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Pensacola Discussion Forum » Politics » American patriotism is dying, do you wonder why?

American patriotism is dying, do you wonder why?

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Deus X
PkrBum
Wordslinger
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Wordslinger

Wordslinger

I extracted the following paragraph from an interesting article on the subject:

"This core component of American patriotism – the popular conviction in a world-historical role for the US – is unlikely to continue. First, it is increasingly difficult not to notice that in many basic matters of government and society, including healthcare, public education, gender equity, social mobility and prosperity, economic fairness, childcare, environment and more, the US has fallen behind most of the developed world. The US’s world-historical ambitions have simply not kept pace with world history. Secondly, the wars. Wars are nation-making events, but they can also be unmaking ones. If your patriotism is linked to pretensions of a world-historical role, what do you do when the world chooses not to emulate you, or when it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) doesn’t want your Americanisation project? Mere military supremacy, especially when it proves ineffective at achieving its goals, is unlikely to be enough to sustain the exceptionalist heart of American patriotism."

That's an astute and accurate projection. As I see it, our government is owned heart and soul by the MIC. At the expense of helping our fellow Americans we're busy putting most of our money into weaponry which our Pentagon happily uses to kill brown or black or yellow people in wars that are designed to never end. That perception does little to enhance one's imagery of the American flag or pride for our country. And this isn't a party issue -- both parties are owned by the MIC. Trump and his awkward, amateurish administration are a side show. The game our real leaders want us to play is start more wars and keep them going. If you think the MIC favors the republicans or democrats, you're naive. Truly.

Check out the whole article on the subject of America's sinking patriotism:

https://www.alternet.org/these-should-be-end-times-american-patriotism?src=newsletter1092172


PkrBum

PkrBum

While you know that I agree about pulling our troops out and closing bases... there's a laughable amount of revisionist propaganda. It really only degrades your position and even credibility to gobble that crap. Results matter... and Obama cooked the weakest foriegn policy sauce since Carter. A complete cuckold "leader". His idea was to either bend over or drop bombs on more Muslim nations that even bush2 did. At least try to be objective and honest. Lying to yourselves doesn't convince anyone except yourselves.

Deus X

Deus X

Wordslinger wrote:I extracted the following paragraph from an interesting article on the subject:

"This core component of American patriotism – the popular conviction in a world-historical role for the US – is unlikely to continue. First, it is increasingly difficult not to notice that in many basic matters of government and society, including healthcare, public education, gender equity, social mobility and prosperity, economic fairness, childcare, environment and more, the US has fallen behind most of the developed world. The US’s world-historical ambitions have simply not kept pace with world history. Secondly, the wars. Wars are nation-making events, but they can also be unmaking ones. If your patriotism is linked to pretensions of a world-historical role, what do you do when the world chooses not to emulate you, or when it (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) doesn’t want your Americanisation project? Mere military supremacy, especially when it proves ineffective at achieving its goals, is unlikely to be enough to sustain the exceptionalist heart of American patriotism."

That's an astute and accurate projection.  As I see it, our government is owned heart and soul by the MIC.  At the expense of helping our fellow Americans we're busy putting most of our money into weaponry which our Pentagon happily uses to kill brown or black or yellow people in wars that are designed to never end.  That perception does little to enhance one's imagery of the American flag or pride for our country.  And this isn't a party issue -- both parties are owned by the MIC.  Trump and his awkward, amateurish administration are a side show.  The game our real leaders want us to play is start more wars and keep them going.  If you think the MIC favors the republicans or democrats, you're naive.  Truly.

Check out the whole article on the subject of America's sinking patriotism:

https://www.alternet.org/these-should-be-end-times-american-patriotism?src=newsletter1092172



Oh, please! The dumb fuck who wrote this article should read a little more history. Britain was the most powerful nation in the world for more than  a century while maintaining sun-never-set sovereignty over colonies all over the planet. There was vigorous opposition in Britain the whole time in their admirably free press and they still held onto their status as the premier world power.

The U.S. ain't going anywhere for at least another 80 to 100 years.

2seaoat



Agree...America is working. We will see if the fascist tendencies can be buried at the mid terms, and even the worst President in American history has failed to destroy the vibrancy of this nation. This is a great nation, and it has nothing to do with soldiers, or how someone responds to the national anthem. It has to do with citizen's duty, and how so many good Americans are working to make this nation better.

