It’s remarkable how effective that strategy has been.

Reagan/Bush run up the deficit by 300%+ due to tax cuts and massive military spending, foreign wars

Clinton pays off the deficit, gets the economy booming, scales back military spending and foreign entanglements

GWB campaigns on a platform of tax cuts and increased military spending, along with denying climate change, barely wins

deficit skyrockets due to tax cuts, multi trillion dollar wars, lack of financial regulation collapses global economy

Obama has to save the economy again, extricate us from foreign entanglements again, while fighting against a republican establishment that refuses to pass any legislation

Trump administration completely fails to deal with COVID pandemic and tanks the economy yet again

Biden has to clean up that mess, and the resultant inflation is blamed on the Democrats

How many times are people going to fall for this shit?

Ok I still think it’s wrong to criticize nonviolent resistance but I appreciate the data and links. It is true that I didn’t read the linked article at first.

I’m extremely confused. The civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, led by MLK, had massive, sweeping success. Brown v. BOE, Loving v. Virginia, Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fair Housing Act of 1968, etc. The non-violent strategy succeded in striking down segregation, Jim crow laws, and nearly all forms of legal racial discrimination within a couple decades.

Securing legal rights for minority groups to be treated equally under the law and courts is a losing strategy? What exactly is your objective if you see the civil rights movement as a loss?

I understand that you’re probably not American so you may not have an extensive knowledge of American history. But this is pretty important stuff, and acting like MLK failed because of his non-violent strategy is 1,000,000% wrong. Literally could not be further from the truth.

What did the Black Panthers accomplish with their violent strategy? They committed a few terrorist acts and all ended up dead or in jail. They didn’t secure any major, permanent victories for future generations.

Saying that MLK failed because of his non-violent approach is like saying Julius Caesar failed because he was an ineffective military commander. It’s so incredibly incorrect that I don’t understand how you could ever come to think that.

Well I mostly was already familiar with “if and only if” terminology from some math class many years ago. So once you said iff stands for “if and only if” I didn’t really look too close at the rest of your comment because I felt like I already understood.

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Cool, TIL

I agree with you on that.

But alternatively: humans can only see a portion of the whole reality of a given situation, and that specific angle can often be misleading.

Are “Iffs” a thing? I’ve been missing out.

Yeah that’s what I meant, very true. But the setting is much easier to optimize.

Rule 1 of tripping. The setting dictates everything.

I think you owe me an apology. It took me a while to copy paste all that senseless vitriol and you won’t even acknowledge your mistake. Disappointing.

It’s a timeless classic

Look at their comment history. They can’t go two days without getting in a dig at Americans. Even when it’s completely irrelevant and off topic. I’m just pointing out that this person has a bone to pick and not to take it personally.

The funny part is that they’re often completely wrong when they try to talk shit. Like here, thinking that India having a larger population than the US is some kind of gotcha moment, despite less than 10% of that population speaking English.

I’ll just transcribe a few lovely comments from our good friend Mr Blott.

Glock pistols popular in US because of the proliferation of fucking cowards

Scared of their own fucking shadows, those pussies

What’s the difference between a cow and 9/11

You’d stop milking a cow after 23 years

Seems a bit unnecessary when you could just dress the ivy up like schoolkids and the yanks would wipe it out in a week

German

I’m guessing a yank whose great great great great great great grandfather once wiped his cock on a strudel

They’re using American weapons, they should just aim for schools

Holy fuck, yanks are weird

God I’d hate to have such poor reading comprehension. You’d last about a minute in UK based communities lol

You’re not out of the dark ages, you quivering shitebag lol

You mean prison slavery? That’s the US, get on it lol

Did it come out of the States?

If so, guaranteed utter fucking horseshit

You can punch your hand through your plasterboard mate lol

You can always spot an American because they’re so fuckin scared of everything. Look, this one’s scared of his own shite 😂

Of course!

Just lose the -

• Guns

• Tiny-penis trucks

• the “right” to hate-speech

• the religious weirdo thing

And you’ll be getting close to the 20th century!

