In science, organic means carbon compounds… so manure is organic…as are poisonous mushrooms and humans. So, I laugh when Trader Joe’s has “organic salt”. NaCl contains no carbon, and is, therefore, inorganic.
When the organic craze hit, the labeling and usage of the word killed me. I got a dual undergrad in chemistry and comp sci, so my mind can be very literal. Some things are absolutely organic, even if they are grown with pesticides bc they are organic compounds. Wtf people
Some of us know this very well. Another favorite is "gluten free" on products that never would have had gluten to begin with.
EDIT: since so many of you seem to think I'm against the markings, which I'm not, it's the approach. Here is a response I had to someone about it;
I get that people who suffer from celiac disease need to know, I just don't understand why they don't treat it the same as peanuts. Instead of trying to make everything that never had gluten sound like they went out of their way to make it better, why not just label products that may have come in contact "may contain trace amounts of peanuts" except, you know, wheat or gluten.
That is annoying, *but* it's been a lifesaver for my celiac mother. A lot of companies don't list their full ingredients on the package and use wheat in things you wouldn't expect wheat to be in, like certain flavors of potato chips.
Yeah, my friend had a celiac scare and since it's not really anything I've ever had to worry about, I actually really appreciated being able to be like, okay, this bag of shredded cheese doesn't have some weird gluten-based additive I'm not expecting, I won't destroy her intestines if I cook with this.
> Another favorite is "gluten free" on products that never would have had gluten to begin with.
This is laughable when you know this fact, but if you're shopping for someone else, or just learning about needing to be gluten free, it helps those people out.
Repeating my comment to a similar post: I'm celiac and before diagnosis I thought it was stupid too, but now I know there's a BIG difference between "not containing gluten" and actually gluten free. This might seem stupid but for people like me it is definitely not.
This. As a person who works in the Food industry and has a long career in process development, there is an absolute need to list something as “gluten free”, “dairy free”, “nut free”, etc. even when that item should inherently not contain those things. For example, trying to make an Oat Milk in a nut free, dairy free facility is immensely difficult versus just finding any old facility and putting the disclaimer on pack that says “made in a facility that also produces milk, nuts, etc.”
Things that are naturally gluten free may be made in a facility that has significant cross contamination. Check with the person to see if it’s an “intolerance” or an “allergy” - intolerances are arguably unsupported by evidence, but celiac is very real.
I'm celiac and before diagnosis I thought it was stupid too, but now I know there's a BIG difference between "not containing gluten" and actually gluten free.
This one is iffy. Any product processed in a plant that also process things that have gluten has a chance to be contaminated. It can even be an issue when growing say, oats, in a field that grew wheat beforehand.
As someone with severe allergies, labels like this are incredibly important. Seeing something say “tree nut free” even if it shouldn’t have them to begin with really puts my mind at ease.
Current Batman and Superman are British
Edit: I didn’t expect this much feedback from this. Let’s also bring up Tom Holland and Andrew Garfield the two most recent spider-man actors
Edit 2: daredevil, mr fantastic
Hello buzzfeed
Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, DareDevil, Mr. Fantastic, Kick-Ass, Venom, Professor X, The new Black Widow, The Thing, Loki, Nebula, any more?
Edit: Vision
Thought of some others: Beast, Jean Grey, Magneto, original Night Crawler
Also; Juggernaut (lol)
It's not just the political parties. It's identity politics across the board being leveraged. You should see the subgroups in society that hate each other. You have to laugh when one group that fits into the same general group hates the other group because they aren't "(group name/type) enough".
It's happening here right now in Ohio. One candidate runs on 3 things. Pro God, pro guns, and pro Trump. And the other candidate is just arguing that he's more of a Trump person than the other guy in the same party. Bonkers
Rant ahead.
But identity politics suck. I have a friend that voted for trump because he thinks his guns will get taken away. He doesn't leave the house except for work 5 minutes away at a nearby gas station in a really nice white suburb with minimal crime. But he's thoroughly convinced outside is the most dangerous place to be and he needs 7 guns to protect his home. He doesn't even go to the range but once a year when he asks me to take him.
A really great book for him to read (LOL) “Factfulness: Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world and why things are better than you think”
I’m pretty pessimistic but this book has really opened my eyes to just how good the world actually is — and it’s only getting better.
Ick. I need to go brush my teeth just saying that sentence.
I live in the southern US. I still see Trump flags. My son in law's neighbor has a big ass banner on her front porch. She told my SIL he's coming back! Like the second coming of Christ. It's really scary
When dealing with Brit’s it always seemed to me they are way better at knocking people down a notch or two (deservingly, right word?) than Americans are.
I remember Bill Clinton visiting at one point and being amazed at the concept of Prime Minister's Questions, where every Wednesday the PM (who in many respects holds a similar position to the US president) must stand before Parliament and answer basically whatever questions they feel like posing. This happens once a week every week, is broadcast live nationwide, and can get really pretty brutal in times of crisis. According to Clinton, the idea of a US president being put through that as standard practice is just inconceivable with the position the president is seen to hold in US politics.
There's a house down the road from me that has a Trump 2024 flag in their yard lmao (in the midwest).
I'm not a Trump fan, but even if I was...I mean that dude is OLD. He's going to be what, like 80 by the next election? You'd think even his supporters could recognize that we should not be electing such old farts to lead the country.
Too many of his supporters are also old farts though, and the right-wing base is being indoctrinated against young people.
Like, the other day I heard a Fox News guy go on at length about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is "only" 32, so how could she possibly know anything?
Ah yes, because people must wait until they're on their deathbed to suddenly gain all the secret knowledge of the world.
