"Non-Americans of Reddit, what is your genuine reaction to what’s going on in America right now?"

[Purplecat]

On a slightly satircal note, here’s what their neighbours to the north are thinking:

Canada searches for new country to compare ourselves to now that U.S. is too sad

[tlwest]

@EPTC

I just don’t want it to be a job where you get more money than you are paid.

Ah, you want them motivated by love of power, not love of money…

I have to say, cynic that I am, that I have greater fear of a leader motivated purely by principle unfettered by worldly concerns than one of more pedestrian motivation. There are a lot of principles out there and the ones I happen to hold are, historically speaking, pretty damn rare.

[JonS]

@groonkame

Part of the problem in our legislators is that they spend decades in Washington doing nothing but playing political games, never listening to anyone but big contributors and corporate lobbyist bribe offers. They fall out of touch with the people who elected them and start thinking of themselves as Senators from Exxon and Representatives from General Dynamics. They should be forced to go back into normal life now and then and forced to relearn what real people think and care about.

You just legislated a revolving door: 4 years in congress writing regulations - 4 years at Exxon figuring out what regulations need to change - 4 years in congress writing regulations - 4 years at Exxon figuring out what regulations need to change - 4 years in congress writing regulations - 4 years at Exxon figuring out what regulations need to change - 4 years in congress writing regulations - retire under a gilded parachute.

[d4nj450n]

Come now, there are literally hundreds of countries that don’t have atomic bombs that we haven’t invaded.

[Otherbrother]

@EPTC

How mentally flexible are you capable of being on other topics? You’re rewriting my points, too. For example the $500 would just be free cash for fun. There would be no budget needed.

Think simpler, friend. You’re insisting this is complicated. I’m saying it isn’t.

I have many follow-up questions for you on your super simple proposal. But just a few quick ones to start with:

1. Is a candidate allowed to self-promote using home made yard signs on their own property saying “vote for me”?

2. Are their friends and family members allowed to make yard signs as well saying “please vote for my friend”?

3. Are they allowed to give the signs away to others who may want them?

If you answer no to any of the above that would seem to be a pretty significant restriction of basic free speech. But if you answer yes then that means that candidates who can put together a budget for yard signs, or have supporters willing to spend their disposable income on arts-and-crafts supplies to make some, would have an advantage over candidates that don’t. And yard signs are one of the least complex aspects of campaigning that I can think of.

[sk00]

That is a rather foolish assessment. Trump has the nuclear authority and can initiate nuclear war at any time.

[rob_bray]

@d4nj450n

Come now, there are literally hundreds of countries that don’t have atomic bombs that we haven’t invaded.

yet…

[EPTC]

You make a fair point about signs for advertising. I’m not trying to limit any free speech. But banning them from ads would be pretty satisfying. You’re trying to edge up to other advertising ideas, but why you have a dog in that fight doesn’t make much sense. Is your point that if someone can make a sign for a friend, so should a massive Super PAC and a call center? Fortunately, Super PACs are declared worse than murder in 2037, and all involved in any Super PAC are garroted. Look it up in the Wayforward Machine on archive.org

But to your point:

Okay, everyone is allowed to make any signs they want, provided they are hand made signs and with large brushes. The Fair Brushes Act of 2062 will grant any number of brushes for signage.

Of course, large media buys on radio, TV, Internet, etc, will be considered a manipulation of society, and a felony. The Supreme Court will uphold banning corporate owned media from discussing ANY politics or airing any ad at all, ruling in favor of public discussion for identifying people of value, in seven separate cases, from 2041-2093.

But by that point, humans will have evolved from even seeing signage or caring about TV News, as augmented reality in their contact lenses will remove any of it from being seen. Left to their intelligence to identify a candidate, they vote the name they identify to be best for the job. Write in candidate. Free election. Only signs painted by friends. Free Tacos for all participants.

[Carbonman]

@TooMuchSanity

How that is changing… the terror is still there. It doesn’t feel like it’s particularly increased lately; I guess I don’t feel like an invasion is particularly imminent (maybe an influx of refugees, but I’m more inclined to welcome those).

Canadian biologist and author of excellent hard science fiction novels Peter Watts predicted a few years ago that the US would invade Canada under some pretext within 20 years. My guess is they’ll invade to get unlimited water and arable farmland that hasn’t been baked to a rock-like consistency.

@EPTC

More simply: Only allow people who want the job without financial gain to get the job.

Then you get zealots; lots of those are Republicans. Very scary.

