Nope. There’s nothing special about Americans just like there’s nothing special about any nation or large group of people. You have to be deeply ignorant of history to think otherwise. We’re all the same species and when things play out in specific ways it’s always for a similar set of reasons and circumstances.
As Dan Carlin would say, “it’s a human thing.” You think this kind of insanity can’t happen in your country because it hasn’t yet. But you’re wrong. It can and has happened, many many times throughout history, in various forms, all over the world.
Again, Americans aren’t special and you have to be deeply stupid and/or ignorant to think otherwise.
It’s a problem because people don’t feel like stakeholders when they don’t have a say and can’t participate in their system of governance. This in turn means that they aren’t incentivized to willingly participate and have to be forced or indoctrinated, both of which are violations of human rights.
100 percent spot on. It’s also a huge part of how they lost such a ridiculous chunk of blue collar workers in spite of labor leadership being solidly Democrat for decades.
Poor whites and rural hicks became the only working-class people it was still socially acceptable to openly mock in public. This was noticed and exploited by the right with dire consequences for our current political landscape.
Of course, a ton of other variables were at play as well, but the certainty that so-called “coastal elites” held them and everything they valued in contempt played a huge role in convincing blue-collar and middle-class rural whites to vote against their economic interests.
Almost no one actually needs a full-size pickup. The only real exception is if you regularly haul heavy loads on trailers, but that doesn’t apply to most full-size pickup owners. Most people buy them because it’s part of an image they’ve been sold through the advertising industry.
I drive a 20-year-old mid-sized pickup with an extended bed and there has never been a single time when it hasn’t been perfectly adequate for all my needs. It’s also a 4-wheel-drive, but since I only ever use that feature on snow and ice and rough unpaved roads and am not an off-road enthusiast, it’s not lifted and doesn’t tower over other vehicles in traffic.
This place is swarming with idiots. I think it’s an age thing. There are a lot of young people on Lemmy and they tend to be very wedded to viewing the world in strictly ideological terms with little nuance and no real appreciation for how complex the real world actually is. As a result, it’s almost impossible to be critical of anything without being subjected to pointless and condescending whataboutism.
Some ridiculous percentage of all currently publishing novelists in the US have an MFA in literature or creative writing or something similar. If this makes you feel a little suspicious about how the publishing industry actually works, it should. It’s very much a closed ecosystem that’s all about recycling the tried and true and that is highly risk averse in terms of straying from the norm. This is why it’s almost impossible for “regular” people to get a novel published unless they self-publish.
You still have the problem of misaligned incentives together with the fact that the only way to mitigate it is through coercion. This is why all communism inevitably leads to authoritarianism. The strength of capitalism is that it can absorb and indeed is designed to allow for the fact that humanity’s cooperative impulse --due to the fact that we evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to live in small bands of about 30 to 150 people-- cannot work at the level of the modern nation state.
They take draconian measures because they’re held hostage by one of the world’s most powerful and effective crime families. One only needs to look at South Korea to see that it doesn’t have to be this way.