Europeans don't, maybe sometimes can't, understand the absolute crushing pressure and gaslighting that most Americans are put through to make us the way we are.
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@quinn I would like to tell you that a lot of Europeans can understand you very well and therefore make a difference between your government and the people.
I'm a German emigrated to France, with family in the USA, fleeing from Hitler already in 1923. Those who didn't flee had to work hard on their responsabilities, their blind spots, and how to avoid such a horror another time. It's our heritage, more relevant than ever, with the rise of fascism in Europe too. Democracy is hard work.
I could@quinn see a thought shift in my US-family up from the 1980s, when the system crashed some of them (poisoning incidents in factories, no healthcare system etc.), and the evangelicals did what Talibans do now: They offered straightforward help and a new community, at the cost of total brainwashing. When the first one converted and started praising Trump on Facebook, I thought it was just an isolated case. Today I’ve cut off all contact because they’ve all gone over to the other side.
It is not
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I often cite this article you wrote in 2013 to show the dark side of the U.S..
I guess things are even worse, now.https://medium.com/quinn-norton/the-values-of-money-f3db7e13e6e3
@GustavinoBevilacqua @quinn
thanks for sharing this! Parts one and two were great reads. Did a part three ever come to be? 
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@quinn see a thought shift in my US-family up from the 1980s, when the system crashed some of them (poisoning incidents in factories, no healthcare system etc.), and the evangelicals did what Talibans do now: They offered straightforward help and a new community, at the cost of total brainwashing. When the first one converted and started praising Trump on Facebook, I thought it was just an isolated case. Today I’ve cut off all contact because they’ve all gone over to the other side.
It is not
@quinn just family ties that teach us about the USA.
We have excellent investigative documentaries covering the historical background, people’s everyday lives, the crimes and life-threatening ideologies of the super-rich, right through to the living conditions of the poor and marginalised. I remember one of an investigative reporter visiting his MAGA family for a big intergenerational meeting, talking with the people ... these personal insights were more horror than every news!
We see that -
@quinn just family ties that teach us about the USA.
We have excellent investigative documentaries covering the historical background, people’s everyday lives, the crimes and life-threatening ideologies of the super-rich, right through to the living conditions of the poor and marginalised. I remember one of an investigative reporter visiting his MAGA family for a big intergenerational meeting, talking with the people ... these personal insights were more horror than every news!
We see that@quinn many aspects of life resemble those of a developing country, not a “rich superpower”. And at the same time, we can hardly believe how this leads people to take the completely wrong side.
Educated people in Europe know that very well.
But the disgust and rage against a rogue state which is destroying everything in the world we fought for for decades, is growing rapidly. So we're back to the lessons of history ... -
@GustavinoBevilacqua @quinn
thanks for sharing this! Parts one and two were great reads. Did a part three ever come to be? @nicksilkey @GustavinoBevilacqua @quinn
Remove the admiration for the self-made man and the other part is painfully true for any European country I've lived in.
[The long admired idea of the “self-made man” isn't self-made because he's built the strong and loyal social connections that will support him, defend him, and turn to him for wisdom and affection throughout his long and social life.]
Here we just hypocritically pretend it doesn't work this way.
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I often cite this article you wrote in 2013 to show the dark side of the U.S..
I guess things are even worse, now.https://medium.com/quinn-norton/the-values-of-money-f3db7e13e6e3
@GustavinoBevilacqua thanks for the link! @quinn
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@NickSchwanck @quinn It's very hard to put into words. We all grow up here in a system that continuously every single day all day for all our lives gaslights and lies to us, telling us evil is good and good is evil, hate is love and love is hate, etc etc. A whole Orwellian nightmare. We're taught from day one not to recognize or accept this system for what it is despite all the warnings (we're supposed to reject the warners as biased.)
As I said, it's a whole system.
@nazokiyoubinbou But you also have the wonderful people resisting in different ways, often in dangerous situations ... don't these people give hope or the idea to start connecting with such a community?
Even we in other countries can learn a lot from them!
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@quinn IIRC it was Republicans in the 1970s who decided that an educated population would be too much of a hassle (and not likely to vote conservative)?
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Europeans don't, maybe sometimes can't, understand the absolute crushing pressure and gaslighting that most Americans are put through to make us the way we are.
It's a decades long effort to turn most of the population into a money and power pump for a tiny elite class, all while grinding us into dust.
We're crazy and scared all the time, and have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world.
There's a reason dying of opiates seemed like a rational choice to a lot of people.
@quinn I've been saying this forever; the defining characteristic of Americans for a while now has been fear.
It only dawned on me after a conversation between a bunch of photographers talking about equipment when shooting solo at night. Little old English ladies talking about tea flasks and 30 year old ex military in the USA talking about how many guns.
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The rest of world never sees the poor and desperate America, they mostly stay in the decently rich bits of New York or California, and have no idea what a "food desert" is.
@quinn Americans also often don't travel within our own country.
One of my current neighbors thinks she would need pepper spray to travel abroad and she's disinterested in traveling more than a state or two away from home. She's so extremely angry but the other neighbors are so sweet to her. The fear has her trapped in this small corner of life and the smallness of her life has her angry, resentful, and clingy.
Folks have ideas about the other states informed by tv and news.
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Europeans don't, maybe sometimes can't, understand the absolute crushing pressure and gaslighting that most Americans are put through to make us the way we are.
