How does the World view America these days?

[BobDobalina]

That looks quite hoaxy achully

[olo]

George Zimmerman Auctioning Off Gun He Used To Kill Trayvon Martin

 

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/12/477769731/george-zimmerman-auctioning-off-gun-with-which-he-killed-trayvon-martin

[maxd98]

Wow.

[doublename]

sick.

[maxd98]

I honestly do not know how to put my reaction into words. I'll still attempt it though.

 

My first thought is confusion. I'd have thought that the gun was still evidence, or was in police possession. But nope, apparently Zimmerman still has it somehow.

 

Secondly,

 

Third, WHY IN THE FUCK WOULD YOU TRY AND BRING MORE ATTENTION TO YOURSELF IF YOU ARE GEORGE ZIMMERMAN?!?! The trial was over a year ago, he got away. But it seems like he never wants the attention to move away from him. Perhaps he craves the attention, even if the attention is focused around the fact that he is an utter shitbag. Jesus.

[olo]

The answer...

 

 

 

 

Seriously though. This country makes little sense to me at this point. I've been crossing into "Get off my lawn guy" territory for awhile now.

[doublename]

Isn't Bud owned by a Brazilian company now?

[bendish]

I hope Trump wins. If Hilary wins things will just carry on as usual. A Trump disaster is exactly what the country needs. To wake up from the delusion that Obama changed anything at all.

[olo]

Isn't Bud owned by a Brazilian company now?

 

Belgian AB in Bev. Think a Brazil company is in there as well.

[Nebraska]

I hope Trump wins. If Hilary wins things will just carry on as usual. A Trump disaster is exactly what the country needs. To wake up from the delusion that Obama changed anything at all.

 

but what makes you think it would wake people up? a trump disaster would only shift blame to something else besides the obvious cause. the only thing that would wake people up is people giving a shit, which they currently don't.

[goDel]

lol

 

and there's prolly lots of people thinking the country needs a trump disaster as well.

 

good luck. i hope the wall will be big and beautiful.

[Audioblysk]

Realistically, it's gonna be Hil-dawg. It's been this way since the beginning. Offer a 'neutral' choice in the form of another progressive step (Aka, she has a vagina) and have most of the spotlight on the two 'extremes' the whole time. They see a poop that's a better shade of brown and jump on it to have the lesser of two brown turds. Gotta love our Republic...

 

We are fucked. It's just a continuation of the same shit stream and we all know it.

 

I like Bernie, but this country is so ass-backwards that we fail to even highlight our real problems outside of thinking they are impossible to change and moving on. I've always said the mentality that will kill this country isn't the mentality of equality - it's the mentality that we love our lords. We defend others ability to make more money in a day than some will see in their life and write it off as 'well they just worked harder and I can do that too if I try'... That mentality is going to be the end of the world. If you'd rather see someone live like that while damning those who need a hand up without knowing a thing about them or offering any scant amount of compassion, this world will stop progressing, like it already fucking has.

[LimpyLoo]

Realistically, it's gonna be Hil-dawg. It's been this way since the beginning. Offer a 'neutral' choice in the form of another progressive step (Aka, she has a vagina) and have most of the spotlight on the two 'extremes' the whole time. They see a poop that's a better shade of brown and jump on it to have the lesser of two brown turds. Gotta love our Republic...

 

We are fucked. It's just a continuation of the same shit stream and we all know it.

 

I like Bernie, but this country is so ass-backwards that we fail to even highlight our real problems outside of thinking they are impossible to change and moving on. I've always said the mentality that will kill this country isn't the mentality of equality - it's the mentality that we love our lords. We defend others ability to make more money in a day than some will see in their life and write it off as 'well they just worked harder and I can do that too if I try'... That mentality is going to be the end of the world. If you'd rather see someone live like that while damning those who need a hand up without knowing a thing about them or offering any scant amount of compassion, this world will stop progressing, like it already fucking has.

