The problem about americans sayin “you could improve on humanitarism” is that they dont just say it, they are at your door step on the next day with guns and demand you to change, then they leave with your oil, leaving you in a worse humanitarian situation than before.
I once read a really great comment about the difference in how Europeans and Americans view freedom as a concept and it’s always stuck with me:
Europeans are mainly concerned with “freedom from”. Americans are mainly concerned with “freedom to”.
In other words, Europeans focus more on freedom from tyranny, oppression, injustice, etc., while Americans focus more on freedom to do things without the government telling then they can’t, like own guns and so forth.
To be fair, the US always seems to be the center of attention anywhere you go. Why that is exactly, I don’t know. I mean for fuck’s sake, I live all the way out in bumfuck Asia and somehow news about American pop culture makes it here better than my local news does most of the time.
I’m not belittling America’s problems but sometimes I feel like people can benefit from being made aware that too much exposure to anything - like criticism of other countries - is detrimental to our world view. It’s literally The Cultivation Theory at work.
Because it has the largest GDP, largest military, and largest entertainment industry, and is home to the world’s largest companies. So it’s kind of an important country that affects other countries directly and indirectly all the time.
Fair, I suppose because the US tends to be belittled so often online so I never made the connection to those sizable facts. It’s a bit too much still though, don’t you think? News about the US somehow always taking over headlines? The world always looks at the US. There’s always something about Elon Musk or the American government even on Lemmy’s “non-Reddit-exodus” instances. When Apple releases a new phone, people won’t stop talking about it positively and negatively. Europe does a better job with most things yet it’s less common to find them in the spotlight.
Europe isn’t a country, it’s a continent. I see individual countries in Europe discusses frequently, but none of them are even close to the US in size and influence. Even the entire3 EU combined has a lower GDP and smaller military than the US.
The US is the world superpower, annoying as that is, and until it is no longer the dominant superpower it’s going to dominate the news.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure if it’s my lack of sleep or a reading comprehension issue on my end but I don’t understand your question. Though to answer it literally, English is so influential in my country that our schools tend to speak, read, and write in English more often than our native languages. If you speak English well, it’s likely that you’ll be regarded as a high-class individual by a good chunk of people here.
Unfortunately, that has threatened our own identity - to our people’s cultural detriment and annoyance - as you’ll probably see via English public discourse on American social media interwebs… which is why I’m saying, hey, why don’t we stop paying attention to what the US is doing every now and then? I mean, how’s Ukraine been really? What’s happening with their EU membership? Maybe if the US wasn’t always on the world stage they can actually participate more authentically and we can stop defaulting to making fun of kids dying in schools as a counterpoint, you know? It’s messed up wherever it happens.
What greater freedom is there than the ability to buy a small army’s worth of guns and ammo, to use as a backdrop to explain how you need to defend your rights from a imaginary monster, while actual monsters use those guns to kill children… nearly every single day, with school shootings nearing every other week. (About 30 of them this year!
Have you considered stopping the monsters before they’re monsters by fixing poverty and jingoism, instead of just deciding you’re going to babble mindlessly about taking away the human right to self defense?
Like that would even be possible in a nation with more guns than people?
That being said, you’re right that a lot of the problem with gun violence has to do with external factors such as poverty and extreme nationalism. An overwhelming majority of mass shooters are male and less overwhelmingly white which hints at a problem more to do with the environments they are raised or live in. If the problem was stricly gun access, we should expect more mass shootings to have been committed by women. In addition, half of all mass shootings in the US have occured since 2000, a third of which since 2010.
A lot of gun regulation tends to target poor people too, intentionally or not. Tax stamps, fees and mandatory wait times assume someone has the money and ability to take time off to acquire a gun, and wealthy people (the ones who already own most guns) have both. Making it harder for poor people, who are disproportionately black, to arm themselves in a time where racist violence is hitting record highs and stories about police brutality hit front pages every week at least, is unfair.
I wonder what gun ownership would look like in 20 or 30 years if right now were enacted (and not thereafter repealed) a countrywide prohibition on advertising of guns & ammo, and on showing any firearms before the watershed and at any time in G- and PG-rated media.
Putting aside the reality that this could never happen because of frozen peaches and strawmen on slippery slopes, I strongly suspect it would do a lot to curb the fetishisation of firearms.
Only if you all a tu quoque argument to derail you. Unfortunately, most people do because they don't understand why it's a bullshit argument. It's been used in propaganda forever and famously prior to WWII.
Also our for profit, punitive, non-rehabilitative, largest population on Earth prison system doesn’t help, with more than 2 million Americans behind bars, largely for being too poor to navigate our pay to play judicial system.
Oh no! I only got an education from my school and didn’t get to fire a gun even ONCE! Let me go sit in a corner and cry myself to sleep with my secure, well paying job and free health care. By the way I’m in army reserves and get paid to shoot rifles and automatic guns at firing ranges. It’s okay, I guess, but I wouldn’t go if I weren’t paid lol
You actually think you’re going to rise up and fight against your national army? How about fighting for a better democracy instead, like by getting rid of Gerrymandering, abolishing corporate lobbyists, adopting preferential voting etc
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