I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.
We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.
We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.
We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.
We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.
Oh and also police are nearly never actually prosecuted, convicted, or sent to prison, we only very recently even began to attempt to have meaningful data on much of that… cops are literally above the law in a wide range of scenarios, allowed to violate their own rules routinely, you have to really, really fuck up hard as a cop to actually be convicted…
And then going to prison, as a cop, is often a death sentence… because the other prsioners fucking hate cops.
Even if you are not a cop, basically you should just expect to be raped in prison, thats how common it is, everyone acts like this is a funny joke though.
And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.
We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.
I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.
Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.
I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.
We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.
I know (and like) the David Bowie one partly for that line. Thanks for the Rammstein recommendation, I hadn’t heard it. It feels apt for Europe, which seems increasingly Americanised.
When I was growing up there was a song called “In American” by British band Red Box. But looking back, I think it’s hypocritical to criticise America if we don’t also acknowledge our own comparable problems here. We’re not dealing with the same scale of predators you have there because - at least in Ireland - there was less for the ambitious and power-craving individuals to aspire to. Those people usually left for America for that reason, where they could be their unbridled, exploitative selves and make more money than they ever would have here.
So I don’t see Americans as the problem, but the systems and the difficulty in changing them. Many problematic people have simply been exposed to unimaginable amounts of disinformation and cults. It’s a difficult problem but if anyone can overcome it I think you can.
There are more decent people in the USA than the news cycle and online grift-fluencers make it seem.
I think we’re all the same. I despair too, but each population grows up in its own Petri dish. Depending on what attention your resources have attracted and how corrupt the news cycle is, different traits will be evoked in society. So while it’s bad, and seemingly getting worse, I have a bit more hope in people wherever they’re from.
I feel for you. I’m not even based in the USA and I find it impossible to avoid US news of the latest political vulgarity. So I follow the good people who lift my heart - whether that’s Project Pink!, Mumdani in NY or anybody who gives me hope. We can’t let the despair get us, because that’s the real war that’s going on here. Once we let despair reign inside us, they’ve won. Keep the faith!
Funny you say that about the Irish that migrated here…
I’m aporoximately half Italian by heritage, and from what I know of my own family, and uh, general Italian American culture… uh fucking yeah, yep, same thing lol!
Where we differ is that… yeah, to a great extent, we are a bit uniquely fucked by our systems…
But I spent the better part of two decades getting a Poli Sci and an Econ degree, being involved at tons of ground level political stuff…
… and almost nobody fucking cared, back during Obama, back when we actually had a realistic shot and altering the institutional inertia of those systems.
We could not reform the electoral college, which doomed us to the Imperial Presidency.
We did not repeal the PATRIOT ACT, now everyone who thinks wrong is a terrorist sympathizer.
We did not countermand Citizens United, now our government is wholly corrupt, bought and paid for by corporations and their boards of directors.
We did not implement a ranked choice voting paradigm that would have made it much, much harder for the Republicans to keep their power, to keep gerrymandering and rigging out voting systems.
That was it, the Obama years, historically speaking, that was our shot!
And we missed it.
I told everyone I knew that what is happening right now was a very likely outcome if we didn’t achieve those things at that time.
And almost everyone I knew called me paranoid, delusional, hysterical.
… So no, the problem is Americans.
We are too high on our own supply, we’ve been huffing our own farts for so long that we just assumed we were immune to the broader forces of history.
We still barely even manage to get half the population to vote, for the President, and local and State level election turnout numbers are way worse.
We don’t care, it isn’t cool to care.
De Tocqueville rather importantly notes that a well informed and educated, and politically engaged populace is required for democracy to work.
What he saw in America was a kind of practical communalism, everyone knows and interacts with and is willing to coordinate with their neighbors and their town… thats how he described our fledgling republic.
But we abstracted that all away, got lost in our own propoganda amd gadgets and doodads, and now its all blowing up in our faces.
Trump is a symptom of a deeply anti-intellectual and religious fundamentalist streak that consistently runs through our history, and no one ever really bothered to do anything systemic about this, even though its implications are obvious.