I'm usually pretty optimistic about humanity, but I do think that civilization is fragile as fuck. (And also it's kinda impossible not to sound alarmist when the stakes are always so high) ...But there are a handful of social and political forces that freak me right out...

 

One is this whole mainstream-fascism thing that people seem to be (frighteningly) okay with lately. Trump (for instance) praises dictators, wants to create a database of Muslims, tells his followers that he'll pay their legal/medical bills if they use violence in his service, wants to sue journalists who speak ill of him (a bit Ergodan-esque innit)...and we have this cavalier 'but hey, it's time to shake things up' attitude about it...a nuclear war would shake things up too, but that doesn't mean we should do it.

 

I think Trump would truly love to be an openly-violent dictator. I mean, America is barely a democracy as it is...how far over do we wanna tip this fucking canoe?

Imagine Trump with a drove of fucking military drones at his disposal...do people expect him to suddenly grow up once he steps foot in the white house? Do people expect his decisions to suddenly be cool and measured? Fucking no. He would 'Putin' away all his political enemies if he could...

[Nebraska]

lol

 

and there's prolly lots of people thinking the country needs a trump disaster as well.

 

good luck. i hope the wall will be big and beautiful.

 

do you think trump's butler is one of those people?

[LimpyLoo]

Yeah all the calls for violence are indeed worrisome...

 

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/paul-lepage-guillotine_us_56a7b390e4b01a3ed123f7c2

 

I have been trying so hard to temper my 'GOP is evil lol' attitudes but motherfuck...

Edited May 12, 2016 by LimpyLoo

[LimpyLoo]

Bah just read this and got a little bummed about humanity again:

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-genes-of-left-and-right/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160511

 

 

my hopes for humanity aside..the last 5 years has seen some fascinating findings on people's political leanings...common sense would tell us that people simply evaluate information (and perhaps new information would interact dynamically with our pre-existing values)..but nope lol.

 

You can predict someone's political leanings based on how easily they are disgusted by rotten food (for instance) and soon we'll be able to predict it based on looking at someone's genome.

[Milwaukeeeee]

[Nebraska]

^^^ classic. i love the guy that said (about mexicans getting to china) "they can swim across the rio grande, but i doubt they can swim across the pacific"

btw my aunt lives in costa mesa and my girlfriend's from newport beach. to properly represent the oc, this guy should've done the interview at a bar or with drunk people.

[chenGOD]

Bah just read this and got a little bummed about humanity again:

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-genes-of-left-and-right/?WT.mc_id=SA_MB_20160511

 

 

my hopes for humanity aside..the last 5 years has seen some fascinating findings on people's political leanings...common sense would tell us that people simply evaluate information (and perhaps new information would interact dynamically with our pre-existing values)..but nope lol.

 

You can predict someone's political leanings based on how easily they are disgusted by rotten food (for instance) and soon we'll be able to predict it based on looking at someone's genome.

For what definition of left and right? American liberals are substantially to the right of European liberals.

[caze]

For what definition of left and right? American liberals are substantially to the right of European liberals.

 

Not really, liberal has a different meaning over here for one thing, it means economic and social liberalism, in the US it's usually used as a right-wing bogey word for socialist (itself used mostly as a bogey word and not representative of actual socialism). Most here would consider that substantially to the right of most of the european left (though they might occasionally have certain more traditionally left-wing policies, tends to see-saw a lot on that front), and also to the right of much of the US Democratic party as well.

 

There is far more variation on the left in europe, but virtually nowhere in Europe is there a significantly left wing party in power (Portugal and Greece only?). Even famously 'socialist' Sweden has economic policies that would be significantly to the right of Bernie Sanders for example. The general trend with mainstream left parties has been towards the centre/right over the last 50-60 years. Fringe hard-left movements, like Corbyn in Britain, or Podemos in Spain, see an increase in popularity from time to time (or hang around with small popularity all the time, in southern Europe mostly - where there are still a few active Communist parties even), but they're not electable at the moment, and will likely go away again when the economy sorts itself out over the coming years.

