NeilBrü

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

Plato, The Republic bk. 1, 347c

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Kubuntu LTS (--minimal-install; no snap fuckery from the start) has been wonderful.

sighs in satisfaction

I’ll be honest, I had to reread it a couple times, but I think I understand the analogy now. Thanks for your compliment as well.

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Opinion on what? Your country? The world? Geopolitics? What Americans are moralizing about anything to you? And about what? The young left? Who is the American version of Greta Thunberg?

I moved to the Netherlands from the US in '22 out of necessity due to my Dutch wife’s medical diagnosis. I’m not here for the fun of it. Furthermore, I’ve been to 12 countries in total and I speak four languages, 2 of them fluently.

I’ve noticed something.

Every rural shit-heel out here in the Dutch countryside complaining about Moroccans and Turks sounds like a typical MAGA pussy to me. This breed of mouth breather has an iteration specific to every country I’ve been in. I’m sure I’ll find versions in Japan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Angola, Paraguay, and everywhere else someone says “god damned <insertEthnicSlurHere>, breathing up all our air.”

So don’t preach to me how fucking “enlightened” the rest of the world is when the conservative puritanical nationalism that is in every conservative talking point globally got its birth right here in this part of the fucking world (Europe) before the United States even existed.

I don’t know where you’re from but this tide of authoritarianism is global. The United States is a dumpster fire politically. But that fire did not start there and it’s clearly not the only trash receptacle burning right now.

I don’t understand anything you just typed. Who’s “young left”? The global “young left”? You think only the “right wing” uses the military?

And who should be leading global issues? Europeans? Chinese? Russians? Indians? G8? G20? UN? Who?

Or is it that Americans are the only ones who can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to “lead” or “moralize”?

Genuinely confused.

My opinion is that language can and does regress sometimes, or more specifically put, sometimes it gets harder to parse and determine meanings due to changes in common usage, irrespective of how it’s creatively expressed.

I think the lesson from that is to understand that the phenomenon is relentless and inescapable because it’s inherently a biological adaptation. It’s a fool’s errand to attempt to uphold linguistic purity, and thus, it isn’t a terribly important hill to die on, so to speak.

For the record, we average citizens don’t want to be the “world police”. This is what President Eisenhower was referring to as the “Military Industrial Complex”.

Starting in  the  1980s,  the  United  States,  which  insisted  on  strict  terms  for  the  re-payment of  Third  World  debt,  itself  accrued  debts  that  easily  dwarfed those  of  the  entire  Third  World  combined — mainly  fueled  by  military spending.  The  U.S.  foreign  debt,  though,  takes  the  form  of  treasury bonds  held  by  institutional  investors  in  countries  (Germany,  Japan, South  Korea,  Taiwan,  Thailand,  the  Gulf  States)  that  are  in  most  cases, effectively,  U.S.  military  protectorates,  most  covered  in  U.S.  bases  full of  arms  and  equipment  paid  for  with  that  very  deficit  spending.

This has  changed  a  little  now  that  China  has  gotten  in  on  the  game  (China is  a  special  case,  for  reasons  that  will  be  explained  later),  but  not  very much — even  China  finds  that  the  fact  it  holds  so  many  U.S.  treasury bonds  makes  it  to  some  degree  beholden  to  U.S.  interests,  rather  than the  other  way  around.

So  what  is  the  status  of  all  this  money  continually  being  funneled into  the  U.S.  treasury?  Are  these  loans?  Or is it tribute? In the past, military  powers  that  maintained  hundreds  of  military  bases  outside their  own  home  territory  were  ordinarily  referred  to  as  “empires,”  and empires  regularly  demanded  tribute  from  subject  peoples. The  U.S. government,  of  course,  insists  that  it  is  not  an  empire — but  one  could easily  make  a  case  that  the  only  reason  it  insists  on  treating  these  payments as  “loans”  and  not  as  “tribute”  is  precisely  to  deny  the  reality of  what’s  going  on.

• Except from the Beginning of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years

It’s not “whataboutism”. It’s about understanding historical context and threads that tie history and geopolitics across time and oceans.

Yes, I’m an American and it’s bad back home. Arguably worse than ever before. And the American flavor of conservative techno-feudalism certainly has its own unique stench. We have much to fight, and we suck at it (currently).

However, I live in the Netherlands currently, since July of 2022, and not exactly by choice. My (Dutch) then-fiance-now-wife got an incurable diagnosis during the pandemic, preventing her from moving to the U.S. But before, I’ve been all over Europe. I’ve read plenty of “Western Civilization” history textbooks in high school and university as well. I see all of the right-wing conservative macho bullshit here in supposedly “liberal Northwest Europe” that I see emanating from MAGA pussies back home. In the Netherlands, that would be the BBB and the PVV.

The mentality I’m referring to is from here. In Europe. EVERYthing in modern US conservative talking points can trace its roots right back to puritanical European Christian white supremacist monarchism/fascism/authoritarianism, “WE’RE-IN-CHARGE-FOREVER-BECAUSE-WE’RE-‘CIVILIZED’”-ism.

“God, Gold, and Glory” was a thing long before U.S was. The American flavor of it has its roots here, so, please, as an American not of European descent, cut the fucking bullshit. Don’t throw stones from your supposedly manicured glass houses. Or, if I’m wrong, invite some Roma people or economic migrants from <insertFormerColonialTerritoryHere> into your home, with all of that holier-than-thou “love” in your heart.

Where do you think the authoritarian, anti-intellectual, isolationist, puritanical Christian nationalism found in the U.S. historically began?

I’m an American who moved to the Netherlands in July of '22. I spend a lot of time going back and forth. My then fiancé, now my wife, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during the pandemic. Given the obvious price difference for medication to treat the disease, I decided to move in with her instead of her coming to the US.

I find it disheartening to see what the rest of the world thinks about Americans up close. I am competently multilingual enough to hold conversations. I have to admit now that I understand why other natively born Americans pretend that they’re from Canada outside of the U.S.

Despite my embarrassment about the body politic and discourse from my country, I find that the the same authoritarian, isolationist, and anti-intellectual mind-viruses that permeate through society in the United States (especially in rural communities) have a beachhead here in Western Europe. Either that or they’ve always been here to begin with. To me, the difference is that the scale is much smaller.

I always hated it because it’s in the past tense but used in the present tense in common parlance. It should be “awakened”, but I always preferred “aware” or “cognizant” if “woke” means to describe a state of understanding of the historical patterns of predation, conquest, and subjugation along with their underlying causes between groups of people (my opinion on its definition; not meant to be taken as gospel).

However, it doesn’t matter what I think; grammatically incorrect or not, language evolves relentlessly.

When they say “we”, they’re referring to homo sapiens.

What? Why?

The origin story of the “indulgences”?

Council of Nicea decreed the “trinity is one”, I believe? As in Yahweh, the holy toast, and Jeebus are all the same?

Grammar uber alles.

Monotheism is a mind-virus.