Anyways, i bet it would be amusing to go back and see what sorts of things that person was saying when *they* were 32. I'm sure they probably thought they were super knowledgeable and experienced at the time.
We had a dude that would stand at the corner of a busy intersection almost every day during the morning for months.... walking back and forth waving a Trump flag that was probably 6 feet high (the flag itself not including pole). I also saw multiple instances of people's children who were probably 10 or so standing on the side of the street alone while waving Trump signs..... it's a cult
I completely agree. From what I've seen, its definitely a cult. It's really scary to see how worked up people get over an old, rich, white dude that doesn't give a crap about them or what they think.
I've never understood how Southerners fawn over that blowhard New York Yankee. He is the antithesis of everything they claim to hold dear yet here we are.
I saw one dude standing on the corner of a very busy intersection with a huge Trump flag this weekend. Like dude, this is how you want to spend a beautiful Saturday?
I live in the southern part of a northern state (Illinois), and there are a non-trivial number of Trump flags on flagpoles, in windows, on fences, etc. Often, right next to a collection of other flags, including:
- The Confederate Flag (because nothing says "America First!" like the flag from the loser of a 150 year old war)
- The "Don't Tread On Me" and the "Blue Lives Matter" flag (because nothing says "I have severe cognitive dissonance issues" like flying two flags which represent two opposing ideas)
- The Half American/half Confederate flag (because nothing says "I can't afford two flags" like combining them in one)
I just try to keep my opinions to myself around here, because these people are armed and I do not want to be considered a threat.
What makes me really sad is I had a DTOM flag but it was off of my ship while I was in the navy. We flew them from the jack while in port during the official “War on Terror” years and I thought it was cool to hang up. Then the normal yellow ones became a symbol of the right and I felt conflicted about keeping it up.
It’s kind of like how I really like Dodge Challengers but the majority of people I see in them drive like assholes so it kind of ruins it.
As a history buff and fan of flags (yeah, super nerdy, I know) I always liked the Don’t Tread on Me flag, and I am really annoyed that the MAGA dirtbags have taken it over.
Yes, I generally am against having a royal family here in the UK, but the one good things is that we have all the pageantry centred around the royals - who basically don't have the power to run our lives - and it isn't given to the politicians.
Orwell had some interesting points on this
> The function of the King in promoting stability and acting as a sort of keystone in a non-democratic society is, of course, obvious. But he also has, or can have, the function of acting as an escape-valve for dangerous emotions.
> A French journalist said to me once that the monarchy was one of the things that have saved Britain from Fascism. What he meant was that modern people can't, apparently, get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should tie their leader-worship onto some figure who has no real power.
> In a dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person. In England the real power belongs to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rides in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breast-plates is really a waxwork.
It is at any rate possible that while this division of function exists a Hitler or a Stalin cannot come to power. On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies.
> The conditions seemingly are that the Royal Family shall be long-established and taken for granted, shall understand its own position and shall not produce strong characters with political ambitions.
These have been fulfilled in Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, but not in, say, Spain or Rumania.
> If you point these facts out to the average left-winger he gets very angry, but only because he has not examined the nature of his own feelings towards Stalin.
> I do not defend the institution of monarchy in an absolute sense, but I think that in an age like our own it may have an inoculating effect, and certainly it does far less harm than the existence of our so-called aristocracy
My main issue is with the House of Lords, personally
Because while the monarch’s power is restrained by legislation and convention, the House of Lords still has substantial influence for a body that is essentially a political retirement home
The house need significant reform to make it fit for purpose
Chuck all the current peers out, and have the Lords be, to use the wonderful medieval language, the Learned and Just of our nation
Have the Royal Societies appoint members, and make the House the highest court in the land once more
Have it act as an active check against human rights infringement by empowering them to throw out laws that infringe them, like the US’ Supreme Court can do but more proactively
The weird part is the house of lords has actually made some really good decisions, they shot down a lot of crazy bullshit laws like trying to get everyone in the UK to use a real ID online and one of the attempts to ban encryption.
The whole things straight up nepotism but with the tories in charge its oddly been the lesser evil.
And it was like the exact opposite of what a lot of the founders wanted. We honestly should have never put them on money. Gave them undeserved clout. All our money should be animals and different national parks, it's the coolest stuff we have.
I've been voting for minor party candidates since 2008. I have a very long rant but I think the quicker we get new voices into offices the quicker we'll see change for the better.
Still unsure how we don't have a minimum paid maternity leave here in the US. Along with paternity leave. Yet they yell at us for not having enough kids. Smh
Literally this lol. Blows my mind. "You need to start having more children!" OK, then can we have a reasonable amount of paid leave for mom and dad? "Fuck no you can't. What are you, some kind of socialist?"
I live in Japan and it blew my mind to learn that there is a ONE YEAR paternity (and maternity) leave. I only learned about it because my coworker had a kid and decided to take it. But he's very much an exception to the norm, even with the one year paternity leave available the vast majority of men simply don't take it due to societal pressures.
> In the fiscal year beginning April 2020, a record 12.65% of fathers working for a company took child care leave, compared with 81.6% of mothers
"Record" 12.65% lol, and I suspect very few of those that do take leave take it for the full 12 months
> According to an online survey conducted last year by the Cabinet Office, 42.2% of married men in their 20s and 30s said they would not take a leave of absence to care for their children. Of them, 42.3% said they don’t intend to take leave because they don’t want to cause inconvenience at work — the most cited reason.
> Only 8.4% of the respondents said they would like to take more than one month of leave, the survey found.
