There's multiple competing narratives about Americans. Two of the more prominent narratives on here that come to mind are:
1. Americans know everything their government has done, and the consequences, but they keep supporting their government anyway, because they're all fascist labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie drunk from drinking the blood of the exploited nations
2. Americans are clueless retard hamburger people who can't even locate the last country they invaded on a map, and don't even know what the phrase "CIA coup" implies, let alone sanctions, embargoes, structural adjustment programs, etc.
Are either of the above narratives true? Are they false? Are they oversimplified? Are they mutually exclusive? Is there some other narrative you prefer?
>>2525301>On BurgersWhat's your favorite kind of burger
>>2525315Chicken burger plus one Kraft American single with siracha and bbq sauce
>>2525334>Chicken burger Is that technically a burger? That's more of a sandwich…
>>2525336He's using that retarded definition of a chicken burger that other countries use. If it was ground chicken formed into a patty on a bun then its a chicken burger, the bun doesn't make it a burger yuropoors.
I’d offer up a third point that people are contradictory, incoherent, and highly atomized. Attempts to neatly package everything into a coherent whole only creates a kind of thinking not dissimilar to conspiracy theorists where everything is part of some pattern of connections. The internet has only made things worse in that regard because now the “patterns” are globalized and seen as almost totalitarian.
Like back in the day there wasn’t this predominate narrative that “the British workers are responsible for the mass murder of Indians” of the same for the Russian workers and the like. This isn’t to say that people were different, but you didn’t have this back and forth where you’ll see stuff in the common forum where ordinary Brits are saying “Haha! Starve those bloody Bengalis!” It’s a doorway to cruelty.
>>2525301Both narratives are completely false and are ideologies that don't reflect reality. The truth is twisted in the middle, just like anywhere else. Americans certainly are not unique. They follow the same broad trends as every other nation, just with quirks and different intensities.
>>2525315The biggest burger you got. Like a real American
The second one is closer to the truth, but it's not because Americans are stupid or apathetic, it's because they are deeply and deliberately indoctrinated. They are broken. They love Big Brother.
>>2525666Indoctrination (of any kind) leads to stupidity and apathy, eventually. The USA isn't exceptional in this regard. It's a worldwide problem.
>but they keep supporting their government anyway
If by support you mean "continue to be proletarianized by" then I suppose it'd be one. You would also be stupid if you meant that.
>>2525428In general people even leftists are too predisposed to this kind of national essentialism, although it makes since considering in the epoch of bourgeois society people take nationalism at face value in the same way that peasants took religion being real for granted. In some cases its kind of an inverted American exceptionalism and you also see it with class analysis being eschewed for simple conspiracy theories.
Of course it is a fact that post ww2 saw unprecedented levels of wealth in america alongside a consumer society and business unions that defused class tensions in the same way that frontier settlement/native genocide did previously. It's also impossible to talk about this without mentioning race and how/why it developed, after all broader society prevented the emergence of even a black bourgeoisie with its own distinct outlook ("black excellence", media aimed at black people, support for conservative Democrats generally) until the 1960s when the federal government realized the formal white supremacist program was untenable. While not a huge fan of his I think sakai was pretty close to the truth when analyzing the postwar consensus and the stuff he wrote around 2000 regarding the far right was pretty prescient. Of course all of the postwar and then post 1991 loot has been drying up for a while now and you see the death spiral everywhere is in, it's a very different world from 1965, 1985 or even 2005. All of this is to say I agree with the person I'm quoting that it's more about how history played out over the past century than some cultural value of Americans like ignorance or individualism. After all whatever its issues were the country did have one of the largest labor movements in the western hemisphere in the early 20th century.
As I'm writing this, it occurs to me that the past century directly runs opposite to the rightoid mantra about hard men creating times since the one major belligerent in ww2 with a population that didn't go through 1/100th of the suffering of the populations of the other major belligerents was also the one that benefited the most from it. and got to write the alibi and justify dropping good democratic bombs on other countries because aren't you glad a genocidal imperialist state with a system of racial hierarchy didn't win ww2?