@gracchus

The U.S. has been in slow decline for at least a dozen years, and by my reckoning almost 20.

I watched a Noam Chomsky interview a couple of years ago. He posited that the influence of the American empire began to decline right after its peak at the end of WW2.

@PartTimeZombie

When I drove from New York to Los Angeles with some friends in the late 1980’s the thing that struck us most was the abject poverty so many Americans live in.

The movie ‘Hell Or High Water’ with Chris Pine, Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges had some truly shocking scenes of the American landscape. The loan company advertising on billboards the brothers drove past really illustrated the widespread poverty in much of the US home to me.

@rob_bray

As suggested upthread, well getting a Bomb might not be a bad idea. Even 10 years ago the idea would have sounded totally nonsensical. But now, well, its an empirical fact that if you have The Bomb, the US doesn’t invade you (cf North Korea vs Iraq). And we have the uranium, the know-how, and a hell of a lot of real-estate. May be it is time we thought about setting up a “Toronto Project” somewhere in the back end of Saskatchewan. Just In Case.

There’s too much infrastructure and technology involved in building reliable nukes, plus you really tip your hand when doing even a small underground test. A more effective weapon group would be chemical and biological weapons. At one time Canada was the world leader in CBW research. There were a couple of big labs in the Prairies. It’s a quiet technology, doesn’t alert possible adversaries to your testing and can be easily manufactured in bulk. Sealed containers wouldn’t give off telltale radiation or other means of identifying the contents. You could ship it anywhere and place it in strategic locations in advance.
Binary chemical weapons are safe and stable to ship. Biologicals are more difficult.

[wolfman_al2]

German here.
I completely agree with everything the redditors said. After world war 2 and the Marshall plan, we had a deep admiration in (West) Germany for the US. You were seen as our stronger friend and liberator. Our culture was strongly influenced by yours at that time. The first cracks where showing in the late 1960s during the Viet Nam war, when people saw the US as an aggressor, a bully that tried to push around a smaller, weaker nation. That really left a bad taste in peoples mouth that never really went away. Fast forward to 1990, when Bush the elder was the only allied leader that openly supported german reunification, which helped to improve things a little, Something his son completely wrecked a decade later. I think I speak for a vast mayority of Germans, when I say that we were horrified, disgusted and appauled by the US, a nation we once highly admired. Obama gave us some hope that you will get back on track, but then HE happend. We have no more illusions about you, we are just feeling that weird mix of disgust and pity. We know that we can´t rely on a failed state like yours anymore. We WANT to be your friends, but you make it difficult for us. Our future is with a strong, united Europe, against the machinations set in place by the Russians and the Chinese.
The american century is over.

[Wanderfound]

@Michael_R_Smith

I think Vietnam, and Nixon were the turning points.

Quite a lot of what happened in Vietnam was an echo of what happened in Korea.

“In Korea, Americans revealed all the arrogance, the paternalism, the insensitivity in handling of local people - and the local army - which later revealed themselves in Vietnam”

– Sir Max Hastings, The Korean War

Choosing your inflection points is inevitably an arbitrary and subjective thing, but I’d tend to point towards, in reverse chronological order:

• Wilson’s revival of the Klan and creation of the security state
• The Compromise of 1877 and the betrayal of Reconstruction
• The 3/5ths Compromise
• Columbus’ genocide of Haiti

There were other important things along the way (FDR’s choice to exclude non-whites from most of the New Deal, Reagan & Bush’s revivals of US militarism, etc), but I think those four are the big ones.

OTOH, it also depends upon what we’re actually discussing. “The US in slow decline”…decline in what way exactly? Decline in power, prestige, influence, prosperity, civility?

If you choose to ignore inequality, the current USA is wealthier and more powerful than it has ever been. The plutocrats who’ve run the place from the beginning are doing fine.

[david_aked]

Agree that term limits is not a good solution.
What would be better would be to fix your election system. First Past the Post is a terrible form of democracy.
Preferential voting would do more to solve things than term limits.
Allow a person to decide how their votes play out. If you do this, then people won’t feel like they are ‘wasting a vote’ if they don’t go for one of the 2 major parties.
Combine that with easier access to polling stations.
And… I’m entering fantasy settings here aren’t I.

[Jeroen_Metselaa]

@Michael_R_Smith

US politics used to be fun.

Yes, but… Politics is a bit like a dentist procedure or health scan: You want it to be dull, boring, with no surprises, and nothing to report back home. Excitement is better reserved for other things.