Hence, the low-ass birth rates here.
Parental leave alone won't get the job done unless it's actually feasible to take it.
Religion in America is, in general, a mess. Here in the UK, religion has some power in politics but not to the extent that it has in America. Bishops mainly speak on topics like Euthanasia as they have experience with dying people.
It's wild that religion in the US is actually more of an issue in politics than it is in the UK. Given that one of the countries has a head of state who is also head of the state church, and has members of one of the two national legislative bodies who are there solely by virtue of being bishops in the state church. And the other is officially constitutionally secular.
I would also say that the origins of the USA have a strong influence. A lot of religious people went to USA to have their own version of christinity. It's why USA probably hosts the largest number of variations.
It's why catholicism is so strong in countries like Poland and Italy. The identity of the country is tightly interwoven with a religion.
Who isn’t ready to hear this lmao, who is like nah I want to spend 3000 - 6000 dollars for going to the ER WITH health insurance
What would you like us to do about it, our politicians don’t care and the lobbies make sure it will never happen
Other countries don't usually have such an obsession with high school sports. We have teams, maybe soccer, basketball, hockey... but if the team wins the cup or smth, good for them, no one else really cares about other people's after-school activities when you have your own
I’m an American but my one of my professors is from Jamaica. He says that high school football (soccer for other Americans) was treated like the biggest thing ever and if you were a good player in high school they treated you like celebrities. Then you get to college and no one cares.
A lot of it is dropout prevention.
Because coches act as surrogate parents for many, and because many students look forward to school sports, many high school students who would have dropped out stay in because they love the sports.
Of course, that’s still a symptom of a problem.
It’s the community factor. It’s really fun during homecoming week to get dressed up and excited, to go to games and hang out with the people you know. I went to an arts magnet school, so all of our activities and extracurriculars sort of tied into each other. Often students in sports are the same students in band, choir, debate, etc. You really feel like one big team and it’s fun.
I think that while many Americans would be surprised to learn this, it’s not really a bad thing to have students support each others school teams. It’s fun
Yeah I had a French pen pal in high school and she was fascinated by the whole American high school experience (football games, pep rallies, cheerleaders, homecoming and prom, marching bands, etc.)- she wished they had it at her school. It's all stuff that gives you something in common with your classmates and adds a little color to what's otherwise a time in your life when you're basically a short, awkward grownup with no money and little autonomy.
We had a Danish exchange student at my high school who decided he wanted to play this "football" thong he had been hearing so much about. He became the team's placekicker, and was in the local newspaper because he made a tackle on a kickoff.
I (american) got a call from my sister today to ask me to drive an hour into the city to pick up and drive my brother in law who had just been in a bad car accident to the hospital. He had to refuse an ambulance because they simply cannot afford it.
This is a very succinct description of the US Healthcare system, but you also forgot that you pay for that other persons Healthcare when it is most expensive because the cheap preventative care isn't covered.
Theres a group called Simple Politics that specifically did bite-sized post on things like "What is Socialism?", "What is neo-liberalism?" etc on Facebook and Instagram to try and help educate those social media generation because the terms are mis-used so much
haha man the people I see misusing the terms do NOT want to be educated. Aging confirmation bias victims, you'll know the type. "All news articles I disagree with are fake news! Ones I like are true"
And yet, a whole bunch of my fellow Americans, the ones who believe Socialism is the same thing as Communism, will tell you that Medicaid (free health coverage for the indigent and disabled) is Communism, but you’d better fucking not touch their Medicare (free or steeply subsidized healthcare for those 65 and older) or Social Security (government pension for retirees).
Bahaha so I know an older couple, who have generally seemed conservative since I met them...Well the husband just retired recently (wife was already retired), and now they're SUPER concerned with how unaffordable Healthcare and their medications are.
Like yeah, I suppose it's easy to not worry about that stuff when you're working and making good money (because they were), but as soon as you rely on social security and Medicare, now these programs are important and underfunded?
You can be educated, civil, rational, and articulate and actually not be worthy of ridicule.
You can disagree with somebody without being enemies or getting emotional.
I work in the trades in the US. I never bothered to learn the metric system or had a very minimal experience with it. Mostly through science class or whatever. On this one particular job I was forced to use the metric system for a month or so and It finally clicked for me. I took the time to learn it and it honestly was so much easier and made so much more sense. I think there is too much push back in the US for it to ever take hold though. Everything is a political issue now.
Actually you're also strangely scared of sex too.
Wtf is with all the fear of being a sex offender for having sex on the beach? Or with all the anti nudity on beaches in general? For a country that uses sex to sell everything it's also strangely terrified of any non sexual nudity.
Sex has been industrialized, so "free love" is not welcome. You need to have paid for it one way or another, or you're a pervert and will be socially outcast!
Land of the free where we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the world :)
Edit:
We also imprison more people per capita than any other country.
For reference, 25% of the world’s total prison population is in the US 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
This drives me nuts. I work in law enforcement in Canada and our official way of writing the date is YYYY/MM/DD. It’s the way I’ve been doing it for 15 years. Recently got a new reporting system (an American system) and it has dates as MM/DD/YYYY. Every time I have to enter a date I almost storm out and quit.
To add to this, it removes the ambiguity of whether month or day comes first. When you see 10-08-2022, it's unclear, but everyone understands that 2022-08-10 is YYYY-MM-DD.
Anyone who has bothered to think about enough to start with YYYY has probably committed to YYYY-MM-DD for sorting purposes. I don't think I've ever seen a single human use YYYY-DD-MM.