 

The only sense in which Europe is more consistently to the left than the US is in terms of social welfare. Both US parties have histories of high government spending on most other areas, far in excess of most of Europe in many cases.

[goDel]

The left/right thing is a bit past century, imo. Nowadays it's more progressive vs. conservative with a splash of regressive parties (read: populism). In a way the regressive/populist parties are the most fun to watch as they often tend to present themselves as preaching progression. Although a misguided one pointing towards the past. ;p

[LimpyLoo]

The left/right thing is a bit past century, imo. Nowadays it's more progressive vs. conservative with a splash of regressive parties (read: populism). In a way the regressive/populist parties are the most fun to watch as they often tend to present themselves as preaching progression. Although a misguided one pointing towards the past. ;p

That's what i meant by "left/right"

I just assumed people would get that, but i guess outside of US "left/right" doesn't necessarily equate to "progressive/conservative"

 

But yeah the studies on disgust and conservativism are really interesting...the not-merely-metaphorical link between actual disgust and moral disgust is a great example of how our basic limbic responses underly our (supposedly) intellectual ones...

[LimpyLoo]

The kinda-scary aspect though is that you can (temporarily) influence someone's political/moral intuitions by triggering disgust in them

 

the more i learn about psychology the more i'm amazed that civilization hasn't collapsed yet...we just have SO many bugs and various exploits in our 10,000-year-old software that are working against us

 

Another troubling finding is that learning about cognitive biases does not actuall make you less susceptible to them lol

[goDel]

he more i learn about psychology the more i'm amazed that civilization hasn't collapsed yet...we just have SO many bugs and various exploits in our 10,000-year-old software that are working against us

 

 

Democracy/checks&balances has been invented by societies to deal with all those bugs. Those bugs tend to get mitigated when more people are actively involved in the political process (instead of having a society rely on the cognitive bugs of one totalitarian idiot).

[chenGOD]

 

For what definition of left and right? American liberals are substantially to the right of European liberals.

 

Not really, liberal has a different meaning over here for one thing, it means economic and social liberalism, in the US it's usually used as a right-wing bogey word for socialist (itself used mostly as a bogey word and not representative of actual socialism). Most here would consider that substantially to the right of most of the european left (though they might occasionally have certain more traditionally left-wing policies, tends to see-saw a lot on that front), and also to the right of much of the US Democratic party as well.

 

There is far more variation on the left in europe, but virtually nowhere in Europe is there a significantly left wing party in power (Portugal and Greece only?). Even famously 'socialist' Sweden has economic policies that would be significantly to the right of Bernie Sanders for example. The general trend with mainstream left parties has been towards the centre/right over the last 50-60 years. Fringe hard-left movements, like Corbyn in Britain, or Podemos in Spain, see an increase in popularity from time to time (or hang around with small popularity all the time, in southern Europe mostly - where there are still a few active Communist parties even), but they're not electable at the moment, and will likely go away again when the economy sorts itself out over the coming years.

 

The only sense in which Europe is more consistently to the left than the US is in terms of social welfare. Both US parties have histories of high government spending on most other areas, far in excess of most of Europe in many cases.

Sorry bad wording on my part - yes Americans use liberal (incorrectly, as you point out) to mean socialist, so the American liberal (left) is more right than than the European socialist (left). Also Europeans often use neo-liberal to describe economic liberalism.

 

 

Yes there are no left-wing parties in power, but this is probably largely due to the wider support for social welfare from non-left parties - if that went away I'd argue you'd see a lot more voters moving toward the left-wing parties. I think you'll see a lot more continued support for Corbyn as Cameron and Co try and whittle away the social safety net in Britain (attacks on NHS funding etc etc).

 

I don't think progressive/conservative works well in Europe - conservative has too wide a variance. But left/right is a bit dated as well.

Not easy concepts to wrap up in one word.