AntiTrumpAlliance

"My friends in the UK complain about travel time and distance to get to relatives houses on holidays when the relative is only 60 miles away. I used to drive 60 miles just to get to work."

A phrase that I've heard that captures the contrast well is:

In the UK, 100 miles is a long distance; In the US, 100 years is a long time

As a Brit, I can't imagine driving 60 miles to get to work.

When I was a kid, we'd sometimes take a day trip out to the seaside, which was 63 miles away. If we wanted to do this, we'd have to get up super early so we could have enough time there.

For a longer holiday in the Summer, we would occasionally take a trip to a different place a bit further down on the coast, which was an 85 mile journey. We viewed that as being prohibitively far away for a day trip, and I don't remember ever going there if we weren't spending at least 4 days there (including the travel days).

It's insane how relative our perceptions of these things are.

Nailed it. Very well said.

What does the size of the country have to do with anything

Maybe it was all just propaganda and lies?

It mostly always was. Certainly no freedom to think alternatively from US nazi economic domination, or Israel's supremacist right to their own freedom above neighbours.

The core issue with criticism of TACO de-escallation is thinking that the US still has the power advantage in this war and can "impose freedom for the world" through another Vietnam/Afghanistan length conflict. It's not just failing to understand hegemony was never about freedom, its not understanding the impotence.

Americans, I assume like many other countries in the world, get blasted with the patriotism firehose early and often. For the first two decades of my life I generally held the assumption that America was the best and most free, England was pretty good and kind of free, then maybe some of the scandinavian countries, then all the countries no one cares about, and at the bottom was Russia, North Korea, and China, in that order. It was really hard to find information to the contrary, and even if you did, voicing doubts about America's number-one-ness could seriously cost you a job, a family relationship, a scholarship, etc. if not actually get you under investigation by the authorities (depending on what was said and to whom). It simply wasn't done when I was younger, at least in my social sphere.

I think the internet really did a number on America's propaganda program, because a lot more young people nowadays, even before Trump, seem a lot more disillusioned about America and its role in the world. There's been a bit of a backslide, I think, as the powerful have consolidated their grip on the internet, but not a complete one. Kids seem to understand that they're being lied to, even if they don't understand the full scope and nature of the deception.

Maybe that a consequence of who I choose to keep in my immediate IRL circle these days. Maybe it's just hope. But I think, or hope, that we're better off than we were 40 years ago as far as understanding what our government is actually doing goes.

Great response. Apologies for my initial defensiveness. Most of what I see here is "well then do something about it" so I was just trying to head that off.

I agree with you. And yeah, it was always propaganda from like the 1960s onward at a minimum. Nixon fucked us over and we've been going downhill since.

Any Americans still defending this playground for pedophile billionaires are idiots who refuse to look critically at this place for even a second, and are likely part of the problem. Fuck em. There's not much to be proud of here. Some small things, mostly local, but nothing on a national scale.

The only thing we have on Russia at this point is gasoline is not currently being rationed.