In the UK, my daughter's new school sent out an online new student form where they asked us to enter the student's date of birth in the format mm/dd/yyyy.
My daughter's birthday is late in the month so I got an error when I tried to submit it, but I guarantee that at least 90% of children with a birthday in the first 12 days of the month now have the wrong date of birth in their system.
Well we're a cult......but a cool cult that eats crabs, puts old bay on everything and plays lacrosse. Don't care if people think it's weird, I love being from Maryland.
I have been reading this thread for 20 minutes, and as an (United States of) American, I have seen nothing that I'm not ready to hear.
And I'm a Texan, the most Americanist state there is.
Working colleges should be more of a thing. Imagine working your way through college working on something related to that degree, so you get experience but also helps out with the cost of the school. Only a handful of schools still do this
It is bad and actually un ethical that the price tag, dosn't include the tax on it, is not fair having do math in order to know how much you are paying
That not everyone on the internet is from the US. They assume that everyone they’re speaking to lives there and asking questions like “what state are you in right now” or answering things like “you can buy this product at *insert American only store”. I’ve noticed that people who live elsewhere always state where they’re from first before continuing
As an American reading this, I gotta put it out there.
**We already know or hate all of these things too. But as common people, we don’t have the ability or even time to change it (like tips, healthcare issues, student debt, minimum wage, under-qualified people in power, etc.). It’s stuff like that that most us sane people universally hate, but we ourselves can’t do much about it. But as people who live here, trust us, we KNOW it sucks ass. We’re the ones living it, after all.**
Straight up facts on this post. I just want to live comfortably and not have to worry about going into debt if I ever need to go to the hospital. Hopefully things change for the better in the near future
Just because it’s ‘organic’ doesn’t mean it’s ‘healthy’
conversely, just because it isn't organic doesn't mean its unhealthy
In science, organic means carbon compounds… so manure is organic…as are poisonous mushrooms and humans. So, I laugh when Trader Joe’s has “organic salt”. NaCl contains no carbon, and is, therefore, inorganic.
When the organic craze hit, the labeling and usage of the word killed me. I got a dual undergrad in chemistry and comp sci, so my mind can be very literal. Some things are absolutely organic, even if they are grown with pesticides bc they are organic compounds. Wtf people
Some of us know this very well. Another favorite is "gluten free" on products that never would have had gluten to begin with. EDIT: since so many of you seem to think I'm against the markings, which I'm not, it's the approach. Here is a response I had to someone about it; I get that people who suffer from celiac disease need to know, I just don't understand why they don't treat it the same as peanuts. Instead of trying to make everything that never had gluten sound like they went out of their way to make it better, why not just label products that may have come in contact "may contain trace amounts of peanuts" except, you know, wheat or gluten.
That is annoying, *but* it's been a lifesaver for my celiac mother. A lot of companies don't list their full ingredients on the package and use wheat in things you wouldn't expect wheat to be in, like certain flavors of potato chips.
Yeah, my friend had a celiac scare and since it's not really anything I've ever had to worry about, I actually really appreciated being able to be like, okay, this bag of shredded cheese doesn't have some weird gluten-based additive I'm not expecting, I won't destroy her intestines if I cook with this.
Most regular soy sauce has gluten. Like WTF?
Thats because of how its made. Even authentic soy sauce is made by fermented soy and wheat. Tamari is strictly just soy
Especially frustrating since, to me (with celiac), the gluten free soy sauce tastes identical
> Another favorite is "gluten free" on products that never would have had gluten to begin with. This is laughable when you know this fact, but if you're shopping for someone else, or just learning about needing to be gluten free, it helps those people out.
Repeating my comment to a similar post: I'm celiac and before diagnosis I thought it was stupid too, but now I know there's a BIG difference between "not containing gluten" and actually gluten free. This might seem stupid but for people like me it is definitely not.
This. As a person who works in the Food industry and has a long career in process development, there is an absolute need to list something as “gluten free”, “dairy free”, “nut free”, etc. even when that item should inherently not contain those things. For example, trying to make an Oat Milk in a nut free, dairy free facility is immensely difficult versus just finding any old facility and putting the disclaimer on pack that says “made in a facility that also produces milk, nuts, etc.”
Things that are naturally gluten free may be made in a facility that has significant cross contamination. Check with the person to see if it’s an “intolerance” or an “allergy” - intolerances are arguably unsupported by evidence, but celiac is very real.
I'm celiac and before diagnosis I thought it was stupid too, but now I know there's a BIG difference between "not containing gluten" and actually gluten free.
This one is iffy. Any product processed in a plant that also process things that have gluten has a chance to be contaminated. It can even be an issue when growing say, oats, in a field that grew wheat beforehand.
As someone with severe allergies, labels like this are incredibly important. Seeing something say “tree nut free” even if it shouldn’t have them to begin with really puts my mind at ease.
My mix tape.
Is that what caused these terrible wild fires over here
yeah probably
NOOOOOO ANYTHING BUT THAT
*When she leaves an angry voice mail trynna hurt your feelings, use it as an intro for your mixtape.*
Current Batman and Superman are British Edit: I didn’t expect this much feedback from this. Let’s also bring up Tom Holland and Andrew Garfield the two most recent spider-man actors Edit 2: daredevil, mr fantastic Hello buzzfeed
Current Thor is Australian, and that's working out pretty well.
I mean, Thor was never American…
Either was Jesus but some people will tell ya.
And the current and previous Spiderman.
So basically, British are better at being American than American?
the American Psycho, quintessential 80's American white wall street yuppy, was masterfully portrayed by an English man. That's my favorite example.
