Pretty sure Charlie is saying that is not happening in his country.
ETA: ninja’d.
@Charlie_Tan is European, (UK?) or maybe Canadian; I’m suddenly drawing a blank. Definitely not USAian.
He’s speaking about what’s not happening in his not-shithole country and contrasting that with the outrages, such as you cite, that are happening in the newly shithole USA.
aah, my mistake, sorry, @Charlie_Tan, that wasn’t completely clear.
In my defence, I can’t actually see the posts of the troll you were responding to.
This is an apropos spot for a plug for my small pet community outreach program:
I legit thought this was somehow related to shipping pets internationally.
I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen military action outside my window.
Now, I was traveling to a town upturned by tornadoes and The Nat’l Guard was helping when clean up and support.
I know stuff is happening in LA and DC and perhaps at the border.
You gotta choose where you live, folks. Simple.
If out of the USA is what you want. Do it.
I don’t see how it makes any difference at all if @madmonk28 wife, family, perhaps the dog live here. How’s that gonna work?
Wow!..and I’m supposed to uninformed.
As a Salvadoran-American I was planning to retire back to the old country as the very real shitty times of civil war and gang violence and murders ended years ago. Sure, there was a lot of people involved with gangs that were imprisoned (the implication is that a good number are not, the result of very little due process, something that Trump loves).
Now me and family members in El Salvador can tell you that it was better until recently. Because now the party of Bukele took control of all the branches of government. And as the saying goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely, the congress in El Salvador is giving permission to Bukele to run as many times as he likes for the presidency, when the limit had been set until recently to two terms.
And instead of basking in the progress made with peace and security, he is torpedoing now the very impressive tourism industry that was growing by now having El Salvador being equated to a country of mercenary prisons with no due process (And he is beginning to arrest people that oppose him).
I will check in 10 years if the situation gets better to decide where I should retire. In the meantime, more countries to fight for to make them better, I say.
Endorse.
Most of the world’s population lives in middle income countries that are not conflict zones. Trump’s policies are not wildly out of place relative to them, though his habit of destroying wealth-producing institutions that benefit the middle class and the elite is a tad unusual. But what remains after that isn’t out of the middle-income country norm.
The accelerationists also seem to assume all suffering and dying are equal. They’re not. And they never ask the people who will be most affected how they fell about it all. It’s just more of the powerful forcing their will upon the weak.
I’ve lived in Asia, Europe and Africa, and I have to agree, especially now that everyone hates us. Also, many of the countries that were attractive 20 years ago are no longer somewhere I’d want to live, particularly the cities like Paris.
This varies by the individual, of course. I’ve settled in Canada, which is meeting my needs spectacularly, thank you very much. It’s not without its problems, of course, and people are people wherever you go, but the quality of life is much higher here—and I was relatively happy in the USA except for that pesky you-can’t-import-your-spouse rule they had at the time. In June of 2015, when the rules changed and we could consider going back to the USA, we chose not to, and of course by November it was clear that staying away was the right choice.
There just too many moral compromises coming for Americans. We’re going to have to accept cruelty to others just to survive. We’ll start biting our lip when people say bigoted things, then start making excuses for the indignities heaped upon our neighbors and finally just turn a blind eye to it all and pretend we don’t see it, or worse convince ourselves it’s not happening. Living here will require us to become complicit just to survive.
That’s true basically every time a formerly sane and stable country goes down the shitter.
My wife was born in Iran, about ten years before the Islamic Revolution. Her father was a university professor. He recognized the early signs of the political situation spinning out of control, and he made arrangements to get his family out of the country, because he knew that when the religious crazies take over, the academics are among the first against the wall.
And he was hardly alone. Many, many intellectuals and skilled professionals packed their bags and headed for the borders. “Brain drain” is a very real phenomenon. The U.S. is not the first country to suffer this, and it won’t be the last. It’s just the first time you’re looking around and experiencing it for yourself. Yes, it’s unpleasant to watch as your country’s best and brightest leg it for the exits. But while you are bemoaning the negative effects, you should also objectively recognize it as a critical tipping-point symptom of the country’s impending collapse.
Incidentally, as a postscript, when my wife and I took our children out of the U.S. and moved to Europe a few years ago, that was the second time in her life that she fled an unfriendly regime.
Yes, the move has been a huge net positive for us in the long run. But that doesn’t mean the raw experience of uprooting ourselves was enjoyable — and my wife has had to endure it twice, once as a child, and now again as an adult. But our hand was forced, so move we did.
So don’t grumble about the “elite” seeking safer pastures, while the less fortunate remain. Thus ever has it been. This is an established historical pattern repeating itself, and instead of complaining, you should take a clear-eyed look at what history tells you is coming.
…I’ve read this thread, I read some of your posts in the other thread, and I don’t think you’ve said anything even remotely controversial. And I’m reading some of the responses to you and its like…why is everyone so angry at you? I don’t understand it at all.
Thanks, it was a weird response from some people.
I think some folks, for some reason, are interpreting your post as a criticism of their presumable choice to stay in the USA, but I haven’t seen anything in any of your posts that indicate that’s what you meant.
I do not judge anyone for staying. It’s going to be a huge pain in the ass and it’s scary. It’s happening right at the point in my life when I’d like to just relax. It might not happen. If I had kids, I wouldn’t be able to even try.
It’s what happens when you point out the turd in the punchbowl that everyone has been drinking from they start attacking and gaslighting you to avoid acknowledging the grossness of the situation. There is nothing in @madmonk28’s list of points that I fundamentally disagree with, and the last point in particular is why I have little optimism that the regression toward autocracy will be halted even though a few vocal people are really trying to bring awareness to and compel action in the general public.
The problem I have with the ‘Escape from America’ scenario is that even if you have the resources to be financially independent, anywhere you go where you are not a citizen or have a familial support system you will find that you are a second-class person who can be deported capriciously with a change in political winds. I have a friend-of-friend climate researcher who was almost deported from a ‘liberal’ Northern European country for completely unintentionally violating work visa rules by give a free public lecture at the behest of their institution and are presently on a probationary status. That wasn’t even politically motivated—just a bureaucratic snafu—and it isn’t as if there is any country you can point to and say, “They’re definitely getting more tolerant to immigrants here.” I have other friends—both with PhDs and long careers in virility research and epidemiology—who are looking at opportunities at foreign institutions but finding the process of even applying to be byzantine and much competition. If these people are struggling to make emigration work, what chance do the rest of us have in a world becoming increasingly resistant to immigration and skeptical of the benefits of liberal democracy or any shade of progressive ideals however rooted in pragmatic benefit?
Stranger
It’s a valid point, and all you can do is plan and hope. I just find life here draining and depressing. My wife said it best when we made the decision, “it’s ok to try and be happy.”