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Comment on The American Dream, minus 60%

I’m an American emigrant, living in Germany, and it’s weird: there are so many layers of problems, that I can’t accurately express what it feels like to watch your home country burn itself and anyone it can take with it to the ground from afar. The closest I can come is “shameful,” when people ask, but I worry that comes off as though I just find trump embarrassing.

I absolutely do, but it’s more that I feel deep shame for ever having believed the propaganda I was raised with; every new, horrible thing this president does is a fucking disgrace; and the mask-off nature of the administration reveals other shameful aspects of American culture and history*, which were previously less known to Europeans.

Just cutting off USAID, NOAA, and American participation in the WHO have or will all contribute to preventable deaths of innocent people around the world (there are too many things to consider them all here). We were at one point well-organized, dedicated, and well-connected enough to have a net positive effect on the world (had we chosen to do so, which we continually did not). We had a robust social safety net for some of the population at one point which could have been expanded to cover everyone in the country. By not doing that, we’ve almost certainly forced people who could have been highly skilled doctors, gifted artists, or creative inventors into wage labor, prison, or an early grave.

Because of what?

Racism?

That weird little fantasy about how the details of a person’s phenotype affect their personality or ability? It’s just a malignant, bizarro-world version of astrology! Race isn’t based in genetic science, and even if they try to suggest that there are differences based on race that are transmitted through culture, it quickly leads to the realization that perhaps treating some people as an underclass is not a good thing for society, actually, so they’re clearly not going about it that way.

It’s repeated a lot, but the cruelty really seems to be the point.

That’s a terrible shame.

*it also revealed a level of solidarity shown by people protesting ICE that I was really happily surprised by, to be clear. It’s not all bad, but there are many ways that could have been revealed which would have been infinitely better.

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bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How’d you escape?

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- idiomaddict@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I majored in German in college (and honestly probably only got to a high B2 or so, which is not very advanced), so I signed up flyor six months of intensive online classes from 3-7:30 am every weekday before work, then applied to a bunch of masters programs in German language instruction. I was accepted on a provisional basis for a normal teaching degree, and given a year to take more intensive German classes before starting the degree. Nearing the end of that year, I had advanced my German enough to qualify for the masters in German education. To qualify for the student visa, I had to prove my student status and have €10k that I could put into a bank account to be withdrawn in steady increments throughout the year. The intensive classes cost about €5k for the whole 18 months, and university tuition is around €400 per semester.
  
  I do have a talent for languages, but I also think that if anyone spends 18 months doing 20 hours of language instruction per week, they’ll be able to at least get a high enough level to study a non language related degree in most countries. I’ve seen dedicated illiterate adults begin learning both German and how to read and get a language level high enough to meet university admission requirements here within three years, so a person starting out knowing their letters can do it in half the time. It’s not easy, but if you can focus on it, it’s doable.
  
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uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.

The whole point of post-enlightenment civilizations is to treat everyone equally. But the US’ economy depended on slavery, and we weren’t ready to give rights to women, and those left cracks fit for social wedges.

Secondly, racism is a tool and always has been. The owner class has always resented the working class, and now they can live so far removed from us that they don’t even pretend or develop empathy by sharing the street with us. Heck Thiel wants to make his own Rapture in which everything is automated.

Racism is the hook by which the massive, oligarch-owned, far-right, propaganda machine draws in its viewership before feeding them the MAGA ideology and encouraging them to isolate themselves from all other information sources (and the libs). It turns out in the last century we’ve developed a lot of psychology. It’s just not used as much to heal minds.

But the owner class hates us all. It may hate non-white non-Christians slightly more, but the thing that disgusts them the most about us, by far, is that we are poor. And they’re just as eager to deny us a means to survive as working-class white men would to black men.

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- bold_atlas@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Firstly, racism is always a thing. Xenophobia is how humans kept infectious diseases at bay for most of human existence. But then we did the agriculture thing and decided to try out larger societies. Throughout history, though societies have always had to contend with half the population hating the other half enough to get violent.
  
  You’ve got that backwards. It’s the insular isolated groups that tend to get wiped out by a diseases. Larger intermixing populations means better immune systems via exposure.
  
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  - uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Smaller insular groups get wiped out by infectious diseases, but they don’t communicate them to other insular groups. And that is the going hypothesis of why we really like to organize in small bands about the size of our Facebook friends list, and want to throw rocks at people from other tribes.
    
    Larger intermixing populations gain their immunity by first having a lot of them die off. This is one of the benefits(?) of ranching livestock, since they’re a vector for diseases that commonly get transmitted to their human owners. The epidemics happen, and then the survivors have the antibodies, and even pass them on to their kin.
    
    Nowadays, we have centralized disease control. It may be failing in the US but the rest of the developed world still have a robust system. But human beings haven’t had time to evolve (very much) towards large pluralistic societies that combat disease through science and proactive prevention.
    
    Given enough time, I’d think we might, since large pluralistic societies also develop science, technology and arts much faster in general, often much to the chagrin of moral guardians like religious ministries.
    
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    NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You just aren’t willing to admit being wrong are you?
    
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