Don’t get me wrong, our systems are fucked, but we had so many chances to do… anything else, anything other than neoliberal phantasmagoria as a political ethos… we had so many people, and stories, and signs, and artists! all pointing out our own hypocrisy… and we basically just sung along and pantomimed being rebels that could change the system, as corporate America just turned that into another marketable demographic, and very very few ‘hippies’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘punks’ realized that is what happened.
Sorry, I losing focus, starting to fall asleep, but basically uh… no we Americans fucking suck, trust me, I probably know more of them than you, haha!
EDIT: Oh right, I’ll have to check out Red Box, cam’t say I’ve heard of them!
I can’t argue with anything you’ve said. Indoctrination is very hard to break out of, and it starts at a young age in the USA (if the people I followed when I was on TikTok are accurate). Singing the anthem at school, hanging the flag (we never saw flags at school here until St. Patrick’s Day), being told USA is the greatest and that other countries want to be like the USA, that it’s the land of the free … all indoctrination. I’d go as far as to call it brainwashing.
We’re fragile creatures (Fragile, by Sting, since we have a musical theme going!). It’s hard to contend with such an onslaught. I don’t blame people for that. I’m curious, what did it for you? How did you begin to see the wood from the trees?
I came from a highly patriotic, religious fundamentalist family.
Unfortunately for them… I am also very inquisitive, very curious, pretty autistic, and very good at analysis.
The cracks were subtle at first… but they could not be ignored… the more I took it upon myself to learn… the worse it got, in terms of upholding the false reality.
I couldn’t pinpoint an exact thing or moment.
Maybe it really was watching the Matrix… a barely describable unease, sense that something… is wrong… a splinter, in my mind, driving me mad.
I was talking, with people from all around the world, in realtime, in the early 2000s, taught myself how to code, read voraciously, did well in school, got those two degrees… at the same time, just had to do either one or two extra summer quarters to finish in 4 years, went to work in corpo america, bounced off of its bullshit rather rapidly, went to non profits, to be able to use my skillset but not feel morally disgusted with myself.
I do remember one thing… walking to work one day.
A lump, of blankets, in the alley near the downtown corporate hq i worked at.
… huh.
Work.
Lunch.
Time enough for a bit of a walk.
Pass by that same alley.
The lump is gone. In its place, there is a … stain.
And there are city workers, with flamethrowers, burning it away.
Sterilizing it.
Because it was the remnants of a decaying, human corpse.
I think it may have been that moment that I realized our society does not give one fuck for the poor and homeless… and that at that point in time… my job was ultimately to facilitate the grander processes that led to that person’s likely avoidable death.
Which is why the Republicans intentionally misunderstand, infantilize and demonize the first, and destroy the latter.
We are down to about an 85% literacy rate now.
Average American reads at a 6th grade level, less than 5% can actually do critical analysis, compare and contrast different news stories covering the same event/story.
I think I generally agree with everything you’ve said, yes I am from/in the US, I also have had many EU internet friends over the years… yeah, policing problems exist everywhere, but they’re a lot worse here tham the EU generally.
We have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the world, of any large, developed country.
We imprison more of our population than commonly referenced authoritarian states like Russia and China.
We have more total prisoners than Stalin had in labor camp gulags at the height of the gulag system, we have more people incarcerated than China does, and their population is roughly 4x larger than ours.
We treat way, way too many problems as crimes to be jailed or imprisoned for, not social problems to be solved at the root cause, and we have a neat little carve out in our Constitution that explicitly allows slavery, forced labor, for imprisoned people… we have a massive industry of private, for profit prisons, that exploits this slave labor.
Oh and also police are nearly never actually prosecuted, convicted, or sent to prison, we only very recently even began to attempt to have meaningful data on much of that… cops are literally above the law in a wide range of scenarios, allowed to violate their own rules routinely, you have to really, really fuck up hard as a cop to actually be convicted…
And then going to prison, as a cop, is often a death sentence… because the other prsioners fucking hate cops.
