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American nationalism hasn't led to any horrors we've been forced to confront as of yet, so it's not really surprising how widespread it is. There's also the point of view that focusing on America as made up of trivial things demolishes our understanding of it as a collection of ideals or of people, but that's somewhat paranoid for my tastes.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:08
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McCarthy was one guy who a lot of the conservative establishment hated, although he's been rehabilitated by many on the modern right. The overall Red Scares, though, haven't been admitted to be a bad thing by most of America yet, nor as something we did as a whole nation.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:14
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Disinterested posted:So you're saying nothing has slipped into the American consciousness yet as a trauma? I kind of get the vibe that slavery and civil rights is at least a bit that way. Of course, there are all sorts of trapdoors that allow you not to blame yourself for this. Those aren't things we understand as a consequence of American nationalism, and they're also associated with specific regions in the country.
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Jan 17, 2015 14:57
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Disinterested posted:That your country has done lovely things can be sufficient to dampen nationalism, whether the lovely things were related to your nationalism or not. However, it's mostly western Europe that has had that dampening. Nationalism is still strong in eastern and southern Europe. All of those countries are also ones which either went through decolonization or fascist governments, both of which are fairly intrinsically tied to nationalism as a principle. Italian fascism being recognized as a bad thing drags down nationalism with it.
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Jan 17, 2015 15:04
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Panzeh posted:If you think America is anything other than a country of gently caress you got mine, i've got a bridge to sell you. Americans actually give the highest percentage of their incomes to charity of any nation. Which speaks to the ridiculousness of treating the USA (or any nation!) as solely its government and that government's policy.
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Jan 20, 2015 06:01
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A Fancy 400 lbs posted:Yeah, but a ton of that charity goes to bullshit like pushing anti-gay laws abroad and the rest of it goes to fixing problems that could be fixed more efficiently by having a real, functioning welfare system instead. No, we rank high on volunteering and helping strangers in trouble as well. But I misspoke- we're tied with Myanmar for number one overall, but we're only number four in terms of people giving money, tied with Ireland and just behind Malta.
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Jan 20, 2015 06:24
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computer parts posted:That seems like a really forgiving narrative for the communists. The existence of Communism did not provide (e.g.) massive government assistance to rebuild Europe, except in the sense that it provided an existential threat that Europeans had to overcome quickly. I'm sure endogenous left-wing groups had nothing to do with it, since the USA delaying its further development of the welfare state to the 1960s and the high-tide of radicalism is easily explainable.
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Jan 20, 2015 13:47
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Disinterested posted:This could have been achieved without killing so many millions of people. It flatly could have. Putting aside the fact some of the deaths by famine were intentional. Stalin's explicit reasoning for abandoning the right wing of the Bolsheviks and embracing forced collectivization was in order to arm the country against a possible invasion. Not specifically against the Nazis, but it wasn't hard to see by 1928 that between the USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, the USSR had a lot of enemies, all of whom were better-armed and more industrialized than they. So it's not so much "could they have industrialized" as "could they have achieved the crash, militarizable industrialization necessary without the use of force", which is a much thornier and probably unanswerable question.
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Jan 20, 2015 15:28
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Cingulate posted:Is this a joke? I can't tell anymore. I mean, once you've committed yourself to the notion that everyone who isn't on a Gosplan committee or high in the Communist Party is a stupid gently caress that needs to be forced (one of the lesser-known things Stalin did was cut urban wages just low enough to force two-income households and thus maximize the number of women in the workplace) into doing the right thing, it's pretty easy to justify imprisoning and murdering hundreds of thousands of people, especially given the real existential threat that existed. Going further, if you believe yourself to be the only person who can do what's necessary, then of course you should frame people who might be a threat to you and have them killed! You can explain virtually everything that happened in the USSR in the 1930s starting from the existential threat that existed from the other world powers, the economic theories of the left wing of the Bolsheviks, and the desire to wholeheartedly reject capitalism (this mainly to cover socialist realism and the recriminalization of homosexuality, but it also explains some of the horrific brutality the Red Army engaged in in Germany and Poland). davidb posted:You still cant name which country has been a greater good influence on the world. Youll try anything not to answer the question. A worm on a hook. Squirming every which way to avoid the straight answer. This all must be very painful for you. Youve been stewing in your america is evil juice for so long youve gone blind. Sumeria.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:59
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davidb posted:Im black who am i racist against? I said poor countries dont matter. Whites. You're racist against white people.
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Jan 20, 2015 22:50
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I don't know how people can cite Alexander the Great, whose will declared his intention to resettle most of the ethnicities in his empire, as a good conqueror by any means.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:50
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Relative to other ancient empires? Sure. Judging him by modern standards is silly. That's above and beyond what other empires did, really. Only the Inca attempted something similar in scope.
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Jan 21, 2015 19:56
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davidb posted:The great empires did what everyone else did just better. I must have missed the part where the Han Dynasty invaded Scythia, bringing the pear to Rome. Or Rome's counterattack, bringing asbestos to China.
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Jan 21, 2015 20:41
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