for me it’s the whole “don’t tread on me” and gun culture rhetoric. Americans seem to be “don’t push me” but when they actually get pushed they’re all “uWu please more daddy” it’s odd.
That it spreads globally even though everybody else looks down on it and calls Americans dumb. It makes sense considering that it’s the most consumer oriented but it’s still weird.
Sigh. Where to start…?
and I’m American
- 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
A brick home wouldn’t withstand a tornado either. Like if a tree hits a brick house it would do significant damage to the house. And most brick houses still have a timber roof under the roof tiles so even a small tornado could lift the roof off the house.
Here is a brick house hit by a small tornado in England
Reinforced concrete is a much better material for a hurricane and tornado resistant building. Also shape of the house is important. A dome would be the best.
Making houses out of wood.
This is fine. Lumber was historically plentiful in North America, and lumber houses last just as long as stone or brick.
Lumber has several advantages over stone/concrete/brick:
- Less CO2 impact from construction activities. Concrete production is a huge contributor to atmospheric CO2.
- Greater sustainability in general. Concrete is approaching a global sand shortage, because most sand in the world doesn’t have the right qualities to be included in concrete.
- Better energy efficiency and insulation properties. Brick homes need double walls in order to compete with the insulation properties of a wood framed house that naturally has voids that can be filled with insulation.
- Better resilience against seismic events and vibrations (including nearby construction). The west coast has frequent earthquakes, and complying with seismic building code with stone/masonry requires it to be reinforced with steel. The state of Utah, where trees and lumber are not as plentiful as most other parts of North America, and where seismic activity happens, has been replacing unreinforced masonry for 50+ years now.
- Easier repair. If a concrete foundation cracks, that’s easier to contain and mitigate in a wood-framed house than a building with load-bearing concrete or masonry.
Some Northern European and North American builders are developing large scale timber buildings, including timber skyscrapers. The structural engineers and safety engineers have mostly figured out how to engineer those buildings to be safe against fire and tornadoes.
It’s not inherently better or worse. It’s just different.
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
As always it comes down to $$$.
I live in Florida, our building codes didn’t tighten up until hurricanes cost everyone everything, and now Miami Dade in particular has some of the strictest building code in the US.
Well, that’s at least some improvement. Still, I hate that situation for you guys - nobody should have their life swept away like that.
Yeah, as I live in a very geologically active area, I’d rather not be crushed by 3 tons of brick falling in on me from the slightest earthquake. I’ll take my wobbly wooden house.
1 ton of tree feels a lot like 3 tons of brick.
Next week on Mythbusters, we crush Jamie with tons of various materials. You won’t want to miss it!
A wood-framed house isn’t necessarily weaker than a brick house.
Wood is pliable and doesn’t suddenly crumble and collapse when it’s stressed. And it weighs WAY less when it does fail.
If you’re in a tornado or earthquake, would you rather be trapped beneath 120 pounds of sheetrock, insulation, and shingles or a 2 tons of broken, jagged rock?
I’ve heard ICF (insulated concrete foam) construction is pretty durable.
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
taughtbrainwashed with.I was taught that if a flag falls on the floor you are supposed to burn it.
That is “flag law” but you also aren’t allowed to display the flag on a T-shirts, in any disrespectful manner, or a fuckin pick up truck and yet. here we are…
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.
Don’t forget the accompanying salute
And then berate them for thinking that the ideals espoused in that pledge are real in any way.
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
You are mistaking the American government for the American people.
Are there no powerful, evil people where you live?
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
Crabs in a bucket
hey, shut up
Nothing but facts
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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
You’re right, they misspelled fuckheads.
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
So nobody is going to address the missing Rs? Cool cool cool cool cool.
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.
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.
(the senate, primarily)
Fair point! In Canada our senate is appointed by the Prime Minister and the position is lifetime. They rarely reject bills from the lower house.
Wow, I didn’t realize there even was a Canadian senate, I only ever hear about parliament and figured it was all MPs.
Exactly lol. All commonwealths have an upper and lower house just like the USA. I believe their senates are appointed as well, though I have not verified that.
Because first past the post electoral systems always result in a 2 party system due to defensive voting.
Nope. FPTP is the norm worldwide and two party systems very much the exception. Even in the US, it’s only been the last third or so of the country’s history that two have managed to become so all-conquering in spite of being so unrepresentative.
