Being pedantic doesn’t really work when you are incorrect. America is not a continent. North America is a continent and South America is a continent. Collectively they are sometimes referred to as “the Americas” but never as “America” which is a common short form for the United States of America which is used internationally.
A quick search turns up articles written in the UK, Australia and Germany (in German) using “America” as a short form name for America. In France it’s “Amérique”.
They only budgeted so much time for the video, I suppose. First they had to show how, in raw numbers, average Americans lose more of their paycheques than do the average citizens of Western “soshalist hellholes” like Denmark and Canada. Then they had to show that the services people actually use day-to-day and pay more for also have worse outcomes than those for the comparison countries. That didn’t leave a lot of time to discuss the grotesquely disproportionate amounts of American tax dollars going to feed the military-industrial complex.
[apologies for potentially alienating the GOP’s suckers with hard truths not aligned with the default neoliberal narrative – I’m just not very good at the whole “moderate centrist” thing]
The lowest is the disability wage, but it applies to the smallest number. On paper it is for certain training programs for people with disabilities, but in practice is used to maintain some sweatshops for people with developmental disabilities. The tipped wage is the next lowest and is both lower and theoretically equal to the base minimum. In theory if the tips received fall below the base minimum wage, the employer is supposed to make up the difference. In practice this is extraordinarily rare.
I live in NYS and am on Medicare. I recently got an infection. My doctor prescribed Vancomycin. My provider is Humana, mail-order only. What a mistake. Would take 2 weeks to get it. So, I go to my local pharmacy. The told me the cost would be $933. When I got up off the floor, the person behind the counter said they can get me a “coupon” which would lower the price. It did: To $353. OK, a lot of money but not $933. Humana said the cost would be $300. I still may have the infection so my doctor prescribed another antibiotic, this one cost $4200. But he said, hold off (not a problem of course) until they do more tests. The people who run companies like drug makers, hospitals, car makers, etc., they live in the First World. If you work for a large company like I used to and they insure you, you’re probably OK. But everyone else, you’re fucked.
I’ve met a few americans insist that there’s only one continent: America and be annoyed when people use “America” to refer to the country.
I see it more as a mix. Making a well-thought-out argument based in pure facts and empiricism only gets one branded (scornfully) as a member of the “reality-based community” or as an ivory tower librul intellectual or such. Wonkery is fine when you’re trying to convince a liberal or progressive of something, but an appeal to visceral emotions in addition to facts and logic is more effective when dealing with the typical conservative, who tends to mainly see what affects him personally rather than being able to perceive the workings of the greater system.
But emotions are so… feminine! Facts are MANLY AND REAL! /s As if the two things are mutually exclusive, FFS.
we’re also constantly being accused of being overly emotional, especially about social justice issues. Especially if we’re in the humanities, which are considered less important than REAL scholarship like science.
They are the worst about assuming their opinions and feelings are facts rather than opinions and feelings. That asshole Ben Shapiro is a prime example.
But what do I know…
Shorter OED disagrees:
American (ǎme·rikǎn). 1578. [– mod.L. Americanus, f. America (1507).] A. adj. 1. Belonging to the continent of America.
Good points. It really is projection all over the place with Shapiro, Fox News, and the rest of the right-wing noise machine.
They’ve weaponized rationality and objectivity and positioned it as the opposite of emotion, which they’ve cast as “irrational”. It’s just a way to dismiss people who are angry about real things that are happening in the world. I find it hard to take people who dismiss anything that has some emotion behind it seriously anymore… due to that, and the fact that in our society we connect emotions with the feminine, meaning that rejecting it has some misogyny behind it, too.
This is textbook conservative false patriotism. Insisting “America is Great!” prevents improvement. Improvement can only really begin when we acknowledge the problems. The people who are real patriots are the ones who are tackling the problems of inequality, poverty, racism, misogyny, gun violence, climate change, mental health, etc. etc. etc. head on. Pretending those problems don’t exist is how they propagate and get worse.
*“My country, right or wrong’ is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.’” --G.K Chesterton
If you are critical of your country it does not mean you don’t love it, it means you want it to improve itself. In fact wanting to improve where you live shows how much you love it-- otherwise you’d just leave.
" The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists” --G.K. Chesterton
Or as the great James Baldwin put it:
People all over the world use ‘America’ as a name of the USA. It may not be correct or pedantic enough for you, but its reality.
The only thing worse is asking us to “Make America Great Again”, which is effectively a fascist slogan hearkening back to a mythic past that was worse than it is now for any American who isn’t a white cis-het male (and indeed was worse for a lot of them, too).
I’m done sparing the feelings of those who don’t want to improve things going forward or who actively want to make things worse by rolling things back to the past. “Meeting them halfway”, as Libertarians and the zentrum disingenuously urge liberals and progressives to do, is not going to accomplish anything. If they’re alienated by a relatively light and humorous video like this they’re lost causes anyhow.
Some in more ways than one!
That’s conservatives seizing the rhetoric high ground. By claiming the title of pro-American. The counter move for liberals isn’t to cultivate a label of anti-American. You don’t counter “America is Great” with “America sucks.” You counter it with "Ok, and here’s how we can make it better "
Use some psychological judo.
Making everything about optics instead of truth is already ceding the argument, because the idea that truth doesn’t matter and it’s all just marketing is very much trying to play on the fascist’s own terms.
The simple fact is that the USA is singularly bad at many things, to the point where there all sorts of sentences you can say of the form “developed countries, except the USA”. They can be fixed but only if people genuinely understand that. And you will never get that understanding if you care more about how you sound than what you say.
I think you are right in theory, but in reality it really doesn’t matter how you present it. Those who are disposed to ignore evidence that doesn’t fit with their narrow, pre-ordained views are going to ignore it no matter how you dress up the ugliness. It is remarkably easy to influence these people with simple slogans like, “Make America Great Again”, and “Taxes are theft”, and “Say No to Drugs”. They don’t do nuance. And they are suspicious of “elitists” who know stuff.