Know how yous get upset when people say “Americans are stupid”

Literally a third of you have demonstrated that you’d eat gravel if someone said it’d cure immigrants

A third. So lets just say only half of the other two thirds are stupid

That’s quite a few. Almost a quarter pounder

Yous cunts are greedy to the point of being fuckin EVIL

That’s just… evil, taking money from poor folk and their kids

How are yous letting evil cunts do this to your fellow citizens? How are you not fucking getting the flaming torches out?

Selfish fucking cunts, the lot of you. Stand up for not just yourselves, for all of yous

The bot is only “spreading misinformation” to people who are too stupid to realise that “left” and “right” mean politically different things in different countries

Mostly the yanks

I feel really sorry for this guy

What kind of unhinged parents call their kid Tyreek?

This is just from the past few weeks lmao. This dude has issues.

Ok, good.

I’ll respond to this tomorrow. Gird your loins.

The claim here is that unless something is flagged as being “world” something, it’s assumed to be specific to the US. The obvious example is politics forums with no qualifier in social media (including here and on Reddit) being about US politics where everywhere else is qualified with either “world” or a specific country/region.

As far as I’m aware, this only applies to /news and /politics. Those are the two communities out of thousands that have a default unlabeled US community and a separate community for world topics. /games isn’t specific to the US, /film isn’t specific to the US, and so on.

So the claim that “anything without ‘world’ in its name is just about the US” is obviously incorrect, or that the very least a huge exaggeration. If you literally only use Lemmy for politics and news, that’s the only way it makes sense. And many people tend to do the opposite and try to avoid those communities.

So the claim is wrong regardless, but even to the extent that it is valid, I would still defend the counterclaim.

most users are not American in many of those sites, or a large enough proportion aren’t that the assumption is not justified.

How do you define ‘a large enough proportion’? I would argue that 50% is large enough to justify such an assumption by a significant margin.

There is no default nation for politics. If anything, “politics” without a qualifier should be fair game for all world politics.

I think it’s certainly possible to argue that the US is the default nation when it comes to news and politics, because our domestic events have by far the most global impact of any nation. Due to the $25T GDP and 11 aircraft carriers, what happens here has massive implications for other nations. If Trump gets elected, that has huge ramifications for European politics, Middle Eastern politics, you name it.

However, I ultimately do agree that it would be more logical to have the communities be flagged US politics/news. Unfortunately humans are rarely logical creatures, and our behavior can often be better understood in social terms. And socially, this just kind of became the default because it was mostly Americans on reddit at first, and then there’s never been a compelling enough reason for it to change.

As I’ve already explained, you’re talking about the general case of assuming where someone is from. Because otherwise, you’re suggesting that we should assume someone is from a different country than the US? Which country? I honestly don’t understand what your point is.

they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

Yes, this is the most important trait among humans, it is known.

49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

The assumption that the 51% of reddit constitutes a monolith of non-Americans is wildly reductive and offensive /s. The majority is irrelevant, Americans still constitute the plurality of users, and thus inevitably become the default.

I absolutely agree that it’s a symptom of dysfunction, but I just think it’s unfair to blame on the average American. We didn’t ask for this either.

Danke schon 🙃

Mr Blott really really really likes to denigrate Americans. Don’t rain on his parade

Don’t ever talk about kilometres in here. Are you trying to spark an international incident?

FWIW ich habe Deustch gelernt. Aber ich habe die meistens vergessen 😔

That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. I don’t mean to diminish your experience, but the world is simply too massive for anecdotal knowledge to apply when attempting to make sense of it. In other words, it’s impossible to gather a balanced understanding of global phenomena via primary experiences. I’m not as well traveled as you, but I’m analyzing the statistics rather than relying on personal experiences, which is much more informative when trying to recognize the big picture.

I’m not reflexively lumping anything in, I’m simply recognizing the reality that the cultural life of anglosphere countries is heavily mixed, and that US culture dominates that mixture due to its size and economic position. It’s not a controversial statement to say that Canada and the US are peas in a pod.

I left the original assumption unchallenged, but I don’t agree with it tbh. There are a ton of Europeans on Lemmy and also reddit, and it’s quite obvious to notice as an American. Furthermore, the entire premise is faulty. Rather than ask why people default to the US, the question is why people are assuming anything at all about anonymous accounts. And the answer is because of human nature, which isn’t something unique to Americans.