It's a decades long effort to turn most of the population into a money and power pump for a tiny elite class, all while grinding us into dust.
We're crazy and scared all the time, and have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world.
There's a reason dying of opiates seemed like a rational choice to a lot of people.
@quinn Long before this era, I observed how US Americans were pressed by a system that insisted on many ideals. Working late hours, every day of the week, to become wealthy, rich. Competing for a first place in any school or sport, because the second is the first of the losers. Eating, drinking, fucking, everything taken as an obsession.
I've seen all that before, then I'm not surprised of the collapse into this reality.
I'm just curious of what will take, if anything, to move you out of it. -
@NickSchwanck @nazokiyoubinbou @quinn
Convenience addiction
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@quinn Americans also often don't travel within our own country.
One of my current neighbors thinks she would need pepper spray to travel abroad and she's disinterested in traveling more than a state or two away from home. She's so extremely angry but the other neighbors are so sweet to her. The fear has her trapped in this small corner of life and the smallness of her life has her angry, resentful, and clingy.
Folks have ideas about the other states informed by tv and news.
@quinn The broader world is as foreign to many Americans as California is to Florida or Utah is to New York.
Its an important part of understanding and facing our challenges.
Most folks aren't so different but the belief that they are makes them coil up into tiny worlds and tiny lives, fearful of every possible source of joy and thus angry at every possible theft of joy that's within that tiny worldview.
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Europeans don't, maybe sometimes can't, understand the absolute crushing pressure and gaslighting that most Americans are put through to make us the way we are.
It's a decades long effort to turn most of the population into a money and power pump for a tiny elite class, all while grinding us into dust.
We're crazy and scared all the time, and have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world.
There's a reason dying of opiates seemed like a rational choice to a lot of people.
@quinn no, we do understand that. Because it’s constantly broadcast to the rest of the world.
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Europeans don't, maybe sometimes can't, understand the absolute crushing pressure and gaslighting that most Americans are put through to make us the way we are.
It's a decades long effort to turn most of the population into a money and power pump for a tiny elite class, all while grinding us into dust.
We're crazy and scared all the time, and have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world.
There's a reason dying of opiates seemed like a rational choice to a lot of people.
@quinn we see that America spends huge amounts of money to inject their culture into every society on earth. At some point sympathy runs dry
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The rest of world never sees the poor and desperate America, they mostly stay in the decently rich bits of New York or California, and have no idea what a "food desert" is.
@quinn What's a "food desert"? My wife has on business trips to the USA stayed in neighbourhoods where it's impossible to buy what we in Europe would regard as real food - the only thing on offer is (extremely) junk "food" that is completely incapable of sustaining normal life. Is that what "food desert" means?
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@pixie @quinn I think most Americans don't know what complete poverty looks like. Or what being bombed or shot in your home looks like. Or what slave labor looks like. All these things happen in the US today; but they usually target people with the least political power--like children, disabled, indigenous people, and racial minorities. So it's hushed up, or people don't care because "oh that'll never be me." This is the "peripheral" inside the US.
@pixie @quinn But outside the US, our government and corporations do this with far more impunity, and so a much larger impact scope. It's hard to even wrap my head around the effect of all these wars on people, not to mention the effects of the miriad of other horrible policy changes that are affecting people in other countries around the world.
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@quinn I can't speak from an European point of view, as I'm south american, but what makes it hard to empathise is that the grinding machine that is the USA gaslights and crushes people everywhere, with different intentions, but outside it's "walls" the consequences are more dire.
And although I wholeheartedly agree that it's not the general people's fault, that the system is design to be this way, I find it very concerning when even the so called cultural or intelectual "elite", that has access to information, that travels, that sees the world, so many times do so with this vision as if they are coming from the centre of things, from the standard, and everything else is periferic and deviation. And I came to see thing like this after working for years with us-americans.
So, although I do feel bad for the people there, I feel worse for my people, as the poor here, when the US elects a supremacist, actuality die from hunger (and drug abuse and crime caused by lack of resources, etc).@pixie @quinn I think most Americans don't know what complete poverty looks like. Or what being bombed or shot in your home looks like. Or what slave labor looks like. All these things happen in the US today; but they usually target people with the least political power--like children, disabled, indigenous people, and racial minorities. So it's hushed up, or people don't care because "oh that'll never be me." This is the "peripheral" inside the US.
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@pixie @quinn It absolutely makes sense that it's hard to empathize with the concerns expressed in the OP when you're seeing everyday far more dire impacts from these policies. I hear similar sentiments from many black people in the US, who are incredibly frustrated with how out of touch American leftist elites are with the realities of continuous government-sanctioned violence against their communities.
@pixie @quinn Personally I think one of the challenges of this moment is getting people to see how these struggles are related. But the responsibility there is on white people, leftists, elites, etc--those with privilege--to educate themselves on this struggle that so many people in the "peripheral" have been engaging in for so long already.
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@pixie @quinn But outside the US, our government and corporations do this with far more impunity, and so a much larger impact scope. It's hard to even wrap my head around the effect of all these wars on people, not to mention the effects of the miriad of other horrible policy changes that are affecting people in other countries around the world.
@pixie @quinn It absolutely makes sense that it's hard to empathize with the concerns expressed in the OP when you're seeing everyday far more dire impacts from these policies. I hear similar sentiments from many black people in the US, who are incredibly frustrated with how out of touch American leftist elites are with the realities of continuous government-sanctioned violence against their communities.