“May you live in interesting times.” Now we do.

[Mike.71]

@Brainspore

I don’t see any reason to think a higher turnover rate in government would necessarily help. Bernie Sanders has been in congress for almost 30 years while Donald Trump is the first US President with no history of public service whatsoever.

I think term limits shouldn’t be absolute, but relative, so one could have 2 mandate on congress then 2 on senate and so on somewhat shuffling the position on different political areas.

Anyway I agree that is the minor problem. Elizabeth is in charge since 1953 and is making a good job and I am sure that Charles will continue to work in a good shape.

Anyway the most problematic thing in the USA is the electoral system with a not so first-before-post that make the system a two-party system. From what I see in the USA having only two parties makes difficult to have correctly represented all the different instance from different people.

[gracchus]

@Carbonman

I watched a Noam Chomsky interview a couple of years ago. He posited that the influence of the American empire began to decline right after its peak at the end of WW2.

I’d place the decline of imperial period more around the early 1970s. What we’re really discussing here, though, is the U.S.'s decline as a nation-state in comparison to others rather than as an empire. In terms of civics and the economy, we’ve reached that point where things can’t be papered over anymore.

[MattWPBS]

That “We Don’t Know How to Warn You Any Harder. America is Dying” link is one of two things I wanted to post.

The other is Robert Evans’ (Behind The Bastards/Bellingcat/Cracked) podcast from last year called It Could Happen Here. It draws on his experiences in places like Syria and Iraq, and applies it to the American situation, talking about how the starting point for a second American Civil War could come about. There’s a lot of things which ring scarily true from the last eighteen months or so.

One of his points was an armed militia vigilante shooting protesters as a spark.

I’m a left leaning liberal (as in social democrat tradition) in the UK, and we’ve got our own problems here with an incompetent blonde in charge. I remember we joked about it being a competition to see which company could be the dumbest.

What’s going on in America now is out of that scale of comparison and seriously worrying from the outside. You’ve got Trump preemptively trying to discredit and disenfranchise people when it comes to postal voting, and a Republican party which appears to have been completely subsumed by this. He’s already saying that the only way he’ll lose is if it’s rigged. You’ve literally got armed militias on the streets confronting and killing people, and federal agents snatching people off the street in unmarked cars. It’s the kind of situation where you’d normally see ‘the West’ sending election monitors in.

And the response I’m seeing from some people on the left in the States? “Well, I can’t vote for Biden, he’s too much of a Centrist.”

I mean fuck me, it’s not normal times. If people don’t vote for a democrat (small d intentional) against Trump, they’ll have a share of the responsibility if things go badly.

[gracchus]

@MattWPBS

The other is Robert Evans’ (Behind The Bastards/Bellingcat/Cracked) podcast from last year called It Could Happen Here.

I’ll second that recommendation (as well as his “Behind the Bastards” podcast). It’s engaging but non-hyperbolic.

The other piece I recommend and quote from frequently is Masha Gessen’s Autocracy: Rules for Survival. It’s not about civil war but about America’s descent into Putin-style oligarchical authoritarianism.

@MattWPBS

And the response I’m seeing from some people on the left in the States? “Well, I can’t vote for Biden, he’s too much of a Centrist.”

The “dirtbag left” and the brocialists are a relatively small group, and their votes (or lack thereof) won’t make a difference in and of themselves. Where they might do damage is by discouraging younger people from going to the polls and holding their noses for Biden. No-one who sees what’s really going on in the U.S. is happy that he’s the Dem candidate, but this is the choice on offer and the alternative could spend his second term destroying what’s left of American liberal-democracy.

[jrkrideau]

@phonono

IEDM are not renowned for their discernment. They’re kind of a Cato Institute wannabe. Or Canadian French counterpart to the Fraser Institute.

You mean they are writers of fantasy novels?

[Mindysan33]

@EPTC

I mean to institute some intelligence metric

No. Lots of the racist, sexist, assholes that run our country are “intelligent” by those standards.

If you WANT a more fully entrenched racist class system, then that’s how you get it.

[Bernel]

@Carbonman

There’s too much infrastructure and technology involved in building reliable nukes, plus you really tip your hand when doing even a small underground test. A more effective weapon group would be chemical and biological weapons.

If you want a deterrent you want your potential enemies to know about it. If USA thinks Canada is defenseless, invades, Canda respond with bioweapons and USA counters with nuclear, everyone loses.