American Exceptionalism Exposed - The Hard To Swallow Truths

The irony of a lot of those statistics is that the US would be topping them with a few simple changes.

1. You need a Government funded healthcare system. As an Australian it just blows my mind that a person living in a rich and industrialised country would actually be left to suffer (or even worse die), simply because they can’t afford basic medical treatment or some medicine.

2. Fix your barbaric drug laws and stop imprisoning people for petty traffic fines or whatever. Putting someone in jail is usually going to lower there general quality of life forever and turns petty offenders into hardcore criminals. America’s obsession with law and order is to put it simply, just purely self-destructive.

3. Tighten up your gun laws. lol, it’s just an endless cycle of Americans living in constant fear, so they load there houses up with easily concealed automatic weapons to protect themselves from the criminal who also has an easily concealed automatic weapon, which was stolen from there neighbours house a few years before.

4. Raise the minimum wage. The fact that there are a whole class of fulltime workers over there that still can’t afford to pay their bills or barely feed themselves, is just simply unbelievable.

Other than that, personally I’ve been loving the US lately. I mean, now that you guys have a president who comes across as having at least average intelligence and is not a war mongering religious fanatic. Oh, also now you guys are finally starting to wake up and the process of allowing responsible adults to smoke a little something if they so choose has began, kinda just makes me jealous I’m not American, lol. It’ll be a long time before we see that kind of freedom starting to happen over here.

Seriously, I wouldn’t be so hard on yourselves, your not so much worse off than most other westernised countries anyway. From an outsider’s point of view it just seems that you guys have had it ingrained into your minds since birth that the US is the only country in the world that has a reasonable amount of freedom and a high quality of life, with a media that has traditionally paid little interest to the outside world. Therefore it has been easy for corruption to slip in and lower the over overall quality of life without the American people realising that they are falling behind.

Looks like things a slowly changing though, as Americans become more reliant on the Internet and not so much on CNN to see what’s happening in the outside world. You guys will come back with vengeances, I’m sure. Lol, well you better anyway, since Australia and many other countries rely on you guys to protect us. Ironically, US nuclear weapons and your all-powerful military does hold the world together and keeps us all safe.

Peace

reply to post by Conquest83

lol 3 out of 4 of the points you listed 1,3 and 4 most Amricans on here seem proud of

But hey what does a Limely and Aussie know righ? We are just 3rd world tyranical hell holes yearning for yanky doodle freedom

Originally posted by sonnny1

Originally posted by GeneralChaos


Your enemy is none other than Lucifer his own damned self.
And he is going to destroy this entire planet and take your ass with it.

hmmm..........

well it would be techincally correct if it wasn't for the little detail where "lucifer" is being thrown into the lake of fire along with his followers as a punishment....

but what i find funny is when god punishes he is looked at as blood thirsty and evil.... in this instance when lucifer/satan punishes he is viewed like a good guy.

silly philosoraptor.

reply to post by votan


The Irony of it all, hey?

I've just gotten home and will address a few things once I've settled in and rustled up some dinner. Before that a quick clarification...

It's funny that I would get accused of "'Murica bashing" simply for pointing out truths - the truth that the US is not number one in any relevant category... stated while wholeheartedly praising the people of this country and declaring my love for it.

I even logged on to find that I'd been foed - presumably over the title of this thread.

I hope one message is clear... I love America. I love it enough to point out that the Emperor has no clothes.

Two nations, The United States and France were leading the way into a new world with new, previously unfathomable possibilities... and amazing things became of it.

When was this exactly? Those nations weren't instigators of the Industrial Revolution. This whole thing is based on imaginary history, sorry.

reply to post by Morg234


The French Revolution and the American Revolution.

The two factors I was specifically referring to, and both very historically accurate.

Both nations, however, were also involved in the industrial revolution as well.

reply to post by Morg234


Plusalthough france way key to the USA victory in the war of independance it certainly didnt go in for any noble ideas. It joined the fight for one simple reason and that was to kill englishmen.

The french weremore tyranical than the britain ever was. But its a case of my enemy enemy is my freind.

reply to post by Hefficide


The french revolution hardly ended in freedom and noble causes....

It endedin a dictstorship.

reply to post by crazyewok


While tragic, the germane aspect of the French Revolution was the cultural change it brought to Europe - the breaking of the previous paradigm which had held sway for thousands of years. The culmination of the age of enlightenment and the move away from a Royal aristocracy.

