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The Fourth of July

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Re: The Fourth of July

#151

Post by throwaway0891 »

rayiner wrote: post #93
filleduchaos wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> American immigration really is the ultimate test of loyalty. Frankly, more and more people are starting to wake up to the fact that it's a bullshit test. Partly because immigration really doesn't have to be all that, and partly because of the global...decline of the United States' image since the turn of the century. When I was a kid moving to the US was the goal, now only a handful of people I know have it at the…

Canada is great. It’s virtually indistinguishable from America for the typical person. I don’t know where you’re from, but as a Bangladeshi immigrant to the US, but I wouldn’t emigrate to the EU. 76% of Americans say that a naturalized citizen is a “real American” and just 13% disagree: https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/... . In France it’s 55-28. In Italy it’s 41-36. There is no place in th…

If you have a look at "legal immigrant that lived here their entire lives is a real " the US goes say down in support.

It's clear they see it as a purely legal status, not necessarily as acceptance in a society.

That survey probably conflates ethnicity and nationality, as many countries use the same word for both. Like Hungary for example.

PS: There's no way 50% of Brits think gaining citizenship doesn't make you British, unless they don't speak English. That's what the word means!

Re: The Fourth of July

#153

Post by jrmg »

rayiner wrote: post #145
geofft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is attacking a straw man. There is no (serious) argument to "cancel" America wholesale (well, apart from the anarchists, but they'd agree with you about all those other countries too). There is a serious argument for holding America accountable for the things she has done wrong. You only hold people accountable whom you believe are actually trying to do good and whom you actually think can do better. People talk…

There is a serious attempt to cancel America, that goes beyond holding America responsible for its past wrongs. Someone posted a link to this tweet elsewhere in this thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/116818940954980... I think this is not an uncommon opinion and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. And that sort of thinking is an attempt to cancel America. It’s not just saying that America has d…

The questioning of opinions in the service of building a nation in which everyone has equal opportunity is one of the most American opinions there is.

If that’s gone then all is lost.

[Edit: and I don’t believe it’s gone!]

Re: The Fourth of July

#154

Post by vore »

magicsmoke wrote: post #35
jessaustin wrote: post #28

A bit sentimental, but on holidays we can accept that. The bigger problem with this historical account is that it is incomplete. We Americans like to pretend that this story begins with WWII, when the evil Empire of Japan invaded those bucolic isles of the Philippines, whose brave residents were inspired by MacArthur to rise up against colonialism. In reality, this history began in 1898. Americans pretended to ally w…

The interesting thing is that despite what America did to these Filipino soldiers, they still chose to be American and sacrificed the majority of their life to do so. American immigration really is the ultimate test of loyalty. Makes you wonder how many natural-born Americans would still choose to be American if they had to go through the immigration experience first. Now that's an idea. People aren't born American c…

That's literally fascism.

Creating a society of citizens around who passes an arbitrary test of "are you really American" is as clear-cut of a definition of fascism as you can get.

Re: The Fourth of July

#155

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #145
geofft wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is attacking a straw man. There is no (serious) argument to "cancel" America wholesale (well, apart from the anarchists, but they'd agree with you about all those other countries too). There is a serious argument for holding America accountable for the things she has done wrong. You only hold people accountable whom you believe are actually trying to do good and whom you actually think can do better. People talk…

There is a serious attempt to cancel America, that goes beyond holding America responsible for its past wrongs. Someone posted a link to this tweet elsewhere in this thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/116818940954980... I think this is not an uncommon opinion and it’s becoming more and more mainstream. And that sort of thinking is an attempt to cancel America. It’s not just saying that America has d…

Can you see how a reasonable person might read this as catastrophizing? The tweet you linked to is pretty banal, and appears factual. I'm having trouble even connecting the dots from "many of the founders were slaveowners" to "let's cancel America". The nuns taught me the same thing in 1980s Catholic grammar school.

