I mean I realize my country has done a lot of questionable and sometimes outright bad stuff but why do people insist on telling me I live in a country that ‘only exists to make others suffer’ as one person said to me recently.
Their example of the US being unprovokingly evil was the bombing of Hiroshima and the other city
My response was “If the US had no justification for bombing Japan, then what justification did Japan have for attacking Pearl Harbor, when the US wasn’t even in the war at that time?”
I don’t get it, I know my country isn’t great, but I also know that without the US a lot of these people who are posting this stuff would likely be living under Nazi rule or worse. One of these people lives in a certain country (I wont say which see if you can guess) that is only protected from Russia by the alliance they have with the US, through NATO.
I think SzAdmin just asked for no more political conversations.
I tend to keep my political views to myself here, it’s no use.
But there’s something about US’s imperialism that bothers me. I was born in China and saw the rise of globalization in the early 90’s there, and it’s weird to see how values and culture are shaped because of the capitalist wants of other countries, but that’s the EU fault as well…
On the bright side, it’s much more easier to travel, if you know english you do good in mostly every country and it’s easier to communicate.
I’m completely in favour of globalization, not in favour of this consumers society that is driving everyone mad as we consume the earths resources using child labour.
There’s more to it, but it might offend so I’ll shut up now
I’m Australian. I lived for two years in the US in New Orleans. I have a great memory of my time there and I know a bit of the American psyche. It certainly can be arrogant but you’ve got to understand that most countries have way less people and aren’t so big. America can be a very much insular society because of this. They certainly can be arrogant but I love you guys and girls dearly!
A land war in Japan would have cost too many lives. Using the atom bomb stopped things sooner without the loss of lives. It wasn’t a good option but it proved to stop the war. I wouldn’t worry about it!
Seriously. You are a world power and you flex your muscles a lot about how the world should be. Don’t be surprised by the backlash from other cultures. We are all different. Australia has a different mentality from the US and that isn’t a bad thing…we are brought up different for sure…although we speak the same language.
You want to be the head of the totem pole then expect some criticism. That is the world.
Bah all countries great and small have done ■■■■■■ off ■■■■… To be honest alot of situations internationally the decision seems to be based on wich sucks less… And war is hell i feel like we have gotten into a few that could be avoided but its too late now…also if your sitting at or near the top you didnt get there being nice…money spurs on more evil than anything so until death is no longer profitable or we figure out how to make it without a money system its going to be this way.
Forget Pearl Harbor. Look at what the Japanese did in Nanking. The Japanese killed over a hundred times as many people in that city as they did at Pearl Harbor. It is estimated that during their rampage through the orient the Japanese killed ten million people. The US did do some horrible things to Japan during that war - not just the atom bomb, but the fire bombing campaign against Japanese cities. But it was necessary to win the war. The consequences would have been too dreadful if we lost it.
The US has done some horrible things, some of which I can see no justification for. But I think the US, with its free press, freedom of speech, independent congress, independent judiciary, and other checks on its behavior, is the best alternative for the pre-eminent super power in the world. No one else wants the job.
I hadn’t realized this was political sorry, I wasn’t trying to be political I was just trying to understand why some people only view the US as a big bully with no morals.
I mean to hate be a jerk about, but the US spends more on the welfare of other countries than it does its own citizens.
the budget for education, social services and benefits for the homeless is less than a quarter of what we spend on on helping the poor of other countries
a good example is that the government spent about 11M on Katrina but closer to 30M on the tsunami in the Polynesian islands…
I just think people are so focused on what the country does wrong, they forget all the good it does
Also I may be a US citizen from birth, but my family has a long history of taking immigrants, and my bio dad is actually Swedish (I have been told I should apply for dual citizenship)
I learned recently the aid sent to waring african states is actualy why they fight. Not just over control of the fresh supplies but they actual wouldnt receive it if they wernt fighting.
I also learned most of the aid money sent after the tsunami you mentioned was wasted. Lack of communication between foundations and basicly stupid purchases. Setting up buildings whos internal temp during the day there was unlivably hot and buying a fleet of broken boats to give examples.
Not trying to argue against your point but i think we could have used it more effectively is all. I mostly posted this because i thought it was interesting info…
That’s why you only want to make donations to the very most reputable organizations when you make donations to needy causes. Even the Red Cross has come up short in helping disaster areas and wasted money on fruitless projects. I got an advertisement on my computer saying that 200 million women had suffered the horrific practice of genital mutilation in the mid-east. They were soliciting donations to stop that practice. While it does happen, and it needs to be stopped, the 200 million figure is way off base. They were just low lifes trying to fraudulently solicit donations. More of that goes on than you might think. People can pull some sleazy ■■■■.