Even if you are not a cop, basically you should just expect to be raped in prison, thats how common it is, everyone acts like this is a funny joke though.
And all those figures and facts were true for years, decades, long before Trump and MAGA just went full fascist, and decided to bring back WW2 style internment camps, but for undocumented migrants, and the homeless.
We’ve already got disease outbreaks running through these concentration camps, which are largely being blacked out of the media, I will be entirely unsurprised if we just progress as the Nazis did to ‘work till you die’ camps and outright death camps, in just a few years time.
Shit’s really bad over here.
I didn’t realise how high the prison population numbers are. I first became aware of the issue when System of a Down released “Prison song”.
Those numbers you shared are really abhorrent, and explains why my lawyer acquaintance finds the prison system there shocking (he visited the US a few times). He absolutely would not want to see something “so inhumane” here.
I wonder how to interpret the 82% non-conviction in the context of over-conviction.
We have people in prison that are as much victims of poverty and undiagnosed problems like ADHD / autism. So if we have people imprisoned who would be better served (including society) elsewhere, I can imagine it’s pretty bad there in the U.S. Ifs a genuine tragedy, but an injustice against human rights too.
System of a Down?
Here’s my attempt at an inverse:
Rammstein: Amerika (it’s wunderbar!)
Yeah, I’m sick of us too.
We are a third world country in a gucci belt, we are basically a failed state at this point.
Oh hey! David Bowie: I’m afraid of Americans.
Me too Dave, me too. RIP.
I know (and like) the David Bowie one partly for that line. Thanks for the Rammstein recommendation, I hadn’t heard it. It feels apt for Europe, which seems increasingly Americanised.
When I was growing up there was a song called “In American” by British band Red Box. But looking back, I think it’s hypocritical to criticise America if we don’t also acknowledge our own comparable problems here. We’re not dealing with the same scale of predators you have there because - at least in Ireland - there was less for the ambitious and power-craving individuals to aspire to. Those people usually left for America for that reason, where they could be their unbridled, exploitative selves and make more money than they ever would have here.
So I don’t see Americans as the problem, but the systems and the difficulty in changing them. Many problematic people have simply been exposed to unimaginable amounts of disinformation and cults. It’s a difficult problem but if anyone can overcome it I think you can.
There are more decent people in the USA than the news cycle and online grift-fluencers make it seem.
I think we’re all the same. I despair too, but each population grows up in its own Petri dish. Depending on what attention your resources have attracted and how corrupt the news cycle is, different traits will be evoked in society. So while it’s bad, and seemingly getting worse, I have a bit more hope in people wherever they’re from.
I feel for you. I’m not even based in the USA and I find it impossible to avoid US news of the latest political vulgarity. So I follow the good people who lift my heart - whether that’s Project Pink!, Mumdani in NY or anybody who gives me hope. We can’t let the despair get us, because that’s the real war that’s going on here. Once we let despair reign inside us, they’ve won. Keep the faith!
Funny you say that about the Irish that migrated here…
I’m aporoximately half Italian by heritage, and from what I know of my own family, and uh, general Italian American culture… uh fucking yeah, yep, same thing lol!
Where we differ is that… yeah, to a great extent, we are a bit uniquely fucked by our systems…
But I spent the better part of two decades getting a Poli Sci and an Econ degree, being involved at tons of ground level political stuff…
… and almost nobody fucking cared, back during Obama, back when we actually had a realistic shot and altering the institutional inertia of those systems.
We could not reform the electoral college, which doomed us to the Imperial Presidency.
We did not repeal the PATRIOT ACT, now everyone who thinks wrong is a terrorist sympathizer.
We did not countermand Citizens United, now our government is wholly corrupt, bought and paid for by corporations and their boards of directors.
We did not implement a ranked choice voting paradigm that would have made it much, much harder for the Republicans to keep their power, to keep gerrymandering and rigging out voting systems.
That was it, the Obama years, historically speaking, that was our shot!
