A great example of why you don’t have any idea what is happening in the world around you. I don’t generally blog this stuff but, you Should know Time Magazine is not the only media to do this. .
I HAD NO CLUE THIS WAS HAPPENING AND I AM SO ANGRY
american schools teach about other countries’ propaganda, but look at this shit.
Did you guys know that the first Canadian deaths in the war in Afghanistan happened in 2002 when an American pilot dropped a bomb on some Canadian soldiers doing training exercises
killed 4 people and injured 8
Did you know this? Probably not because boy does your country like to brainwash about their fucking military being the greatest and most important and amazing fucking thing
Americans, we get more news about your country than you do, because gosh diddly darn does your country ever like to hide things from you and keep you stupid.
The misinformation and ignorance of the American public is manufactured and deliberate as a means of social control
Tag: united states of america
I get making fun of America for its flag worship and stuff but Brexit should be all the reminder you need that you don’t need flags in every classroom and a pledge of allegiance every morning for the people of a country to turn out absurdly xenophobic.
LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
i used to feel like america’s flag worship thing was really creepy and fucked up, but now i think that america is so big, it’s actually a necessary. america has a ton of different states, environments, and cultures, plus the stated values of independence and individuality. state governments clash with the federal government and different chunks of the country absolutely don’t understand—or like—each other. so maybe the constant reminder that we all wave the same flag around and are part of the same nation is important to keep everyone from just breaking apart. we’re signaling to each other that we’re all, ultimately, on the same side.
These are two of the most misguided comments I have seen on tumblr in a long time.
1) The UK most certainly does have a flag-waving, poem reciting masturbatory sense of xenophobic nationalistic pride that is more than just comparable to the US’s. “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire”, “God Save the Queen/King”, the whole myth about how the Brits ~held the line in Europe all alone against the Nazis and saved the world~. This is the nation that literally created the idea of ‘White Man’s Burden’. They slap the fucking Union Jack on everything.
2) The US was founded during the rise of Nation-State Identity and thus was allowed to nurture its propagandist idea of what made it “unique” within its borders from the early days of its inception. The whole “oh, American states are all just sooOOoooOOoooo different from each other” is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism. US culture is not actually that diverse when compared to, like… almost anywhere else in the world (just think for a second about places like: India, China, Indonesia, Spain, Nigeria, etc.) Most of the US’s diversity comes from immigration and subsets of oppressed minorities that the US government has traditionally tried to silence, sideline or snuff out (the same as in my country or any other predominantly-white ex-colony). These are the kind of people who feel disunity with the flag, for good reason.
3) Nationalist ideology in general seeks to erase diversity. The American flag, for many, is a symbol of oppression and cultural (or literal) genocide. I understand that you, nowhere in your post, said that this is how people should feel, but it’s an incredibly naive call for unity with a cultural idea that is especially hostile to those who don’t fit its parametres; an unconscious reinforcement of Nationalist Exceptionalism in a time when such ideologies should be dismantled. The people who feel disunity with the flag are not the people breaking the USA apart, and the people who worship it absolutely will not respond to any call to unity with those who don’t fit what they feel the flag represents. It is not a necessity – its a symbol of the ideology that caused those divides in the first place.
I get that these posts came from a good place, however when I saw this cross my dash I actually had to double-take because what this one-two-punch says – entirely due to thoughtlessness and not malice – is: “Hey, the UK doesn’t have exactly the same kind of xenophobic nationalism and the US does, so I guess that maybe aspects of the US’s xenophobic nationalism aren’t that bad and flag worship can be a good thing!”
Flag worship is still creepy and bad. More nationalism is not the solution to nationalism.
explainguncontrolandsafespaces:
Just a friendly reminder that the Constitution does not have the word “God” once.
But it does contain the phrase “promote the general welfare”
Declaration of Independence does.
“Promote” does not mean “Provide”.
Also, general welfare, not individual welfare.
Declaration of Independence is not the founding document of our Government, the founding document of our government does include this interesting part though,
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion (x)
The recognition of “God” is the government respecting monotheistic religions, which is also why you will not find it once in the Constitution.
Also, I am opposed to individual welfare, such as corporate tax cuts, bailouts and the like. I firmly support general welfare, such as a Universal Basic Income and Single Payer Healthcare.
