It has been my observation (and thus is subjective as all hell) that people seek to shut down undesirable conversation about the actual nitty gritty state of US quality of living, rather than confront it, because confronting those issues is absurdly difficult, and people prefer the illusion of living a happy life over throwing a fit over something the feel they are unable to get changed.
This is in response to the "If you want to talk about disenfranchisement, go spend a month in Somalia and get back to me." type shutdowns, when people rightly point out that there are hugely disenfranchised segments of the US population-- or mention actually factual things, like 1:6 people having food poverty.
No, it's all about how we are the biggest, bestest place to live (even though Europe has us beat hands down in many ways, quality of living wise), and if you dare detract from that-- well, unless you can point out "Somalia like" conditions, then STFU.
this is just the "me too" version of " 'Merica, Love it or leave it!", and it smacks of being willfully obtuse and jaundiced toward real social problems, just so the status quo can continue.
Another thing people miss about "go live in Somalia" is that yes you can go into Africa and pull out an example of exaggerated suffering. But generally those people aren't suffering because they're poor starving African orphans, they're suffering because they're in one of the parts of Africa that's "off the grid" and hasn't adapted modern tech yet*. Being on the edge of starvation, disease or homelessness is the standard for subsistence farming. By that standard they're dong about as expected. Likewise, going into say Egypt and pointing out that even in urban areas there's huge wealth inequality and poverty is also somewhat unfair; if we took a time machine to say Age of Sail London it would be about the same story. Not identical but again, close enough. Early industrial.
In the US, we're at the bleeding edge of industrial societies. I couldn't tell you if we've reached the pinnacle of what the industrial era has to offer, but we're more advanced than anyone else. Our economy has shifted almost entirely from goods based to service based, we do a ton of the world's research and most of what we do produce is things like new pharmacueticals, software and spaceship/airplane parts. We also export things like Hollywood movies and videogames that don't require raw resources, and of course we're exporting tons and tons of food. Our education is inefficient and places a huge economic burden on the young, but even in spite of that our population is incredibly educated. By our standard, of a wealthy late industrial society that hasn't faced a war on our home soil in living memory, where the government has a monopoly on force, we are doing awful. Yeah, if America was a warzone or a pre-industrial nation we would be doing worse. But guess what? If you took a hellhole like Syria and gave them what we have (peace, security, education, infastructure, technology, and money), they would be doing better than us. Because
everyone who has what we have is doing better than us. Even authoritarian nations like China that make people vanish still manage a functioning healthcare and education system.
Part of the divide here is that some factions within American politics say things like "prosperity" and "freedom" and they mean "economic freedom." But that's not a good metric for judging a country's success. A lack of economic freedom cannot possibly be the problem in America. Cause people in failed states have
so much economic freedom. They can bribe cops, they can buy shit off the black market, they can move wherever they want and buy whatever they want because the national level government isn't going to notice. They can work for as low a wage as they want, they don't have unions, they don't pay import and export tariffs. There's no OSHA. Like if the minimum wage and capital gains tax are what's holding people back, shouldn't places like Somalia be prosperous AF?
*or a warzone. But again, that sounds like exaggerated suffering to people in the US because that's unthinkable to us. Being in an African or Middle Eastern warzone is shitty but only in the way that you would expect a warzone to be shitty. Of course it sucks. Holding a wartime civilian or refugee to our expected quality of living is unfair both to them and to us.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4455937 times)