The US is the new Britain, basically, in that they are globally influential because they have massive foreign capital to operate and protect, rather than anything lofty like having the "right ideas" or demonstrating responsible stewardship of the world order.

They also attract the smartest people with the best ideas by being rich and paying in-demand workers more than everyone else, not by being an actual good place to live or raise a family.

Nothing else really matters here. You have a middle America that's basically saying, **** foreign capital, let's stop protecting it. And you have coastal America that's basically saying, **** labor, let's stop paying them. And then you "provincial" voters are all left wondering why America doesn't seem as great anymore.

The only way any of you are going back to the moon is if McDonalds wants to open a restaurant there.

Yeah, I don't get this thing about the "idea" of America. America doesn't really have ideals. Maybe that was true after the collapse of fascism and the Japanese empire, where democracy and liberalism meant more. But now it's mostly just a cynical justification for doing whatever the U.S. elites want to grab power and influence. America is nothing symbolically to the world. Well, maybe a symbol of human baseness. IDK, maybe some people worldwide really buy the "American dream" thing, there can't be none, but they're more of a vocal minority who are given a megaphone by U.S. elites than a representative voice.

And yeah, America has pathetic social institutions.

Reverend Jones, fret not. If you are any indication, your side will inevitably win.

You back-pedalled a bunch after that first sentence, but taken at face value, I've never seen a more blatant example of your anti-American bias on this forum. To say that America is nothing symbolically to the world is laughable.

Not sure if serious, but from what I've heard, Democrats are pretty terrible at winning elections, especially in non-election years.

The president himself, though? He's pretty well torpedoed his poll numbers with this whole Paris thing.

Anti-Americanism is a joke of an idea. Only countries wrought with idiot nationalism care about "anti-countryism".

Try going to Germany and talking about anti-Germanyism. You'll get laughed at because most people other countries don't believe in such stupid things.

And no, I'm not anti-American. I benefit much from America's position in the world. I am deeply against many of our social institutions and foreign policy. If anything it means I hold American to a higher moral standard than most other countries. America could be doing much better, and I'm more frustrated that it doesn't. I don't expect the same from Russia, or Italy, or Brazil.

If you don't think it exists, it's probably because you've seeped yourself in it so thoroughly to the point of it being invisible to you.

Nobody without this bias would say something patently false like "America is nothing symbolically to the world."

BTW, I know **** all about Germany and have never been there, but I think you might want to read a bit about this phenomenon you may have heard of known as "German guilt".

America doesn't mean "nothing" symbolically to the rest of the world, and it certainly isn't a symbol of baseness, but it's also not at all the symbol most Americans think it is or want it to be.

At the state and local level, sure, but they own virtually all of the educational institutions in the country. It shouldn't take long for virtually the entire country to be on the same page. We'll probably still have a two party system but there will be even less difference between the major parties than there is today.

Just have to make sure that pesky Article V convention doesn't happen, though.

Symbols do not mean as much as you think they do. As well, it could also be that the degree to which other people give a **** about America is invisible to you because you're steeped in American points of view.

It's like you're saying the idea of Rome mattered a whole bunch to people in Europe during Rome's peak. Or, it could simply be that Rome was overwhelmingly strong and asserted themselves over everybody that Rome's point of view was heard by everybody. Which is pretty close to where America is. The reason so many people talk about America is we have a huge country and constantly exert pressure on other countries. That doesn't mean there's some spooky mystical "idea" that people give a **** about. It just means America wields alot of power over the world.

Exactly.

I took issue with Reid's statement because I've seen it contradicted so many times by the statements of immigrants and hopeful immigrants who are yearning for a better, less corrupt, more optimistic future. I mean, look no further than the flippin` statue of liberty for a literal symbol of America from a Frenchman.

Well, at least this was all true before Donald Trump turned his back on millions of people abroad who were desperate to become Americans.

I haven't read the rest of your post because it doesn't address me.

What you originally wrote (before you qualified it) was factual incorrect, no more no less. The rest of your post is just more waxing philosophical points that have nothing to do with the scope of my criticism.

I'll restate myself clearly. America has a huge amount of influence on the world, economically, politically and militarily. When people think of America, this influence is what people think of more than any ideas of America. Moreover, the ideas of America are often tied to this same system of political influence. So more often than not, what people think about is American power, not American ideas, and any discussion of ideas should take backseat to discussion of power.

You're right to say it's not "nothing" symbolically. I'll take that back. If anyone could, maybe, enlighten me more to what these ideas are supposed to be, AKA, do you really think the world views America as Winthrop's city on a hill.

What I mean when I say that the idea of America doesn't matter is that: people view America as the largest threat to global peace. However many countries also have favorable views to America, partly because America isn't nearly as bad for them as I portray it sometimes.

Okay. I'll grant you that. It's a factual error.

And it's one which I grant that you never made, because you qualified it with your next sentences. But it still struck me as an outlandish thing to say at face value.