General welfare is the welfare of the union not the individual people.
Since this is confusing to you, let’s look at it in context:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
If you notice, the people of the United States are declaring that that would like a few things:
- Form a more perfect union
- Provide for the common defense
- Promote the general welfare
- Secure liberty
Because of those reasons, We the Peopled are establishing a Constitution.
The people are trying to promote their general welfare is the literal meaning of that statement. They also want to have a more perfect union, but that hasn’t been established yet, so asking to promote the welfare of a union that does not yet exist is rediculous.
The general welfare is the aggregate of individual welfare. Look at the median. If there’s thousands of people one bad break away from starvation but a couple hundred who could bankrupt a Fortune 500 company and walk away with most of their houses, that’s still not a good General Welfare.
The union is made up of individual people, how can someone be this dense, it’s like the most privileged dehumanizing thing ever just because they don’t like the idea of sharing.
like setting aside the grotesque human rights violations, if you have to use physical force to conduct an interrogation … you’ve failed as an interrogator and you shouldn’t have a job. like – that’s what salts me about the cia. they’re not just evil, they’re incompetent. they are such a posse of hideously incompetent goons it embarrasses me to be the same species. “this guy wont tell me secrets so i guess ill punch him” ohhhhhhh my god you fiasco
no offense but! i wish american students would stop seeing foreign language classes as just an academic requirement but an opportunity to learn part of another culture!
I wish language education in english-speaking countries actually seemed to care about teaching us about another culture and learning a language for reasons other that it being useful, rather than just teaching us to pass an exam
I wish learning a second language was mandatory in the US and was taught to us at an early age when we are still developing language skills and comprehension so that its not so difficult to learn other language at a high school level.
The UN Sent 3 Foreign Women To The U.S. To Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified.
The United States continues to embarrass.
The delegates were appalled by the lack of gender equality in America. They found the U.S. to be lagging far behind international human rights standards in a number of areas, including its 23 percent gender pay gap, maternity leave, affordable child care and the treatment of female migrants in detention centers.
The most telling moment of the trip, the women told reporters on Friday, was when they visited an abortion clinic in Alabama and experienced the hostile political climate around women’s reproductive rights.
“We were harassed. There were two vigilante men waiting to insult us,” said Frances Raday, the delegate from the U.K. The men repeatedly shouted, “You’re murdering children!” at them as soon as they neared the clinic, even though Raday said they are clearly past childbearing age.
“It’s a kind of terrorism,” added Eleonora Zielinska, the delegate from Poland. “To us, it was shocking.”
In most European countries, she explained, abortions are performed at general doctors’ offices and hospitals that offer all kinds of other health services, so there aren’t protesters waiting to heckle the women who enter.
The women discovered during their visit that women in the United States have “missing rights” compared to the rest of the world. For instance, the U.S. is one of three countries in the world that does not guarantee women paid maternity leave. The U.N. suggests that countries guarantee at least 14 weeks of paid parental leave. Some countries go further – Iceland requires five months paid leave for each parent, and an additional two months to be shared between them.
“The lack of accommodation in the workplace to women’s pregnancy, birth and post-natal needs is shocking,” Raday said. “Unthinkable in any society, and certainly one of the richest societies in the world.”
Another main area of concern for the delegation is violence against women – particularly gun violence. Women are 11 times more likely to be killed by a gun in the United States than in other high-income countries, and most of those murdersare perpetrated by an intimate partner. While the Obama administration has talked a lot about combatting violence against women, its efforts have been frustrated by Congress’ inability to pass new federal gun restrictions.
While the delegates were shocked by many things they saw in the U.S., perhaps the biggest surprise of their trip, they said, was learning that women in the country don’t seem to know what they’re missing. “So many people really believe that U.S. women are way better off with respect to rights than any woman in the world,” Raday said. “They would say, ‘Prove it! What do you mean other people have paid maternity leave?’”
The US is so far behind in women’s rights, people don’t even believe that other countries allow Paid. Maternity. Leave. Good lord.
But “feminism isn’t needed in the first world!”
The UN Sent 3 Foreign Women To The U.S. To Assess Gender Equality. They Were Horrified.
just moving along like everyone else 