Beren wrote:According to my experience Americans are still the most open to any foreign criticism of their country regardless of where that criticism comes from. They're also the best partners for an honest debate in general.
That must be your experience, Beren. My experience is that Americans from the US get touchy with criticism when you tell them they are bold-faced hypocrites are highly materialistic and only value money and greed. Most people in the USA who are living there have to live with certain values just like any other nationality. The American Way is a bad diet of fast food, popping drugs or pills for an ailment, undermining their safety net, consuming sometimes beyond their budgets, privatizing most everything they can privatize, never studying history, thinking that nothing beyond their borders is worth studying or knowing about, and lying about how happy they are living in a free society.
If they were so happy living in freedom why be the nation with the most imprisoned people out of all industrialized nations? They have more people locked in prisons than any other society with some kind of infrastructure, including the PRC. They are highly litigious as a society. Everything is a fucking court case.
A lot of addiction. A lot of addiction to illicit drugs. They push pharmaceutical drugs on TV ads because that is a form of making money. Most kids in foster care in the USA are there because either one or both parents are locked up in a prison doing jail time, or because the parents are on drugs. Drugs and prisons are very common in the USA. Do you start with a drug addict's life? Where does it lead to? Prison eventually. You can't hold a job worrying about popping a pill, drinking an alcoholic drink every two hours or less, or popping some Opioid pill. Why do they have to be doing drugs all fucking day? Or zombied out in front of a computer worrying about anonymous people telling them how to live their lives?
The US society is not honest and transparent with ITSELF. Which is what it should be doing. Taking stock of what is wrong in that society and coming up with a plan to improve living conditions.
Where is the MONEY for housing drug addicts properly? Getting them long-term care? Treatment facilities? Rehab? Getting them to work and hold a job on their own without stealing and getting violent to sustain their habits? It is a very difficult situation.
I won't even get into the gun and mass school and public area shootings that are as regular as clockwork now. What the fuck is going on with shooting random people in the USA who are in some supermarket, mall or at a school or university or walking around minding their own business? Mass shootings and gun control issues. The USA has problems with violence and gun control. Why don't they CHANGE that situation? Oh, because, freedom. Whatever. Transparency and honesty with their own flaws and heavy contradictions is not my experience with Americans @Beren. I disagree strongly with your assessment about them accepting criticism. Do you point out real two-faced lying to them? By an individual or by their government? They either are crazy types like Marjorie Taylor Green Trump types, or they hide their heads in the sand with white man's burden guilt shit. Or they make excuses. Action is needed. Voting is needed. Protesting that is effective is needed. Organizing for change is needed. They are in a stupor. They need to take action ASAP!! Did you hear that Nikki Haley woman? We are not a racist country. We did not go to war over slavery. We are a nation of Christian values. How Christian is being a professional drug addict?
Mexico and South America have fertile land to produce the need for heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and many other drugs that the US society consumes like there is no tomorrow. It causes tremendous crime and problems in Latin America because due to poverty and underdevelopment the US drug market is a way of escaping poverty for those who never had an opportunity to get decent educations and be able to earn livable wages. It also is about power and control. Of distribution points. It is threatening as @Potemkin stated to keep corruption out of the official government platforms and law enforcement. It breaks down law and order and fosters dishonest government. Money corrupts if it is from dirty sources like drug sales, arm sales, liquor and prostitution and human trafficking, child pornography, drug smuggling, and so on....it is a bad scene for all societies.
But, the Latin Americans are the corrupt people, the liars, the dishonest ones, the dumb ones, the inferior societies. It is all lies.
The US society has to stop with their cheap ass anti-Latin American propaganda that they manufacture with their endless Narco series on TV, and so on, and discuss like honest adults what the fuck is going on in US society that the supposedly free society with lots of money, is so unhappy that it has a serious illicit drug consumption culture and the youth are dying like flies in an empty value society that has very little space for family life, community life, and focus on shitting on other people that it has created a lot of animosity between two political parties that objectively speaking have a lot more in common than differences.
The Democrats and the Republicans are both basically similar except for the culture wars. They should work on being HONEST about drug culture in the USA and come up with a massively well-funded healthy lifestyle challenge for everyone. But no....got to spend BILLIONS and TRILLIONS on WARS that never end.
1. Stop spending on wars. Tax the super wealthy the way you did in the sixties.
2. Do not restrict voting. Make it easy to vote. Accept non white voting blocks and stop trying to hold on to paradigms that no longer work for the future demographics of your nation.
3. Come up with good and efficient workable plans for combatting homelessness, gaps in educational achievement, pay essential workers extremely well, like teachers, health care front line workers, cops, fire fighters, and food related workers. Agricultural reform needs to happen in a mass way.
4. Get very serious about climate change problems.
5. Spend on social spending like drug treatment, senior housing, children's health and well being, recreation, parks and preventive medicine.
6. Put money on infrastructure.
7. Spend on building education, health and housing in other countries that are currently knocking on your border due to crisis in those nations. Study where the desperate are coming from? And do something TANGIBLE MATERIALLY and POLITICALLY to stop it.
The drug culture from Reagan does not work because drug shit is not simplistic. Even the most military and best-trained military and law enforcement people know that the Reagan policies are FAILURES. Dump them.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/12/the-e ... n-america/