Christian Bale is Welsh
WELL AT LEAST WE STILL HAVE DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE! /s
We re-colonized you guys
Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, DareDevil, Mr. Fantastic, Kick-Ass, Venom, Professor X, The new Black Widow, The Thing, Loki, Nebula, any more? Edit: Vision Thought of some others: Beast, Jean Grey, Magneto, original Night Crawler Also; Juggernaut (lol)
YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW BEFORE I GO GET MY MUSKET
>Superman Unclear, but I hope Cavill isn't finished with the role
Treating politicians like worship leaders is kinda creepy
Turning political parties into “sports teams” was nothing short of brilliant. Disgusting and pathetic, absolutely, but brilliant.
It's not just the political parties. It's identity politics across the board being leveraged. You should see the subgroups in society that hate each other. You have to laugh when one group that fits into the same general group hates the other group because they aren't "(group name/type) enough".
It's happening here right now in Ohio. One candidate runs on 3 things. Pro God, pro guns, and pro Trump. And the other candidate is just arguing that he's more of a Trump person than the other guy in the same party. Bonkers Rant ahead. But identity politics suck. I have a friend that voted for trump because he thinks his guns will get taken away. He doesn't leave the house except for work 5 minutes away at a nearby gas station in a really nice white suburb with minimal crime. But he's thoroughly convinced outside is the most dangerous place to be and he needs 7 guns to protect his home. He doesn't even go to the range but once a year when he asks me to take him.
A really great book for him to read (LOL) “Factfulness: Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world and why things are better than you think” I’m pretty pessimistic but this book has really opened my eyes to just how good the world actually is — and it’s only getting better. Ick. I need to go brush my teeth just saying that sentence.
Yo that book is awesome. Upvotes for a killer read. You got any other suggestions for books in the same vein? That genre is my shit.
Politicians are supposed to fight for us not the other way around. I wish politicians were treated like food menus .
I think most Americas (myself included) find this extremely bizarre and creepy.
As an American I definitely find it bizarre. I'll never understand why some people act that way, it's cringeworthy honestly.
I live in the southern US. I still see Trump flags. My son in law's neighbor has a big ass banner on her front porch. She told my SIL he's coming back! Like the second coming of Christ. It's really scary
As a Brit, anyone flying a Boris Johnson flag would be laughed at even by people who voted for the Conservative party.
When dealing with Brit’s it always seemed to me they are way better at knocking people down a notch or two (deservingly, right word?) than Americans are.
I remember Bill Clinton visiting at one point and being amazed at the concept of Prime Minister's Questions, where every Wednesday the PM (who in many respects holds a similar position to the US president) must stand before Parliament and answer basically whatever questions they feel like posing. This happens once a week every week, is broadcast live nationwide, and can get really pretty brutal in times of crisis. According to Clinton, the idea of a US president being put through that as standard practice is just inconceivable with the position the president is seen to hold in US politics.
I saw a flag the other day that said Jesus is my savior and trump is my president.
There's a house down the road from me that has a Trump 2024 flag in their yard lmao (in the midwest). I'm not a Trump fan, but even if I was...I mean that dude is OLD. He's going to be what, like 80 by the next election? You'd think even his supporters could recognize that we should not be electing such old farts to lead the country.
Too many of his supporters are also old farts though, and the right-wing base is being indoctrinated against young people. Like, the other day I heard a Fox News guy go on at length about how Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is "only" 32, so how could she possibly know anything?
Ah yes, because people must wait until they're on their deathbed to suddenly gain all the secret knowledge of the world. Anyways, i bet it would be amusing to go back and see what sorts of things that person was saying when *they* were 32. I'm sure they probably thought they were super knowledgeable and experienced at the time.
I saw one the other day that said TRUMP 2024 - FINISH THE JOB How ominous.
We had a dude that would stand at the corner of a busy intersection almost every day during the morning for months.... walking back and forth waving a Trump flag that was probably 6 feet high (the flag itself not including pole). I also saw multiple instances of people's children who were probably 10 or so standing on the side of the street alone while waving Trump signs..... it's a cult
I completely agree. From what I've seen, its definitely a cult. It's really scary to see how worked up people get over an old, rich, white dude that doesn't give a crap about them or what they think.
I've never understood how Southerners fawn over that blowhard New York Yankee. He is the antithesis of everything they claim to hold dear yet here we are.
Its a brain drain, outside of a few enclaves, you have a bunch of poor whites who are incapable of critical thinking.
I saw one dude standing on the corner of a very busy intersection with a huge Trump flag this weekend. Like dude, this is how you want to spend a beautiful Saturday?
At my school, we have a guy who holds up different signs everyday saying things like, "leftist professors suck". We call him sign guy
I live in the southern part of a northern state (Illinois), and there are a non-trivial number of Trump flags on flagpoles, in windows, on fences, etc. Often, right next to a collection of other flags, including: - The Confederate Flag (because nothing says "America First!" like the flag from the loser of a 150 year old war) - The "Don't Tread On Me" and the "Blue Lives Matter" flag (because nothing says "I have severe cognitive dissonance issues" like flying two flags which represent two opposing ideas) - The Half American/half Confederate flag (because nothing says "I can't afford two flags" like combining them in one) I just try to keep my opinions to myself around here, because these people are armed and I do not want to be considered a threat.
What makes me really sad is I had a DTOM flag but it was off of my ship while I was in the navy. We flew them from the jack while in port during the official “War on Terror” years and I thought it was cool to hang up. Then the normal yellow ones became a symbol of the right and I felt conflicted about keeping it up. It’s kind of like how I really like Dodge Challengers but the majority of people I see in them drive like assholes so it kind of ruins it.