don’t I know it, there was a ‘charity’ in my area a few years ago that got donations for ‘helping the mentally ill’ by running a suicide hotline and having meetings. it turned out the number on their website automatically redirected you to the state sponsored hotline, and the meetings they posted about were always canceled for ‘emergencies’
it was all run by three people who went from living comfortably in a nice apartment on campus, making enough money to buy nice things for themselves to living like wall street CEOs in a house, with a 75" flat screen TV in every room and get this, a bathroom that had a 360 shower a hot tub, whirlpool tub, and a steam sauna. and they paid for it all with the money they received in the form of donations, sadly they even had 501c3 status so they didn’t have to file the money as income, they also got a tax write for the ‘time spent’ working the charity…of course they got found after just four years
I also read an article recently that the wounded warrior project spent less than 10% of the money donated to them on the care of veterans, the rest went to pay for ads and the CEOs who run the charity…
A good tip legally they must tell you what percentage actualy goes to the cause…now a 3 man hustle will probably lie but redcross and such wont…10% seems the normal amount…thats very sad…
I’ve always been amazed at the wideness of the variability of different people is in all endeavors, including the practice of good morality. I was reading the bio’s of some of the people running in an election of the board of directors of Amnesty International, a human rights organization. All those people had been on the front lines fighting for human rights most of their lives. The work they did was exemplary. Then there are those low lifes who fraudulently raise funds for charitable causes. How low can you get?
The U.S. has by far the largest and most powerful military on the planet. This means our military gets used the most by far when trying to control the planet and maintain stability. And it also means that it’s the military that has the greatest impact. It’s not that other countries don’t have past and present issues with overt and covert conquest, but when the U.S. does it, it tends to be intense and get a lot of attention. I think also as a nation we struggle to try to figure out what our responsibility is in the world if we have all this military power, and much of the world seems equally as unsure what they want from us. For example we can get chastised for waiting so long to intervene in Europe in WW2, yet when we try to move to intervene hastily (such as in the Middle East) we also get chastised for that. All of this boils down to essentially what always happens when there is a stark power imbalance, people are going to be fearful and feel insecure, and that’s going to lead to resentment. It’s just the way it is. As a U.S. citizen I try to roll it off my shoulders because I’m sitting pretty in the castle and don’t know from experience what it’s like on the outside.
But the US intervention in the middle east has intentions, such as the oil control. It’s not pure out of generosity and good intentions. The attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq out of “The War on Terror” is absurd. Destroyed the countries, messed with politics and it’s outright abuse of power.
Not to mention US relations with Israel.
The intelligence issues as well, NSA, CIA, FBI, and all the issues that they arise.
Guantanamo Bay and so forth.
It can be very dangerous to have “the most powerful army in the world”
Those are the accusations against us, yes. If we had intervened early in Europe in WW2 I can just about guarantee we would have been accused of trying to overthrow a dictator for our own selfish means. Also if we don’t step up, someone else will, like Russia, so there will always be someone. So there is a pressure many of us feel like if we do it, maybe we can try to do it in the most humane way possible. I’ll never try to claim that my country is perfect, because that would just be lol, but I’m just saying it’s complicated from our perspective, too.
like the thing with the police right now…they are getting ranted at and threatened for doing their job, you know cracking down on crime where it is at its worst and yet when they do like that is happening in Chicago right now, where they avoid those areas for fear of being labeled racists, they get yelled at for that too!
Theres a guy from NYC who is a detective for NYPD VICE, he vacations here in Maine two weeks in the spring and three weeks in the summer.
I was talking to him at the coffee shop (he gets the coffee every morning, says its the best hes ever had, and I stop there before work every morning, so we talk a lot when he is here) and he say two of his officers were shot at by residents when they were chasing a gang member who had just shot at an elementary school because a rival gang leaders little brother attended the school. They were called racist pigs. A week after that, when the same gang tried the same thing, the officers didn’t chase them, and the gang members got away, the same people who had shot at the officers before, then complained that they ignored the shooting and didn’t try to catch the shooters.
my big question was why weren’t these people arrested for shooting at an officer, as well as aiding and abetting, ont top of interfering with an arrest! Apparently some stupid law that was enacted allows residents with a concealed carry permit to fire at police if they think their lives are in danger, and they don’t even need to prove it, they just have to say it.
I guess people really do have contradictory feelings towards those with power. On one hand they feel they should be protected, but at the same time they fear that power being turned against them…
I know. I just have to vent/process it out when confronted to try to keep my own morality tempered. I’m often a few notches away from thinking the U.S. should just withdraw all military support from every other country on the planet and let all of our “haters” enjoy the ensuing violent ■■■■ show. But then I try to take a moment to breathe, understand that it’s a messy, emotionally-charged topic and that it’s understandable if people get pissy with us. It’s ethically better to take the hate and keep trying than to just go isolationist and nationalist.
I never have been in favor of the invasion of Iraq. We could have bought a lot of oil for the two trillion dollars we spent on that. I sometimes wish we could get more support from our allies in policing the world, but a re-armed Japan would send shock waves through the orient, and a re-armed Germany would make Russia nervous.
