I’ve started a thread for those that think the U.S. is almost guaranteed to collapse, what they think will replace it…and why: Questions for those that think that the U.S.A. will collapse…and the sooner, the better - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
No, he doesn’t want to at present. Which is fair.
OP here. Sounds fine to me: it was my hope that hijacks get directed to this thread. Though I see and endorse @Czarcasm’s GD thread.
I agree the America of today-Trump’s and his deplorables’- is shite, but for most of my life I’ve been grateful to live here. More specifically, glad to be in California, which (to me) is most definitely not a dystopian shithole, and I will fight for it to the end.
I don’t know if madmonk28 has always had negative views of U.S. and has reached his boiling point. Over the last few decades I’ve watched my countrymen get uglier, especially in Floriduh, which did not encourage my will to live.
But I’m back home in CA, amongst people ready to fight.
…no. I meant who needs to learn to read the room? Who needs to “learn the country?”
I have not read the thread further than this, so sorry if I repeat something others may have written already.
I am not American, but I can sympathise with fleeing fascism and I don’t think the word is an exageration.
But from a practical perspective, I would not recommend building a house straight away. Rental is a much more flexible option. Taxes and costs are very different in Europe and vary a lot by country too, but building costs a lot upfront and then, if you don’t like it there, you don’t recoup that cost when you sell it.
The reasons seem pretty clear to me. Some people believe that he is actively cheering for the Americans who can’t flee to be thrown into the meat grinder of a huge national collapse as a necessary sacrifice for the good of the rest of the world. Maybe that he thinks American lives are lesser (because look who’s running the country and what kind of people wouldn’t be personally burning down the White House to get him out?), and so the responders feel personally insulted and abandoned to some extent?
…I don’t understand how anyone could read what they are saying that way at all.
But somewhere in one of these trigger fests, I explicitly said that I don’t think American suffering is better or worse than other people’s suffering. American suffering, Palestinian suffering, Ukrainian suffering, Israeli suffering, Indonesian suffering are all equal.
I think that the people who are upset are upset because I don’t find American suffering to be the worst kind of suffering. They’ve bought in to the propaganda that we’ve been fed since birth that we’re special and I don’t have a particular allegiance to the US, but to people.
You might be convinced … but you’d be wrong.
Now yes, there is a 40% plus block of non-voters and if somebody with the charisma and money could corral all of them and only them they’d win every time. But they comprise an impossibly heterogenous, contradictory and mutually antagonistic grouping. A labour of Hercules far beyond herding cats.
Consider some GWI data from 2020. Maybe the US has become more engaged, less polarised and less self-absorbed since. I’m skeptical.
Non-voters are a diverse, but uninformed group.
Compared to typical voters, non-voters are generally younger, unmarried, and slightly more likely to be Black, Hispanic or Asian American.
They’re 40% less likely than typical voters to have a college degree, and financially, over 40% describe their financial situation as “tight” or “struggling”.
non-voters are more likely to live in either urban or rural areas.
45% do not engage with news sources whatsoever, whether online or in-print.
Non-voters are skeptical of “the system” overall, showing high levels of distrust in social media companies, large brands and religious institutions.
Their own personal finances is the only issue they care more about than the average voting American.
As a mere higgnorant furriner, I’d reckon that on those parameters were they to vote en masse they would by majority do so wearing those bloody silly red caps. Hence the collective you would be singing the same song, with a touch more vigor and volume.
I visited Germany and Denmark this summer. I found the people who knew me treated me with compassion and kindness, and those who didn’t treated me professionally. (Customs officials, waiters, hotel staff… Pleasant, efficient, and professional.)
I’ve talked with Canadian friends. They know it’s not my fault.
Yeah, there are all sorts of risks being a legal alien in a country, but “everyone will hate me and treat me badly because I’m American” is not high on the list of things I’m worried about.
Look, if you are a WASP, and a cis-het man with no entanglements, please stay here and fight. Try to take control of the reconstruction should it come. If you are a queer woman (or worse, non-binary) of Arab ethnicity, get the hell out if you can. Many have nowhere to go, of course. For those of us in between, it’s hard. I neither feel safe nor have a straightforward place to run. (Many of my friends have recently acquired dual citizenship. But I’m not eligible. But maybe some countries would let me in anyway? It’d be very expensive.) Risk assessment is hard.
Amen to that. If @madmonk28 truly believes the United States is a “dystopian shithole”, then he has no idea what a “dystopian shithole” would really be like.