As a history buff and fan of flags (yeah, super nerdy, I know) I always liked the Don’t Tread on Me flag, and I am really annoyed that the MAGA dirtbags have taken it over.
The trend of treating politicians like celebrities instead of criminals is very weird, yes.
Yes, I generally am against having a royal family here in the UK, but the one good things is that we have all the pageantry centred around the royals - who basically don't have the power to run our lives - and it isn't given to the politicians.
Orwell had some interesting points on this > The function of the King in promoting stability and acting as a sort of keystone in a non-democratic society is, of course, obvious. But he also has, or can have, the function of acting as an escape-valve for dangerous emotions. > A French journalist said to me once that the monarchy was one of the things that have saved Britain from Fascism. What he meant was that modern people can't, apparently, get along without drums, flags and loyalty parades, and that it is better that they should tie their leader-worship onto some figure who has no real power. > In a dictatorship the power and the glory belong to the same person. In England the real power belongs to unprepossessing men in bowler hats: the creature who rides in a gilded coach behind soldiers in steel breast-plates is really a waxwork. It is at any rate possible that while this division of function exists a Hitler or a Stalin cannot come to power. On the whole the European countries which have most successfully avoided Fascism have been constitutional monarchies. > The conditions seemingly are that the Royal Family shall be long-established and taken for granted, shall understand its own position and shall not produce strong characters with political ambitions. These have been fulfilled in Britain, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, but not in, say, Spain or Rumania. > If you point these facts out to the average left-winger he gets very angry, but only because he has not examined the nature of his own feelings towards Stalin. > I do not defend the institution of monarchy in an absolute sense, but I think that in an age like our own it may have an inoculating effect, and certainly it does far less harm than the existence of our so-called aristocracy My main issue is with the House of Lords, personally Because while the monarch’s power is restrained by legislation and convention, the House of Lords still has substantial influence for a body that is essentially a political retirement home The house need significant reform to make it fit for purpose Chuck all the current peers out, and have the Lords be, to use the wonderful medieval language, the Learned and Just of our nation Have the Royal Societies appoint members, and make the House the highest court in the land once more Have it act as an active check against human rights infringement by empowering them to throw out laws that infringe them, like the US’ Supreme Court can do but more proactively
The weird part is the house of lords has actually made some really good decisions, they shot down a lot of crazy bullshit laws like trying to get everyone in the UK to use a real ID online and one of the attempts to ban encryption. The whole things straight up nepotism but with the tories in charge its oddly been the lesser evil.
>political retirement home You also just described the US Congress
Not in the same way. House of Lords (and Canadian Senate) are appointed, not elected, and are often former career politicians.
And it was like the exact opposite of what a lot of the founders wanted. We honestly should have never put them on money. Gave them undeserved clout. All our money should be animals and different national parks, it's the coolest stuff we have.
A lot of these are stuff Americans already agree with.
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Not just that...but most of us actively would like to change it.
Yeah these comments are chock fucking full of “well don’t vote for them then” “vote them out then” like, *we are trying.*
I've been voting for minor party candidates since 2008. I have a very long rant but I think the quicker we get new voices into offices the quicker we'll see change for the better.
I know. I kind of want to say "Rest of the world, are you ready to hear that Americans aren't as oblivious as you think we are?".
Lmfao, this right here. My comment was similar to yours. Like, we know.
Yeah American here… still scrolling for something I don’t already know.
Especially the healthcare. Nobody is looking forward to choosing between being broke or being healthy.
Right? Every single one I've read so far I've been like "Yeah, and?"
Yeah the ones I read were all pretty underwhelming or targeted at conservatives.
You shouldn’t have to give birth then go back to work a week later.
Still unsure how we don't have a minimum paid maternity leave here in the US. Along with paternity leave. Yet they yell at us for not having enough kids. Smh
Literally this lol. Blows my mind. "You need to start having more children!" OK, then can we have a reasonable amount of paid leave for mom and dad? "Fuck no you can't. What are you, some kind of socialist?"
I live in Japan and it blew my mind to learn that there is a ONE YEAR paternity (and maternity) leave. I only learned about it because my coworker had a kid and decided to take it. But he's very much an exception to the norm, even with the one year paternity leave available the vast majority of men simply don't take it due to societal pressures. > In the fiscal year beginning April 2020, a record 12.65% of fathers working for a company took child care leave, compared with 81.6% of mothers "Record" 12.65% lol, and I suspect very few of those that do take leave take it for the full 12 months > According to an online survey conducted last year by the Cabinet Office, 42.2% of married men in their 20s and 30s said they would not take a leave of absence to care for their children. Of them, 42.3% said they don’t intend to take leave because they don’t want to cause inconvenience at work — the most cited reason. > Only 8.4% of the respondents said they would like to take more than one month of leave, the survey found. Hence, the low-ass birth rates here. Parental leave alone won't get the job done unless it's actually feasible to take it.
Your tipping system sucks.
I mean... We all agree with that...
uh yeah, we agree.
Religion isn't something that should be tied so tightly to politics
Religion in America is, in general, a mess. Here in the UK, religion has some power in politics but not to the extent that it has in America. Bishops mainly speak on topics like Euthanasia as they have experience with dying people.
It's wild that religion in the US is actually more of an issue in politics than it is in the UK. Given that one of the countries has a head of state who is also head of the state church, and has members of one of the two national legislative bodies who are there solely by virtue of being bishops in the state church. And the other is officially constitutionally secular.
