Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
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Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#2[deleted]
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#3Americans are weird. America is always exceptional. Exceptionally good, or exceptionally terrible. We have homeless people in Australia too, you know.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#4This essay certainly corresponds with the sentiment in this article:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blu...
"You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-driven women pushing into jobs they never had before. Then you see immigrants, Mexicans, Somalis, the Syrian refugees yet to come. As you wait in this unmoving line, you’re being asked to feel sorry for them all. You have a good heart. But who is deciding who you should feel compassion for? Then you see President Barack Hussein Obama waving the line-cutters forward. He’s on their side. In fact, isn’t he a line-cutter too? How did this fatherless black guy pay for Harvard? As you wait your turn, Obama is using the money in your pocket to help the line-cutters. He and his liberal backers have removed the shame from taking. The government has become an instrument for redistributing your money to the undeserving. It’s not your government anymore; it’s theirs."
I think this sentiment explains why so many poor whites are against programs that would ultimately help them. To them, minorities are the competition in a zero sum game.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#5This piece is very melodramatic, ignores huge pieces of US history, and the US's place in world history. No citations or references. Starts off relying on cherry picked headlines to set a biased tone that doesn't reflect reality for most US citizens.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#6This essay certainly corresponds with the sentiment in this article: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blu... "You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-dri…
The line is so long and non moving not because of these supposed line cutters, but because the people at the front of the line managing it are so slow and stingy processing the people in the line.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#7Americans are weird. America is always exceptional. Exceptionally good, or exceptionally terrible. We have homeless people in Australia too, you know.
The blog's author is British.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#8This essay certainly corresponds with the sentiment in this article: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-white-blu... "You are patiently standing in the middle of a long line stretching toward the horizon, where the American Dream awaits. But as you wait, you see people cutting in line ahead of you. Many of these line-cutters are black—beneficiaries of affirmative action or welfare. Some are career-dri…
The line is so long and non moving not because of these supposed line cutters, but because the people at the front of the line managing it are so slow and stingy processing the people in the line.
I don’t think it’s referring to immigration but rather the economic success associated with the American Dream- owning a house, a car and having a plan for retirement.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#9Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts. They try to give an impression that their words can carve America out of the "modern world" with surgical precision, by contrasting the socialist utopia of... the entirety of Europe.
The result feels hystrionic to me. Claiming that America has no social contract, that there is a proto-fascist movement arising, all this and more, feels like it is just designed to raise the excitement for people in the correct echo chamber. By calling on increasingly abstract concepts the author can reign in an appeal to authority and emotion that has more appeal than actual facts and statistics.
The author, and his inward-looking media peers, are all drinking eachother's Kool-Aid a bit too much. It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself.
Re: Why Didn’t America Become Part of the Modern World?
#10Americans are weird. America is always exceptional. Exceptionally good, or exceptionally terrible. We have homeless people in Australia too, you know.
The blog's author is British.
I'm not sure we've been that exceptionally good for awhile now. if ever. It's a story we grow up with, and tend to repeat, But i think the author has a reasonable assertion, and describes america pretty accurately. I look back at all the vitriole we would cast at peoples of foreign countries, and laugh at how beneath us they are. I suppose most countries feel that way about others, it's the age old iron-age in-group/out-group that we need to somehow grow out of. Frankly we, as americans, are now looking up at other peoples.