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Vin LoPresti's avatar

America, reasonably competent when I was a small child, has now become synonomous with Mediocrity - mediocre politicians, mediocre products that wear out quickly (owing to greed and mediocre oversight of corporate malefactors), and mediocre sense of fairness and justice --- masquerading as hyper-fixation on identity. Oh yeah, we're excellent at something: violence. Violence against its own citizens, against countries who don't genuflect to the world's bully, and worst of all, violence toward the biosphere and the planet.

Essentially, the USA is a corporate totalitarian state and a thinly disguised criminal enterprise. And too many of its citizens mature into a narcisisitic indifference to all of it. This, in turn, says a whole lot about the effect of the social milieu (money uber alles) on the development of an ethics of self-aggrandizement rather than one of collaboration. The out-of-control worship of celebrity is an apropos symptom. I haven't felt OK about my country since I was a very naive 16, a quite long time ago.

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Rebecca Turner's avatar

I don't think the population of the UK where I live have much greater an interest in world affairs, no matter how responsible we are for them. Ask most people about Yemen and they'll not know where it is, nor that there has been a vicious war waged by Saudi Arabia with the help of the Royal Air Force since 2015, nor that the UK has been supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia to use against Yemeni people, nor that we manufacture those weapons in England and Scotland.

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