Originally posted by
Chris
:confused:
I must be really thick, because I have no idea what's going on in this thread any more...
Aragorn has mentioned this many times, but I think we are getting to a level of detail in this thread which pretty much requires you to be a pure-bred American to understand what's going on.
I would like to remark here that there seems to be a paranoid streak in American politics and public discourse that isn't healthy and goes back all the way to the Anti-Catholic League, John Birchers and such like.
I will leave you guys to it, but as Aragorn mentioned before there is life outside the United States and you could learn an awful lot by looking outside your borders once in a while and checking out what the view is like from over there. This doesn't apply to everyone of course, plenty of you here are open-minded enough to acknowledge the rest of the world and try to learn about it and from it, but the general trend of American insularism and isolationism is pretty unmistakable. I do not wish to be unkind, but you will probably find that in the foreseeable future, the rest of the world will care about as much about internal political disputes in the US as they do about those in Brazil or Indonesia.
I am sorry to have to break this to you, but the USA isn't nearly as important in world affairs these days as its inhabitants like to think. Frankly, both the UK and the US have become a laughing stock, with Brexit and Trump.
To me the whole Q/Trump phenomenon is a clear sign that a fairly large portion of the US public has gone off the reservation and it is just a sad thing to see. A similar thing has happened in Hungary over the last decade or so, but I still don't think that Orbán is comparable to Trump in that respect and the sort of craziness that happens on the far-right in the US does not seem to happen here in Europe at all and this becomes especially apparent when you look at actual facts and figures rather than just ideology and rhetoric.
The sort of inequality, racial prejudice, incarceration rate, miscarriage of justice, murder rate, etc... that is commonplace in the US, simply doesn't happen in Europe, even in the poorer parts. To take just one example, almost all of the most dangerous cities, with the highest murder rates are in Latin America and the US. None of them are in Europe. Some US cities have higher murder rates than war zones in the Middle East.
To me, it is a clear sign that the USA is slipping down from the developed world and becoming ever more like your typical Latin-American banana republic. It is not something I enjoy saying, but I have to look at the facts as they are and not how I'd like them to be. I'm sorry if this was too harsh, but I don't believe that anyone will benefit from wishful thinking and looking the other way.