Re: The Fourth of July

#156

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #73
tathougies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. My mom and dad came to this country with nothing. My mom had $30 and a husband, who, she didn't even know, was 'employed' by her brother-in-law but not paid wages. They managed to escape virtual slavery at age 30, have two kids, and achieve the American dream. Mom even went to school again while putting both her kids in private school (didn't live in a great school district). America's been pretty great to us. B…

We cancelled the melting pot: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

Where by "we" you appear to mean "The University of California" and by "cancel" you mean "didn't cancel".

From the same article, in its update:

Contrary to what has been reported, no one at the University of California is prohibited from making statements such as “America is a melting pot,”

Re: The Fourth of July

#157

Post by beaner »

weiming wrote: post #42
myrandomcomment wrote: post #2

As a father, a husband, a former soldier and an American, this brings a tear to my eye. “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” - Lincoln As an American I feel we are bound not by our failures of past moral…

What me and my family talked about today is that, as immigrants, we are so sad how much the "native born" people of the US hate their own country. They seem to never waste an opportunity to remind others of their disdain and it is more and more visible these days e.g. in big news media or on Twitter. Makes me sad and I hope this can change.

I feel like I might get downvoted for this, but a large part of it comes from a sense of guilt about clearly being the most successful and powerful country in the world. When nearly everyone else on earth constantly gives you shit (while also trying to enter...) many people here have started accepting those foreign perspectives and seeing themselves as spoiled and privileged. I can remember this being true from when I was a child. It has been happening for a long time. Complacent adults have never stood up and tried to set things straight.

Many Americans don't want to seem naive about how good they have it, so they overcompensate by disliking the country instead.

It doesn't help that being successful has made life incredibly easy for a significant fraction of people, who find fulfillment in social justice rather than family and work, because they aren't as necessary anymore. Social justice as a way of living tends to correlate with self hatred, which extends to the country.

There are other factors of course, but these ones are large.

Re: The Fourth of July

#158

Post by flipactual »

This is a horrific example of perseverance porn

These people were exploited which is terrible. That the nation that exploited them was still more desirable to them than their former home is also terrible. That all they got in return for being exploited was what they were initially promised but decades later is terrible

Everything presented here is terrible

Re: The Fourth of July

#159

Post by cookie_monsta »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #150
yongjik wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Focusing on the "cancel culture" is, IMHO, putting the cart in front of the horse. It is a by-product of a society where a cop can murder an African American in broad daylight and (in most cases) suffer no consequences. If you can't trust the society to not murder you , why would you refrain from tearing down anything you don't like? When the society doesn't serve justice, people will implement "justice" with their o…

The probability for a black person of being killed by the police in the US is approximately 0.0005%. That's the probability of being killed (most commonly because you pulled a weapon on a cop), not the probability of being murdered, which is at least an order of magnitude lower than that. There shouldn't be anybody getting murdered by the police. It's totally unreasonable. But it is in actual fact extremely uncommon.

It might be worth considering that murdered-on-tape-in-broad-daylight is at the extreme end of the spectrum of violence - both direct and indirect - that minorities experience throughout their lives. Otherwise you might end up with the belief that a black person's experience of the USA is only 0.0005% different to that of a white one's.

Re: The Fourth of July

#160

Post by Godel_unicode »

geofft wrote: post #115
stormdennis wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that you said descendants. They were not slaves, nor were their parents nor their grandparents. What remove does it take to get over it and stop acting like everyone owes you? Immigrants have come to America with nothing and having suffered unimaginable trauma (such as having had their entire family incinerated) and prospered.

I think you will find that the descendants of immigrants who suffered unimaginable trauma have not "gotten over it," either - they just know America is not responsible for that trauma, so they don't have anything to demand of America. (In many cases, the political entity that enacted that trauma is effectively no longer existent, so they have no one to make demands from and they have gotten as close to justice as the…

> ...they just know America is not responsible for that trauma...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Ameri...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-miscegenation_laws

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