Although I consider myself “only” to be middle class here in the U.S., I’m convinced that I am among the top 25% of privileged people in the world. I have a private residence, a really nice personal form of transportation in the form of an automobile, access to food that only royalty ate in the middle ages and many people still cannot eat. I have unlimited, instant, high quality entertainment on demand with a 64” UHD TV. I’m free to express my opinion and vote.
“Dystopian shithole” my ass.
This would be the @madmonk28 who was an aid worker in Afghanistan, Iraq and other active conflict zones? Name me a single better-qualified Doper to judge.
The rest of your post is just “Fuck you, I got mine”. Talk about Ugly Americans…
also, just plain fucking ignorant. If you think being middle class in America puts you in the top 25% worldwide, you really have no fucking clue how the rest of the world lives. You’re a 1-percenter, you privileged ass.
In my experience, the world doesn’t hate Americans. There are times when it is admired and there are times when it is reviled. Not surprisingly, those times coincide with what America is doing at the time.
I have a Palestinian colleague who got his Master’s in Tennessee and his PhD in Florida. He told me that he found Americans to be really friendly and genuinely curious about the world. They had an ignorance that is to be expected from people who were physically isolated from the world, but they were open. He said that changed after 9/11, there was a fear and hostility that hadn’t been there before.
I’m reminded of the book Berlin Diaries by William Shirer. He had lived in Berlin between the world wars and once the Nazis came to power, he wondered what had happened to the Germany he had known, where had it gone.
It is nothing here on the Dope for people to be casually dismissive of the suffering of foreigners. People shrug off child starvation and in any thread about something horrible that has happened in a conflict zone, someone comes along and says “that’s war,” as if they are laying down some profound wisdom, as if old men who never experienced war haven’t been saying that for ever. And no one really calls them out on it; no one really gets upset about their complete lack of empathy, but if you suggest that America is subject to the same historic forces as every other nation, a certain type of Doper freaks the fuck out.
This feels like a good time to ask people to revisit the ‘famous’ Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) speech – about four minutes – from Aaron Sorkin’s series, “Newsroom:”
Beating our chests and waving the flags in each other’s faces has never made even a single thing better in this country. In fact, I would argue that it’s a significant impediment to achieving true greatness as a nation.
The people who seem to imagine what other countries are like – countries to which they have never been – are making a far more significant mistake than those they believe are exaggerating the current political environment in the US.
That fact only makes his statement that much more absurd. How you can spin that into something in his favor makes you qualified to work as a Trump speech writer.
A ridiculous interpretation of the point I was trying to make.
Again, that only emphasizes my point. If people like me who are in the top 50% of people in the United States are truly in the top 1% of the people in the world, then the U.S. must be the opposite of a “dystopian shithole”. It must be among the greatest nations or even THE greatest nation ever to exist.
So, thank you for your support of my position.
You’re not very good at this, are you. 
In America, a lunatic walking into a school with a gun and slaughtering children is a regular occurrence and we don’t do anything about it. Children actually have drills for what to do when a lunatic opens fire in their school. If you don’t think that’s dystopian, I feel really sorry for you.
I just think Americans have convinced themselves that they don’t deserve better.
That fact makes him eminently qualified to recognize a dystopian shithole when he sees one, I’d say. Or one in the making.
That you think recognizing his experiences counts as spin is rich.
So - too stupid to make your point without bragging about the size of your TV, but also too stupid to realise that having stuff or being middle class doesn’t preclude being in a dystopian shithole in any way, shape or form. You think some privileged people in various other shitholes didn’t have nice stuff?
Do you think that the Fallout-type is the only kind of dystopia there is? Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 are as much dystopias as 1984 and Mad Max, and the people in them have plenty of stuff.
Stuff = Great - yep, Ugly American box well and truly checked.
The person making my points for me really shouldn’t hurt their arm patting themselves on the back.
Greatly resulting from the constant drumbeat that what we have is already the absolute best.
When all is going to shit, you might as well have the good shit.
And we see a mentality domestically among individuals on the Right that the answer is be rich enough or armed enough that you can survive an upheaval.
I can’t think of any dystopian shit hole where being middle class makes you in the top 1% of “privileged asses” globally, no.
I don’t think the US is a dystopian shithole, but we sure as hell are heading that way. We are probably heading towards economic collapse as well as the social and political collapse that is already well underway.
The federal government is sending armed men to the streets, masked men to kidnap innocents, and subpoenaing the private medical records of people guilty of bad thoughts. (At the moment, kids treated for transgender conditions.) The courts are allowing the privacy of the census, social security, etc. to be breached. Political opposition is being made illegal.
We are also picking stupid fights with as many other countries as Trump can keep track of.
Fwiw, i have nicer stuff than my European friends, but they have nicer lives, and that’s been true for years.