And we missed it.
I told everyone I knew that what is happening right now was a very likely outcome if we didn’t achieve those things at that time.
And almost everyone I knew called me paranoid, delusional, hysterical.
… So no, the problem is Americans.
We are too high on our own supply, we’ve been huffing our own farts for so long that we just assumed we were immune to the broader forces of history.
We still barely even manage to get half the population to vote, for the President, and local and State level election turnout numbers are way worse.
We don’t care, it isn’t cool to care.
De Tocqueville rather importantly notes that a well informed and educated, and politically engaged populace is required for democracy to work.
What he saw in America was a kind of practical communalism, everyone knows and interacts with and is willing to coordinate with their neighbors and their town… thats how he described our fledgling republic.
But we abstracted that all away, got lost in our own propoganda amd gadgets and doodads, and now its all blowing up in our faces.
Trump is a symptom of a deeply anti-intellectual and religious fundamentalist streak that consistently runs through our history, and no one ever really bothered to do anything systemic about this, even though its implications are obvious.
Don’t get me wrong, our systems are fucked, but we had so many chances to do… anything else, anything other than neoliberal phantasmagoria as a political ethos… we had so many people, and stories, and signs, and artists! all pointing out our own hypocrisy… and we basically just sung along and pantomimed being rebels that could change the system, as corporate America just turned that into another marketable demographic, and very very few ‘hippies’ and ‘rebels’ and ‘punks’ realized that is what happened.
Sorry, I losing focus, starting to fall asleep, but basically uh… no we Americans fucking suck, trust me, I probably know more of them than you, haha!
EDIT: Oh right, I’ll have to check out Red Box, cam’t say I’ve heard of them!
I can’t argue with anything you’ve said. Indoctrination is very hard to break out of, and it starts at a young age in the USA (if the people I followed when I was on TikTok are accurate). Singing the anthem at school, hanging the flag (we never saw flags at school here until St. Patrick’s Day), being told USA is the greatest and that other countries want to be like the USA, that it’s the land of the free … all indoctrination. I’d go as far as to call it brainwashing.
We’re fragile creatures (Fragile, by Sting, since we have a musical theme going!). It’s hard to contend with such an onslaught. I don’t blame people for that. I’m curious, what did it for you? How did you begin to see the wood from the trees?
I came from a highly patriotic, religious fundamentalist family.
Unfortunately for them… I am also very inquisitive, very curious, pretty autistic, and very good at analysis.
The cracks were subtle at first… but they could not be ignored… the more I took it upon myself to learn… the worse it got, in terms of upholding the false reality.
I couldn’t pinpoint an exact thing or moment.
Maybe it really was watching the Matrix… a barely describable unease, sense that something… is wrong… a splinter, in my mind, driving me mad.
I was talking, with people from all around the world, in realtime, in the early 2000s, taught myself how to code, read voraciously, did well in school, got those two degrees… at the same time, just had to do either one or two extra summer quarters to finish in 4 years, went to work in corpo america, bounced off of its bullshit rather rapidly, went to non profits, to be able to use my skillset but not feel morally disgusted with myself.
I do remember one thing… walking to work one day.
A lump, of blankets, in the alley near the downtown corporate hq i worked at.
… huh.
Work.
Lunch.
Time enough for a bit of a walk.
Pass by that same alley.
The lump is gone. In its place, there is a … stain.
And there are city workers, with flamethrowers, burning it away.
Sterilizing it.
Because it was the remnants of a decaying, human corpse.
I think it may have been that moment that I realized our society does not give one fuck for the poor and homeless… and that at that point in time… my job was ultimately to facilitate the grander processes that led to that person’s likely avoidable death.
The ‘tism can be a great asset for seeing through BS, along with education.
Which is why the Republicans intentionally misunderstand, infantilize and demonize the first, and destroy the latter.
We are down to about an 85% literacy rate now.
Average American reads at a 6th grade level, less than 5% can actually do critical analysis, compare and contrast different news stories covering the same event/story.