George Washington, when during his farewell address he strongly cautioned against “alternate domination” of a 2 party system.
Pretty sure he was very much against the concept of political parties in general, rather than having any preference as to how many.
But yeah, the two major parties HAVE pretty much embodied all his worries and more…
Because Americans are woefully uneducated, dis-interested, and preoccupied.
That’s a big part of the problem, sure, but the issues of regulatory capture and the two parties themselves being in charge of how the entire system works (including the barriers to entry for everyone else) is MUCH more critical.
Didn’t Jackson warn about point 2 as well? Or was it Jefferson? Someone did, and it also went unheeded (or used as a blueprint.)
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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.
Exactly, what that means is that we have a tactical concern where the more voters represented by an elected official and the more disparate they are the worse of an idea it is for you specifically to split a vote. That’s actually why Abraham Lincoln (the guy who was president during our civil war and oversaw the abolition of chattel slavery) won his election.
This creates the irony of it being somewhat common to have a lot of differing meaningful political choices for city council, third parties being not rare in state government, third parties being very rare in the national congress (though some independents will happen, notably from weird states like Vermont, which is a very rebellious in a cool way state), and third parties only win the presidency in times of calamatous upheaval. For context the last time a third party won the presidency is the election I linked earlier in this comment, half the country went to literal war over that result.
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 🤪
two the two people who downvoted this person, it’s true though. any two party system is a one party system where all government decisions are made long before we find out about them as the politicians form coalitions within their parties. the republicans didn’t become MAGA in 2016. they became MAGA in 2014 and 2015. 2016 was just them announcing their coalition
“Winner takes it all” makes it inherent to the system. They really really need to change that. But that is hard, when it keeps the only two relevant partys in power.
Google “Gerrymandering”. It’ll all come together.
Oh man, I’m not sure how to condense this much context.
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Since the days when the USA was economically reliant on slavery for land development and market growth, the US population has been split over the issue of race and ethnicity. Even before that, the USA was founded by religious conservatives fleeing the church reforms in Europe. “Freedom of Religion” was put into the constitution not to separate church and state but to protect church from state. Because of these very strong and very harmful ideologies, naturally the people split into two camps: for ethnonationalism or against.
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The US Constitution is very old. The USA as a country is very young, but it’s still one of the oldest democratic systems of government still in use today. It is very flawed: utilizing the electoral college, capping the seats in the house, each state with wildly different population getting two senators, the senate confirming judges, and worst of all “first past the post” ballots. In hindsight a lot of this is terrible for a functioning democracy, but the ethnonationalist party doesn’t really like democracy anyways so it’s going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.
It’s kind of like how the Weimar Republic was before the Nazis took over. There is a united hard right party and then theres the SPD. You COULD split the SPD’s influence into farther left and communist parties, but then if they don’t individually have enough seats they fail to form a government the Nazis have opportunity to become majority in the face of continued inaction from the government.
but the ethnonationalist party doesn’t really like democracy anyways so it’s going to take a supermajority to fix it, if you even believed the opposition party were motivated to fix it.
In other words literally never going to happen. The electorate has been hand picked by legalized gerrymandering that getting a supermajority is less likely to happen than getting bitten by a shark that’s getting struck by lightning as you’re winning the lottery :(
Idk, we came close for like 3 months in the 2010-2011 congress.
We cod get 67 DNC in the midterms if we magically voted out all 20 Republicans, which would be very cool if unlikely.
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They have no impact for several reasons, but one weird thing about us Americans is that we’re never happy. The Clinton years were peace and prosperity. Nope! Not having any more of that, in comes Bush. We did well enough with Obama. Nope! In comes Trump.
I don’t know about Bush, but the people who voted for Trump decidedly did not do well enough with Obama. Radical wealth redistribution is necessary to fix American society and Obama was not that.
Don’t you only have like 3 who are usually I’m the running?
That’s 50% more parties!
We have first past the post voting, not ranked choice or star voting
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.
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.
Criticizing how we eat is like criticizing how the pigs in the farm eat.
We’re not here to be healthy. We’re livestock. Our health only matters insofar as it affects the bottom line.
We’d rather have lots of things to whine about on the Internet so long as we don’t throw their vote away. Same shit. Every time.
Well. That sucked. Let’s do it again!