Ask any Iranian, Iraqi, or Syrian waiting in the queue to immigrate on their opinions of the relative merits of the American system of law and commerce versus those of their own government.

Anti-Canadaism. Anti-Somaliaism. Anti-Kazakhstanism. Anti-Mexicoism.

They all sound stupid because they're not really things people talk about. It's basically only imperial powers that invent such a concept.

Look, I don't know what the right word for it is. But I noticed a pattern in your posts where almost every time we bring up the United States government, your response tends to careen into a long rant about how the CIA is worse than people are assuming, and that rather than address the original point being contended, we should all talk about how bad the U.S. is.

Saying that America is "nothing symbolically" just struck me as another data point in this bias.

Yes, they would say favorable things to America. America is very uncorrupt and we have many actual civil liberties than they do.

That doesn't mean everybody in the world wants to move to America and wants to be just like us. Shouldn't we say the perspective is gray, not black and white?

Maybe I do talk about it too much. Or overemphasize certain topics. That's probably true.

Probably a big reason I don't talk about how many people view America as a place of opportunity is because, while in many ways true, it's also a propaganda line that's been repeated and hammered into our collective heads for decades. It's a perspective that doesn't need to be heard because it's already plastered all over America. There are plenty of things I like about America, but you can probably already find dozens of op eds and the like written on that because Americans are already self-absorbed with our greatness.

Rather, the country's weaknesses are often ignored or wildly distorted by self-serving interest. They need more careful deliberation.

Or, maybe this was more true before the Trump phenomenon. But the point still stands.

Again, you are careening the discussion off into the direction of your preference and out of the scope of my criticism. Literally my only point of contention was the obvious falsehood of a blanket remark about symbols (which, I may add, are not universal) which you never explicitly made, but which nevertheless struck me as something that could only have been imagined by a biased person.

Trump is going to have to do a lot more damage to the United States before the rest of us patriotic Americans give up the fight for our ideals.

Okay, I grant that statement is a false one. So we are in agreement about that. Nothing else said.

Does one have to be patriotic to fight for ideals?

Source: [url]www.stallman.org[/url]

Well, that's fine, but I don't feel I need to couch my ideals in symbolism and nationalist sound bites.

"More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly."

Symbols are important to unify people behind a cause. Maybe mainstream politics isn't your thing?

And we have found the source of projection. You let the scope of your own ideas about what symbols can be bleed out onto the possibilities considered by others, resulting in a statement that rung false enough to raise hackles.

This doesn't necessarily mean you are wrong or even misguided.

The bigger rhetorical question here in my mind, is whether or not we can win elections by getting together and reading Nietzsche instead of going door to door.

No, the world does not view America only through the lens of their influence and political power. For a long time the US was an exceptional ally, and through at worst enlightened self-interest was the principal architect and driver of the closest thing we will ever have to world peace. American inter-war propaganda didn't hurt, either.

This is the problem, because at some point you guys gave all that up. Now you come off as a super scary declining police state that would rather drag the world to hell than live in a world you don't absolutely rule.

I'm not really trying to create a political movement, though.

Okay then. I'll drop the point. I was wrong.

I don't have a family of my own at this point in my life, but I am seriously considering the possibility that I won't be living here if / when I do raise one.

It's a damn shame too, since it's such a physically beautiful country, and is home to a great deal of the technological and cultural heritage of 20th century progress.

Living in the US with a family was terrifying. ADP ****ed up my health insurance and it took them months to get it sorted out. if I hadn't had a huge corporation at my back I would have turned around and gone home immediately. I can't imagine actually living there and having to put up with that **** long term.

The US tech thing... ehhh. I mean, the US isn't unimportant, but really the only thing the US beats other countries to is commercializing stuff first and taking credit for inventing it.

Like, modern Deep Learning comes from Canadian research labs. But US congressbeasts all talk about how the US is the birthplace of Deep Learning, among many other equally bizarre claims. It's pretty ****ed up actually.

The only US tech thing you're likely to miss is the absolutely stupid pay $$$.

For whatever reason, research in the United States has become very myopic. To an extent this was always the case--IBM and MIT were conservative compared to ARPA, SRI, and PARC, which took a much longer, wilder view of what research could be. The internet and personal computing were runaway successes, but in the 60s, most people still thought that mainframe computing represented what computing could be.

At any rate, when ARPA became DARPA, research became much more narrowly constrained. Anecdotally, I have heard from researchers (one of whom left research in medical imaging to go help Google suck out more advertising dollars, because by doing so he doubled his salary overnight) that almost all grant money is cleaned up by a small number of people who have figured out how to write grant proposals in precisely the right way. More importantly, though, DARPA grants are now much more likely to be accepted if it is apparent to the grant reviewer that the idea is highly likely to work. Which, basically, means that you aren't going to be funding any ground-breaking research, but only incremental progress.

Your comment is probably true today, but it certainly is false if you go back half a century. There's a reason I used the word "heritage".