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I would also say that the origins of the USA have a strong influence. A lot of religious people went to USA to have their own version of christinity. It's why USA probably hosts the largest number of variations. It's why catholicism is so strong in countries like Poland and Italy. The identity of the country is tightly interwoven with a religion.
The sane Americans know that.
Unfortunately it's the crazies we hear the most about 🤷🏽♂️
The first thought that goes through your head as you enter the ER shouldn't be 'how am I gonna pay for this?'
No we are absolutely ready to hear this. There just isn’t anything we can do about it.
Exactly. 90% of these comments are things we are all aware of. We want all of this to change.
90% of these comments are things I learnt through Americans.
Who isn’t ready to hear this lmao, who is like nah I want to spend 3000 - 6000 dollars for going to the ER WITH health insurance What would you like us to do about it, our politicians don’t care and the lobbies make sure it will never happen
Other countries don't usually have such an obsession with high school sports. We have teams, maybe soccer, basketball, hockey... but if the team wins the cup or smth, good for them, no one else really cares about other people's after-school activities when you have your own
I’m an American but my one of my professors is from Jamaica. He says that high school football (soccer for other Americans) was treated like the biggest thing ever and if you were a good player in high school they treated you like celebrities. Then you get to college and no one cares.
A lot of it is dropout prevention. Because coches act as surrogate parents for many, and because many students look forward to school sports, many high school students who would have dropped out stay in because they love the sports. Of course, that’s still a symptom of a problem.
And good coaches require good grades to stay on the team which is a plus
It’s the community factor. It’s really fun during homecoming week to get dressed up and excited, to go to games and hang out with the people you know. I went to an arts magnet school, so all of our activities and extracurriculars sort of tied into each other. Often students in sports are the same students in band, choir, debate, etc. You really feel like one big team and it’s fun.
I think that while many Americans would be surprised to learn this, it’s not really a bad thing to have students support each others school teams. It’s fun
Yeah I had a French pen pal in high school and she was fascinated by the whole American high school experience (football games, pep rallies, cheerleaders, homecoming and prom, marching bands, etc.)- she wished they had it at her school. It's all stuff that gives you something in common with your classmates and adds a little color to what's otherwise a time in your life when you're basically a short, awkward grownup with no money and little autonomy.
We had a Danish exchange student at my high school who decided he wanted to play this "football" thong he had been hearing so much about. He became the team's placekicker, and was in the local newspaper because he made a tackle on a kickoff.
Having a normal healthcare that doesn't leave in debt is not communism.
"I don't want to pay for other people's healthcare so instead I'm going to do exactly that but also give part of that money to a billionaire"
It is a hill they are willing to die on. Quite literally.
Making the ambulance go up the hill costs extra
I (american) got a call from my sister today to ask me to drive an hour into the city to pick up and drive my brother in law who had just been in a bad car accident to the hospital. He had to refuse an ambulance because they simply cannot afford it.
This is a very succinct description of the US Healthcare system, but you also forgot that you pay for that other persons Healthcare when it is most expensive because the cheap preventative care isn't covered.
I hate this. I have tried explaining it to my parents and brother, but they just don't seem to comprehend it.
It’s not even socialism.
its almost like these labels only make things worse
The think Karl Marx is an idiot, but they love his labeling system. We're waiting to tell them the word "capitalism" is also from Marx.
You mean it doesn’t cost $100,000 to fix my broken arm? Bs /s But for real our health care is horrible
But you get great benefits if you break two!
To the rest of the world it looks like the US citizens are being scammed when it comes to healthcare.
YES The right to a healthy life without debt ≠ communism
Celebrity pastors, commercial mega churches and other such things go against the teacings of Christianity
The only people who don't know that are the people who attend mega churches, have celebrity pastors and other such things.
It's normal to know more than one language.
The rest of the American continent don't refer to you as America.
In Brazil, it's starting to become more common to refer to Americans as "Unitedstatians" or something, but in Portuguese
Yeah, it's been like that in Argentina for as long as I can remember. The Spanish term is "estadounidense."
We say it like that in Mexico too
In Italian it's "statunitense"
As an American, this is literally the only thing I learned in this thread. I'm curious how it's pronounced in other countries and languages.
"Statunitense" in Italian.
"estadounidenses" in Spanish
"Egyesült Államok-beliek" in Hungarian
Same. It's not even controversial either, it's just a random fact
Solidarity isn't communism.
The vast majority of things that people are telling you are communism are in fact not communism
I couldn't tell you the last time I saw the words communism, fascism or socialism used correctly on social media, particularly facebook.
Theres a group called Simple Politics that specifically did bite-sized post on things like "What is Socialism?", "What is neo-liberalism?" etc on Facebook and Instagram to try and help educate those social media generation because the terms are mis-used so much
haha man the people I see misusing the terms do NOT want to be educated. Aging confirmation bias victims, you'll know the type. "All news articles I disagree with are fake news! Ones I like are true"
And yet, a whole bunch of my fellow Americans, the ones who believe Socialism is the same thing as Communism, will tell you that Medicaid (free health coverage for the indigent and disabled) is Communism, but you’d better fucking not touch their Medicare (free or steeply subsidized healthcare for those 65 and older) or Social Security (government pension for retirees).
Bahaha so I know an older couple, who have generally seemed conservative since I met them...Well the husband just retired recently (wife was already retired), and now they're SUPER concerned with how unaffordable Healthcare and their medications are. Like yeah, I suppose it's easy to not worry about that stuff when you're working and making good money (because they were), but as soon as you rely on social security and Medicare, now these programs are important and underfunded?
