Also - Downvote me all you want you...the US is an awful influence on the world and if you disagree with that, you're part of the problem. I grew up thinking the US was the good guys, what a absolute load of shit that turned out to be.

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thomassmith65 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That reads a little like the zeal of the convert. The US is still a more humane nation than most, though it's not immune to the diseases that come from being a great power.

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verelo 13 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't know about that. Honestly, idea of Americans self-ranking themselves as more humane is the kind of absurdity that lead us to where we are today. How many people making such claims have actually travelled to the nations they villainize?

For a long time I wanted to believe you, and in the past I'd have looked at work camps in China and said "thats bad". Now i look at the US prison industry and go "Is it really that different?". The examples don't end there...

	▲	piloto_ciego 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well, your thought process is "fine" we are still evil, but right now it's a matter of picking the least evil guys, and hoping they win. I'm an American and sometimes I'm not sure which is the "least evil game here." Like, the Iranians and Russians are pretty evil, the IRGC killed a lot of people last winter and I'm friends with quite a few Ukrainians. But then also we have the ongoing insanity with ICE and the Epstein files... The way I see it right now, we have "The Epstein Alliance" versus "The Axis of A-holes." Nobody involved in this is great, but I would rather live in America or the EU than Russia, or Iran. To be fair, as an American, I don't know enough about what life is actually like in China to form an educated opinion? But by the sounds of it, they suck too. My intuition is that this whole charade will come crashing down over the next few years as AI starts replacing more and more jobs.

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piloto_ciego 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are no good guys buddy. That’s the problem. Not us, not the Canucks? The Brits nor the Iranians nor the Russians.

People are great, countries are pretty much all evil.

	▲	verelo 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Completely agree. Up close everyone is great, far away, like from space, everything looks great. It's the middle distances that are problematic.

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sillystuff 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, that the US was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. True then, and true today.

The ignorance of the American people enables this violence-- this is by design. William J. Casey, CIA director under Reagan, "We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false". The CIA has employed many hundreds of journalists working at major networks and newspapers like CBS, the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Reading the comments on this story, it appears that much of what Europeans believe is false, as well. Someone presented a detailed and accurate account of the recent* history leading up to the illegal, but absolutely provoked, Russian invasion of Ukraine but was accused of lying. Several comments indicate a complete lack of concern about provoking the nation with the largest nuclear stockpile in the world into a direct hot conflict. Even if it stayed conventional, which appears unlikely, Russia has a much larger military than all of Western Europe combined. Insane.

* The history should start much earlier, with US assurances to Russia that NATO would not expand, and then Clinton and all subsequent US administrations betraying these promises.