>>2525301Most people in any country don't know shit about what's going on. Do you know local politicians? If you do, do you know who funds them, who cooperates with them, who opposes them? Do you know the decision-making behind how they built that new mall or plant and what the moneyed interests did to make it go smoothly? That's about how relevant foreign politics is to most people until it intrudes into their lives.
The one thing I find very weird is how backwards Americans are regarding religion. 40% of people go to church every week? That's insane and not in a good way. They are otherwise the perfect bourgeois country that almost everyone else strives to emulate.
>>2525680Well to be fair it's 40% of the type of person that would agree to take a survey, so it's not that surprising.
>>2525680While a lot of Americans are indeed pretty dumb and the school system sucks, I agree that people who say these things overestimate how much others in other countries know sometimes. Pretty sure the post covid decline in literacy/numeracy has hit many places pretty hard too, not to mention people from developing countries ime being a bit more optimistic overall about outsourcing their thinking to AI than firsties.
It probably doesn't help that left wingers who espouse these sentiments are more likely to be college educated whether in humanities or in stem and the people from other countries you meet are often the brighter ones who could make it here giving one the impression every Chinese or Iranian person is a rocket engineer or something while they don't see the below-average ignorant people stuck in rural poverty because they got dealt a shit hand in life.
>>2525723Part of their victory lap in the past year has been rejoicing that zoomers have become more religious but if memory serves it still didn't put too much of a dent in the overall statistics regarding that decline. Feels like another cant put the toothpaste back in the tube thing as similar victory laps are/were had over the resurgence in religious sentiment in the former Eastern Bloc but from everything eastern euros say most people are culturally religious if at all.
americans have been the most progressive force in the world
turd worldist volkerabfalle seething
>>2525728COVID might have stalled the decline of church attendance because the existential horror of a virus trying to kill people. It terrifies people on a different level. But from a long-term perspective, I think religion is in decline and will continue to decline and end up in museums eventually. It's no longer possible to commit people to these ancient books (which people don't have time or patience to read anyways) given the competition in the modern technological society from Netflix to Pornhub to MMA and video games.
In fact, I was raised by secular humanists who didn't believe in God. But in a fairly conservative (and religious) part of Texas. I had friends who had a church band that performed weekly at their church's Sunday services, and I attended those (Pentecostal) services a few times, even though I've never been religious. But my friends also liked to sling drugs and play poker, so they weren't really that religious. My extended family are Church of Christers, and I'm a bit familiar with that, which ChatGPT has described as analagous in an Islamic context to quietist Salafists. That said, I've found myself able to communicate with religious people fairly well I think. Not just Evangelical Christians but also devout Muslims. I can only reckon that it's because I picked up some of the ambience from my environment in terms of mannerisms and how I carry myself IRL.
That also reminds me of a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal who wrote a book on Saudi Arabia. (She had been a correspondent there for many years.) I was listening to an interview with her, and she was asked whether it was difficult to get along with her sources in Saudi Arabia because she was a woman, and she was like nah not at all actually, she grew up in West Texas and had more culture shock when moving to New York than she had when talking to these Saudis.
>>2525428>The truth is twisted in the middle, just like anywhere else. Americans certainly are not unique. They follow the same broad trends as every other nation, just with quirks and different intensities.>>2525744How are you supposed to do that with car dependent infrastructure and no one knowing their neighbors? Civil ward happen within communities and America has very few
They no longer make any excuses for their terror.
>>2525952I don't have the answers anon. The infrastructure is a major obstacle for sure, the lack of social cohesion, the atomization. Once I was looking at the US on Google maps and as I was looking at the kilometers upon kilometers of those bleak suburbs and grid cities and it dawned on me that you guys really do live like that. What a nightmare
>>2525952Housing crisis. Urban sprawl is only sustainable if everyone can own a home. Civil war will break out when everybody is crammed into tenement halls.
>>2526052Anyhow fuck petty-bourgeois housing speculator parasites. Fuck your little mansions.
Scapegoating the lazy stupid obese uneducated American working class is such a middle class bourgeosie limousine liberal tactic. It absolves them of any guilt or accountability, everything is the stupid poor people's fault. It is standard operating procedure of the middle-management to always blame everything on their subordinates, shit always rolls downhill.
>>2525428wrong, burgers are like a completely different species or something, i am very smart
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