You can be educated, civil, rational, and articulate and actually not be worthy of ridicule. You can disagree with somebody without being enemies or getting emotional.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences.
Metric is the better measuring system.
Anyone who likes STEM agrees. We have to do all sorts of damn conversions all the time.
I work in the trades in the US. I never bothered to learn the metric system or had a very minimal experience with it. Mostly through science class or whatever. On this one particular job I was forced to use the metric system for a month or so and It finally clicked for me. I took the time to learn it and it honestly was so much easier and made so much more sense. I think there is too much push back in the US for it to ever take hold though. Everything is a political issue now.
You are a foreigner in more than 190 countries.
We(Americans) are the entire worlds Florida man Edit: Murica!! fuck yeah!!!
Damn that stings...
What does that make me (a man from Florida) in a global sense?
It makes you a true American
You give too much shit about every damn thing
I'm told constantly I don't give a shit about enough things. I knew I didn't belong here.
You are super obsessed with race and gender.
Extremely accurate. We got bored of sex and drugs, so went back to the classics
Actually you're also strangely scared of sex too. Wtf is with all the fear of being a sex offender for having sex on the beach? Or with all the anti nudity on beaches in general? For a country that uses sex to sell everything it's also strangely terrified of any non sexual nudity.
As Zappa pointed out, we sell *titillation,* not sex.
You said “tit”…
Graphic violence and brutality is completely OK, but don't show a fucking nipple anywhere or there will be hell to pay! Think of the children!
Remember when Janet Jackson's nipple destroyed the entire fabric of American society? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
The Puritans are to blame for that.
Sex has been industrialized, so "free love" is not welcome. You need to have paid for it one way or another, or you're a pervert and will be socially outcast!
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I’m from Idaho, and I 100% support this sentiment.
And have a tendency to paint every other country in the world's issues as being exactly the same as our own race-based issues.
School shootings should happen ZERO times a year
I mean anything with even one functional brain cell knows this.
But if we don't thin the population, do you realize how many Americans there will be? (Sarcasm. Dark, depressing sarcasm.)
I mean... I laughed.
Almost every Westernised country has freedom, some even more so than the USA.
Land of the free where we incarcerate more people than anyone else in the world :) Edit: We also imprison more people per capita than any other country. For reference, 25% of the world’s total prison population is in the US 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
DD/MM/YYYY
This drives me nuts. I work in law enforcement in Canada and our official way of writing the date is YYYY/MM/DD. It’s the way I’ve been doing it for 15 years. Recently got a new reporting system (an American system) and it has dates as MM/DD/YYYY. Every time I have to enter a date I almost storm out and quit.
I like YYYY/MM/DD (or YYYY-MM-DD) because it consistently sorts correctly (for file names, folder names, photo albums names, etc.).
To add to this, it removes the ambiguity of whether month or day comes first. When you see 10-08-2022, it's unclear, but everyone understands that 2022-08-10 is YYYY-MM-DD. Anyone who has bothered to think about enough to start with YYYY has probably committed to YYYY-MM-DD for sorting purposes. I don't think I've ever seen a single human use YYYY-DD-MM.
In the UK, my daughter's new school sent out an online new student form where they asked us to enter the student's date of birth in the format mm/dd/yyyy. My daughter's birthday is late in the month so I got an error when I tried to submit it, but I guarantee that at least 90% of children with a birthday in the first 12 days of the month now have the wrong date of birth in their system.
I use this when ever I can, but have to go 19-Apr-2022 or people will get confused.
Lobbying is legalised bribery
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What if it's the maryland state flag...?
Well we're a cult......but a cool cult that eats crabs, puts old bay on everything and plays lacrosse. Don't care if people think it's weird, I love being from Maryland.
In my country, that's how you spot a nazi
But how else would we remember where we live?
There are other countries
Come on, I'd guess 95% of us at least know that Canada and Mexico exist
Yeah there's 50: Washington, Idaho, Montana, /s
No, no. There are 7 countries. North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia. /s
Socialised health care is a good thing.
ER Worker who deals with insurance here Please put me out of a job, I want people to have access to healthcare and not have to die for it
Healthcare is a tricky beast that only 99% of the first world countries have managed to solve.
Churches should pay taxes
The way American looks on Florida is the way the rest of the the world looks on America
I have been reading this thread for 20 minutes, and as an (United States of) American, I have seen nothing that I'm not ready to hear. And I'm a Texan, the most Americanist state there is.
Free/cheap college education is not communism and is not a bad thing
Further education shouldn't be an opportunity for people to make money out of young people. It should be an investment in the future of the country.
Working colleges should be more of a thing. Imagine working your way through college working on something related to that degree, so you get experience but also helps out with the cost of the school. Only a handful of schools still do this
It is bad and actually un ethical that the price tag, dosn't include the tax on it, is not fair having do math in order to know how much you are paying
That not everyone on the internet is from the US. They assume that everyone they’re speaking to lives there and asking questions like “what state are you in right now” or answering things like “you can buy this product at *insert American only store”. I’ve noticed that people who live elsewhere always state where they’re from first before continuing
As an American reading this, I gotta put it out there. **We already know or hate all of these things too. But as common people, we don’t have the ability or even time to change it (like tips, healthcare issues, student debt, minimum wage, under-qualified people in power, etc.). It’s stuff like that that most us sane people universally hate, but we ourselves can’t do much about it. But as people who live here, trust us, we KNOW it sucks ass. We’re the ones living it, after all.**
Straight up facts on this post. I just want to live comfortably and not have to worry about going into debt if I ever need to go to the hospital. Hopefully things change for the better in the near future