality doesn’t include those political seats of power, it actually doesn’t work.
how many times in the news have you seen americans sitting in tiny local protests with their signs? how many times have you seen it actually lead to anything happening, other than a live demonstration of police brutality?
it doesn’t work. americans by and large recognize this, their apathetic attitudes aren’t some weird form of jackassery they are a rational response to their situation.
i don’t know what we should do. but continually disparaging americans for their lack of will or protests isn’t it. they’re not protesting en masse because they live in a social and political climate that explicitly prevents them from doing so, and disarms them when they actually manage to do it.
“those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”
-jfk
“i, -er -uh, would like the party plattah!”
-also jfk, but in clone high (the cooler jfk imo)
I can assure you that idiots are everywhere, Europe included. They have always been everywhere, but now it’s just so simple for them to find and reinforce each other’s stupid opinions. And boy, are they loud and sure of themselves.