We'll be fine once we clean out the upper echlons of power ,using military force if necessary.I have seen it worse and the doom pukes ain't squat but COINTEL PRO children doing their best imitation of chicken little.
Our country's name is AMERICA ,just because Yankees and liberals can't here us saying the 'A" part,doesn't mean we don't say it.Like the second "D" in didn't that is now apparently pronounced with a grunt instead of pronunciation. Theres a lot they don't listen to.
But man they suck up the media,wow. Return to your regularly scheduled apocalypse (That will never happen bucko)
A scout ...out.

reply to post by Hefficide


OK I absolutely LOVE this post. You have laid out so many ideas that my husband and I have come up with. ESPECIALLY the term limits thing. I had an instructor once that had tenure. He was the rudest, host horrible instructor I have ever met. Would teach out of the 3rd edition of the book while the rest of the class used the 6th edition. (Yes they were almost completely different books.) You had to remember EVERYTHING, even the stats at the bottom of a little graph in a side bar on the page. Yet he never told you this. It sure was on the quiz though! And even with studying EVERY waking moment AND memorizing an entire chapter... you still made a 40 on the exam. W... T... H??? (Yes I did memorize the chapter to see if it was me not studying hard enough or if it was him being an ass.) He had immunity and didn't care BECAUSE he didn't have a "term limit". Now granted, this is so completely different than someone in political position but the premise is the same. Why would a political leader try to help when they were just in it for the money and knew they wouldn't be kicked out even if they did a crap job?

Affordable higher education? Yes please! I am 60k into student loans to help pay bills for a degree that I am 6 classes away from and cannot afford to finish. Yes it was my choice to take out the loans but I had to feed my kids, a single mom and bills and child care, etc. I was younger and dumber and didn't know better. Now I do and will be paying on the interest on those loans for the rest of my life. I will likely never even touch the principle of it with the economy they way it is. Or unless some miracle happens and I find some winning lotto ticket or something. But the real problem I think is why? Why should it cost SO MUCH to get an education. I went to a less-well-known 4 year college and each semester STILL cost more than each of my children cost to be born in a hospital, with a c-section, and the 1-2 day stay afterward, AND the $20 box of tissues (what? 6 tissues?? you serious?).

I could go into each point you made but you would likely all hate me and I would be banned for talking too much. Let's just say I completely agree on EVERY idea you posted. Well thought out and just flat out brilliant IMO.

Someone slipped a nerd pill into my breakfast cereal, and I started to look at the surveys. I looked at the first two before the pill wore off.

The first one, the Fraser study of overall freedom, looked at Economic and Personal Freedom. In Economic Freedom, the US was behind only Hong Kong and New Zealand. Their Economic Freedom ranking was taken from a different report, which I did not look up. In the introduction to their study, the authors wrote:

In constructing this index, we use indicators that are as consistent as possible with the concept of negative liberty: the absence of coercive constraint on the individual. We do not attempt to measure positive freedom, however desirable such may be.

This index of freedom also does not incorporate measures of democracy or “political freedom.”

The index is divided into four categories: 1) Security and Safety; 2) Freedom of Movement; 3) Freedom of Expression; and 4) Relationship Freedoms.

We have tried to capture the degree to which people are free to enjoy the major civil liberties—freedom of speech, religion, and association and assembly—in each country in our survey. In addition, we include indicators of crime and violence, freedom of movement, and legal discrimination against homosexuals.

The US, and other countries at the top of their Personal Freedom ranking, achieved identical scores on Freedom of Movement so the entire ranking is obtained by an equal average of the other three areas. The US does the worst in Security and Safety, where at least half of the entire category is based on our crime rate.

To say that America's crime rate shows we are not a free country is a strained conclusion, and alternative explanations are available, as I posted earlier.

Our worst scores in Freedom of Expression comes from laws and regulations, and political pressures and controls.

Our worst scores in Freedom of Relationships come from government restrictions on, and social hostility to, religion.

I'm not sure the Fraser study identifies the problems and solutions that Hefficide thinks it does.

Concerning the Heritage study of Economic Freedom, the snapshot is less informative than the narrative:

The United States, with an economic freedom score of 76, has lost ground again in the 2013 Index. Its score is 0.3 point lower than last year, with declines in monetary freedom, business freedom, labor freedom, and fiscal freedom. The U.S. is ranked 2nd out of three countries in the North America region, and its score remains well above the world and regional averages.

Registering a loss of economic freedom for the fifth consecutive year, the U.S. has recorded its lowest Index score since 2000. Dynamic entrepreneurial growth is stifled by ever-more-bloated government and a trend toward cronyism that erodes the rule of law. More than three years after the end of recession in June 2009, the U.S. continues to suffer from policy choices that have led to the slowest recovery in 70 years. Businesses remain in a holding pattern, and unemployment is close to 8 percent. Prospects for greater fiscal freedom are uncertain due to the scheduled expiration of previous cuts in income and payroll taxes and the imposition of new taxes associated with the 2010 health care law.

Restoring the U.S. to a place among the world’s “free” economies will require significant policy reforms, particularly in reducing the size of government, overhauling the tax system, transforming costly entitlement programs, and streamlining regulations.

Again, I'm not sure the problem is what Hefficide expected, and the solution almost certainly isn't.

With respect,
Charles1952

Ideals change and get updated as the culture changes and updates. What makes one "American" is not a particular ideal, but how he refines the culture around himself, to form what he thinks makes an American.

reply to post by Hefficide


Well, we will just have to change those statistics
with rapid decisiveness.

Thanks

reply to post by GeneralChaos


GeneralChaos, you hit a bullseye right here, and i thank you for putting our past, present, and future physical and SPIRITUAL situation into needed perspective.

