Certified European here, can confirm individual member states and EU as a whole as not being a utopia.
Especially us Dutch folks who have been fucked over and held hostage by a waaay to large upper middle class for years. To the point where we’ve managed to abolish the ministry of housing, open up the housing market to foreign investors, replace a functioning healthcare system with a healthcare market where insurance firms rule with an iron fist and demand more bureacracy than actual care being provided.
… and the list goes on.
It’s a worldwide symptom of economic unequality and the decrease in social skills stemming from the fact that we live our lives increasingly isolated in our own online social bubbles. We’re turning increasingly hostile towards each other because we’re no longer confronted with all people and perspectives in our surroundings, but just the ones we like.
The United States, being a large country filled with very diverse people, despite all being taught to “love America”, still deals with Nebraskan farmers having wildly different wants and needs, and way different social standards than the Californian yuppies.
You’re a large country, with 334 million people spread out over a vast amount of land. Meanwhile, we’re 18 million living on a patch of marshy land roughly 3/4th the size of West Virgina, and we’re further from being united than ever before. The fact that you’re even holding together as a country is nothing short of amazing considering the fact that your political systems probably cause way more chaos than ours do.
A lot of Europeans probably mean it when they say “How are you even a country?”. And it’s not so much an attack on the American people as a whole (though some of y’all deserve to be made fun of), but geniuine amazement at the fact that it has more or less held together since 1776.
My dad used to refer to something he called “Scottish engineering”, which meant you start a project with good intentions but just end up swearing frequently and throwing everything in the fire lol
In Québec in 1998 during the ice storm, we missed power for 5 weeks. They derailled train to bring them at some place to plug their big diesel generators on the city power system.
Yes they were driving train on the asphalt road, I’m sure you can find pic and videos or it.
And then the random citizens who defend or justify ignoring it either take offense instead of agreeing it’s fucked up, or grasp at straws with whataboutism to shift the issue.
This meme contains a common accusation from 20 years ago, but I think it’s odd that it is being posted in 2024, long after it became clear that whatever the purpose of the invasion of Iraq actually was, it wasn’t to obtain oil wealth.
It was to remake the area Pax Americana as dictated by the the neo con “Project for a New American Century”. Basically republicans making it up as they go along and assuming destabilizing an entire region would somehow stabilize the larger picture.
“ In 1998, Kristol and Kagan advocated regime change in Iraq throughout the Iraq disarmament process through articles that were published in the New York Times…”
Basically they’d been lobbying for the Iraq war since the Clinton admin but normal people saw how fucking stupid of an endeavor it was.
It took 9-11 and a Dick Cheney led psyops campaign to finally make it happen.
The result…?
Chaos, dead soldiers, no real benefit to US, a destruction of our image abroad, a waste of trillions of dollars etc… no real remaking of the region and the “morality” of this new century now belongs to MAGAtes and trump actively arguing he is a dictator who can stay in office indefinitely and kill his opponents.
Way to go republicans… Also now we have idiots spamming stupid memes that show they can’t tell the different between the 90s and their own asshole.
Well, yes - George W. Bush appears in retrospect to have been sincere. Some of the other powerful supporters of the war did profit from it, but at the expense of American taxpayers rather than Iraqis.
He initially accused Hussein of being in league with Al-Qaeda too. He pressured the shit out of the intelligence community to corroborate his story. When they refused, it was switched to what you just described. People give Bush too much credit. He was just very dumb.
Also this is like the fourth “US NEEDS OIL” meme I’ve seen today lmao. Domestic production is at an all time high, and very little oil produced in the Middle East even comes to the states. But we shouldn’t let facts get in the way of this weird meme campaign
And shit trains, and pointless poverty, and ridiculous town planning, and an absurd prison system, and shit voting and representation, and unlimited money in politics, and weak-sauce unions…
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