lmao look at all those downvotes. just like Reddit.
yea idk about lemmy but in reddit people get SO upset over criticizing America. it’s the weirdest shit. Isn’t this the same group that goes on about “THE WEST”? why are they all so spiteful of Europeans?
even the Americans criticizing America are dismissed as having internalized shame. wonder what those folks have to say about other forms of internalized bigotry…
seriously those, these fucking jingoists ought to try living in another developed nation. there’s such much awful backwards shit in the US. It’s pretty sad when your main point of pride that America has more iPhones than Venezuela and more evil gays than Iran
This is the case for every country. You just see it with the US a lot more since it of course has the biggest footprint on the English-language side of the internet.
According to one source, the only media that for a long time made it into the states is media that the US government approves of. I could go into detail about it, but it shows up quite prominently in this video.
Pushy, ignorant, reactionary, racist, isolationist, nationalist. Stick our noses into the matters of other countries where we don’t belong. Assume everything is centered around us. War/military happy. Arrogant. Loud.
Not sure if I’m missing any, but these are the prevailing things I see when people are talking about the US and the people who live here.
What is hard is that there are of course people (many people, even) that match one or multiple of those descriptions. But the same as it is silly to generalize all of Europe (or even any one European country), it is silly to generalize all Americans.
I think other countries are a lot more open to self deprecation as part of their humour / culture. Not saying there aren’t some examples of this in America, it just doesn’t seem to be as prevalent as in British comedy for example.
If you think some of us from the USA are bad about assuming we are the center of the world and that everybody we speak to online is from the US… you should see some of the people we live with!
Americans do a lot of stupid things, but they are most likely to be self critical in this space. I think this meme should talk about Western Europe instead, because they have many problems, but they are so often never willing to accept criticism. They’re quick to call the US racist, but in my experience, Europe has so much racism it’s crazy it’s viewed as this anti racist place.
I (a US citizen) literally didn’t get a job in Germany because one member on the team objected because I didn’t speak German yet. The company is “English first” and I worked in the US division previously. So yeah, Europeans are certainly as capable of being racist. And they didn’t even try to hide it!
Idk about OP, but from my experience, you can speak German perfectly correctly, but have an accent, and that will make your job search many times harder, because they know you’re not “German”. I highly doubt this is about skill.
I’m not sure what are you talking about. I’m Spanish and the first people to criticize Spain is Spanish people. Probably you’ve never even heard of all the problems our country has. Unemployment, corruption, house okupation, lots of small crime, mafia related crime for all the drugs trying to enter Europe, lots of immigration as Spain is one of the doors to Europe… I can go on. For all of these there’s a lot of debate and not much being done so far…
Same. In most of the interactions I have had with Americans here (including myself), they have been generally pretty aware of the faults of the United States and willing to admit to them.
Primarily because it’s really difficult to move countries. Even when an other country is “better”, by whatever metric you may choose, the high switching cost makes the move worse for individuals unless staying in a country is really really bad. That threshold is typically when subsistence in the country of origin becomes untenable, often due to war or famine.
Do you realize how difficult it is to move from one country to another? It’s expensive as hell, and if you’re a US citizen you still owe taxes on money you make while living abroad.
Additionally, the cost to renounce US citizenship is the highest in the world by a large margin. $2350 + exit taxes, as of this writing. common.usembassy.gov/en/renounce-citizenship/
speaking as someone married to an American who migrated to my country… the cost of renouncing your citizenship is far cheaper than the backward arse tax system that applies to US citizens regardless where they live, and the need to pay someone to do your taxes for you even if you owe nothing.
Once you get citizenship elsewhere (if you can) I’d recommend renounce US on sheer economic grounds alone
its pretty much the only way you would move to a first world country is be rich. most countries only take a certain number of people with certain skillsets, and have limited quotas for unskilled migration via things like spouse/family. anyone who thinks someone can just pick a country and move there is either stupid or naive
Half the population has less than 1000 bucks in savings and doesn’t have a degree like an MD that would bump them to the top of the list as far as citizenship elsewhere. How do you propose people make this happen? The people who are most disadvantaged are those who would have the hardest time doing so.
Well to be quite fair, it’s better to judge a country by it’s progress and current state of affairs than by its past actions. Because if we judged every country by their actions in the past, not many countries would have clean hands.
From 2016-2021, I was ready to move away. I was quite disillusioned by everything. What changed? Soccer 💀. Soccer made me comically nationalist for our national teams.
Honestly being in that environment of being able to be innocently prideful of my home without thinking about the past helped put things in perspective.
I’m now prideful to be American, and proud that my home heavily invests in NATO. I’m an adult now, and I’ve been working to push for some more improvements in things like infrastructure. I don’t cringe at 4th of July celebrations anymore, and I feel great that I’m making an impact.
You probably won’t see me putting a flag outside my home, but I have a lovely high quality flag.
Our national park system is the best in the world, our ecosystem, nature, and geography are spectacular and diverse. And NASA is phenomenal.
Don’t allow yourself to wallow in this cynical disillusionment. It’s not good for your mental health to focus on the terrible parts of America without having the ability to change those parts.
You need to be grateful! I am sorry, I know things are bad out there, but things are worse out of the US. I know this doesn’t work, but I feel like learning to be grateful for the things we have is way too important. I am grateful even for the small things in life that we all take for granted.
Don’t be cynical. It’s not good for you either. Your country despite it’s imperfections has been THE shining beacon of hope for many immigrants. The separation between the church and state is no small thing, it’s a revolution. Free speech is precious. Idk, don’t let the media fool you, despite it’s imperfections, USA is a great country :(
I would have loved to have been born there, received an education which I now only can dream of.
I agree, but I don’t think in black and white. My Dutch friend is probably completely oblivious to any of that, and he is a good person. Most people are probably in that same situation.
Would it be good for the government (or any government) to come out and apologize for shitty things that happened in the past? If course. But that isn’t a reason to use blanket “we hate these types of people” statements seriously.
I haven’t encountered Americans getting mad over that but what I have encountered is them thinking everything involves the US, especially lately. For example people claiming the Ukraine - Russia war is a proxy war between the US and Russia instead or that NATO = US. Like chill, your country is not relevant to everything in the world.
“Hey, isn’t nati the one that drone strikes weddings?” “No, that the US, that us.” “But america is part of nato…” “Yes, but you can’t just” “Why would nato do that?”
The Ukraine conflict isn’t a RU - US proxy war in the traditional sense but it’s worth noting that the overwhelming majority of foreign aid to Ukraine has come from the US, more than double the amount of aid given by the EU as a whole. It’s not hard to assume that Ukraine would be in a much worse place without America’s support.
Yea, of course it has, the Budapest Memorandum says they have to help, it’s a defensive pact they got in return for giving up nukes. But people are pretending the US is like the instigator and driver of this conflict even though they are literally just one of the countries providing aid to Ukraine.
And if you look at it by gdp the US isn’t even top 10 and the US, UK and northern Ireland are the only countries with a pact obligating them to help Ukraine.
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