You can see it all around you, if you just take the time and look. The symbols have been and are in our tv, videogames, comics, books, movies, childrens cartoons, company logos, music and it's videos, flashed by the famous, powerful and influential. The Vatican has made it illegal to report sexual abuse, torture, or any crime for that matter. It is impossible to investigate or prosecute high ranking individuals for pedophilia or satanic ritual abuse, murder and torture, no matter how much evidence is compiled against them. Satanic ritual crimes, always, ALWAYS, are met with a solid, impenetrable wall of delay, non-communication, secrecy, uneeded bureaucracy, and protection by all levels of law enforcement; from cops, federal agents, to judges and politicians.

I'm going to say this, and get flamed, but it's something that people who think that America used to be a bastion of freedom and opportunity needs to come to terms with. America was always an undercover police state. America was always an evil war monger. It sounds overly inflammatory, but it's the truth. First there was the killing off of the natives and the racial slavery. Then we have the invasion and takeover of Hawaii, Mexico and Puerto Rico.

America intentionally poisoned poor blacks in the U.S. and injected std's into South American countries to observe it's "effects". They left behind mass graves of innocent's after the invasion of Panama. They supported financed the likes of Paul Pot, Idi Amin, Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, basically any greedy, brutal dictator that works to make the peoples lives miserable while enriching themselves in the process.

They employed the COINTELPRO operation in order to infiltrate dismantle and KILL any movements, institutions, and individuals that worked to empower and unify blacks, Native Americans, or any other group that lived in this environment of legal oppression and racism. Documents were leaked of how to demoralize and depopulate the black population in the U.S. through using negative media, poverty, and drugs. They spied on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They unlawfully confiscated money that was raised by Marcus Garvey's back to Africa movement. They trafficked drugs and guns into poor black neighborhoods. They detained Japanese Americans into shi**y detainment camps.

They lied about the reasons for going to war with North Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. and ended the lives of thousands of U.S. troops, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Why do people continue to say that America is or was so great? It's because they have been effectively brainwashed throughout there education. If anyone will take a a little time, and do a litt;le research itno the history of this country, it would would become obvious to them that the the instances of good done by this country are FAR outweighed by the evil committed. The problem is the ones who commit the evil, control what you see and learn, they always have. So obviously we will grow up thinking that America was so great.

That squeeky clean, ideal, close knit nuclear family that the average old timer reminisces about? They probably preferred them coloreds far away from them, under a heavy, white mans boot. Sorry to muddy the picture here. American society was never very morally upright, ever. It's just today, the moral rot has shifted to other less obvious but equally problematic areas, and pushed out into the open.

America has always been invading, plundering, taking, killing, oppressing. It's just at later times, they have employed more covert techniques to continue this trend. Blacks want rights? Fine, lets make sure they have no jobs and are too poor to manage their own communities and educate themselves, and lets throw in some drugs into the mix. That'll show them. Lets go over tho this country, and make sure this uppity leader here trying to make something good for his people is taken out, and lets prop up this evil, ignorant blood thirsty tyrant, and pass it off as popular vote.

When will people wake up and realize that America was never, EVER, great at all?

The path we are on now was Lucifer's and his team's intended path for this country, and the world. Sorry for the doom and gloom, but that's why i always rolled my eyes at the paltry resistance of petitioning your local congressman, marching, signing forms, and calling into the office to complain. They will ALWAYS go through with what they want, no matter what you do. Unfortunately, the only way to finally turn this country great, for the first time ever in it's history, is to shoot it out. But that's not happening, sorry to say.

You know, Heff, you got 21 years on me. It's changed a lot for the worse in my short lifetime. I don't know how to fix it, I wish I did. Right now I'm having enough trouble just paying the rent and car insurance.

Originally posted by CranialSponge
Maybe this will lift the spirits of my neighbour pals to the south:


The USA is numero uno in...

Total Olympic Medals


... now that's something to be proud of (hard work and determination)

I don't think we Canucks are number one in anything except maybe beer drinking, snow fort making, and moose dodging.

Crushed 3 to 1 by the EU

www.medaltracker.eu...

Originally posted by cartenz
No.1 For external debt (exceeding even the EU):
en.wikipedia.org...

No.1 For natural gas consumption:
en.wikipedia.org...

No.1 For oil consumption:
en.wikipedia.org...

No.1 Arms exporter:
en.wikipedia.org...

Worst current account balance:
en.wikipedia.org...

Just to balance the sheet on energy--this I did not know, largets wind energy producer:
en.wikipedia.org...

per capita American (52,170) debt is much worse than European (27,864) and the worst is coming to an end in Europe while America just spent its way out of trouble. They still need to hit Americans with a decade or more of austerity to make a real dent in their debt. Detroit is only the beginning...

Not that Olympics is a good yardstick anyway. Athletes regularly change nationalities. Americas greatest are almost always imports, Einstein an American? every year America for decades America has poached the greatest from around the world and claimed their achievements are American.

its also worth mentioning the only reason America boomed in the 50s and 60s was due to Europe and asia being in ruins. Europe and asia is eclipsing America everywhere these days and Americas slide will continue

Wow,

This is the most blatant, Let's bash America for stars, thread of all time.....and by a mod too.
Shameful.