Telstar

Telstar

National Anthem ha! Seems like only YESTERDAY that Roseanne Barr was the most despised woman in America for grabbing her pussy during the National Anthem. Today she is beloved by the pussy grabber's cult. Like that Russian comic said, "America, wat a country!"



American patriotism is dying, do you wonder why? Rosean10

Wordslinger

Wordslinger

PkrBum wrote:While you know that I agree about pulling our troops out and closing bases... there's a laughable amount of revisionist propaganda. It really only degrades your position and even credibility to gobble that crap. Results matter... and Obama cooked the weakest foriegn policy sauce since Carter. A complete cuckold "leader". His idea was to either bend over or drop bombs on more Muslim nations that even bush2 did. At least try to be objective and honest. Lying to yourselves doesn't convince anyone except yourselves.

You haven't heard me laud Obama's foreign policy decisions -- but this situation -- the death of American patriotism -- has been greatly accelerated by the Pussy Grabber. Reality.

PkrBum

PkrBum

Wordslinger wrote:
PkrBum wrote:While you know that I agree about pulling our troops out and closing bases... there's a laughable amount of revisionist propaganda. It really only degrades your position and even credibility to gobble that crap. Results matter... and Obama cooked the weakest foriegn policy sauce since Carter. A complete cuckold "leader". His idea was to either bend over or drop bombs on more Muslim nations that even bush2 did. At least try to be objective and honest. Lying to yourselves doesn't convince anyone except yourselves.

You haven't heard me laud Obama's foreign policy decisions -- but this situation -- the death of American patriotism -- has been greatly accelerated by the Pussy Grabber.  Reality.

Bs... that's just your opinion. The difference in 2020 will likely be the fly over working class dems.

Just like in 2016. That blue wave is turning into a dem mud puddle.

zsomething



America's very confused right now.

One of the major political parties has basically turned into a theocratic cult. That's why we're seeing this pointless shit like moving the embassy to Jerusalem. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dominionism

Dominionism or Christian sharia (and sometimes used interchangeably with Christian Reconstructionism and theonomy, see below) is an ideology of Totalitarian theocracy. It holds that Christians should not withdraw from the earthly world to avoid becoming corrupted by involvement in earthly politics and patiently await the second coming of Christ, as old-school Christian fundamentalists do. Rather, it asserts that Christians should seize earthly power and use it to forcibly fulfil biblical prophecies and bring him back. Where in the Catholic world these debates about withdrawal/domination are played out behind closed doors, in the Protestant world it manifests as an open split between Fundamentalists and Dominionists. The United States is the Dominionists' stronghold and seizing control of the US is the movement's first major objective. Note that almost no Dominionists actually call themselves such.

Dominionists believe that the civil laws laid down by the Old Testament (as distinct from the moral laws such as the Ten Commandments) should be enforced by reforming the U.S. legal system along theocratic lines, which would entail a substantial increase in the use of capital punishment. They also believe that that biblical injunctions regarding slavery should be followed.[2][3] Dominionists are the direct, Christian equivalent of Islamists demanding Sharia law.

There are several things Dominionists require for their plans to happen. One is that Jerusalem be in the hands of the Jews. Dominionists treat Jews as mascots -- they "support Israel" only for its place in "prophecy," but think the Jews themselves, as they are, are damned. But, when Jesus comes back, they'll all convert, become Christians, and thus be "completed Jews." It's craziness, and more than a bit bigoted, but it's what they believe. It's how they manage to have all the "I Support Israel!" bumper-stickers while simultaneously having an alt-right "Jews are evil" stance.

Anyway, that's part of the problem -- a party who's terrified of Democrats becoming "too close to Socialism" is pushing for theocracy... which is by far worse.

They also, absurdly, think they're "redpilled" to all these harsh-reality truths (all of which somehow favor white males in every way, go figure) while they still think the Bible is fact. It's absurd, but, like I said, America's confused.

On top of all this, we have people rejecting actual facts as "biased fake news," just because the facts don't favor their side. Meanwhile, they take the word of complete propagandists, like Sean Hannity, as gospel. And part of what their news tells you is that half the country is your enemy and you'll never be happy until they're all dead or converted. Rush Limbaugh once said something like he'd like to kill all the liberals but keep one in the zoo just so people could remember what they looked like.

Then you have idiots on sites like 4chan creating a culture of complete mindlessness, where lonely, isolated idiots find a support group by saying "cuck/cuckold" and "kek" and a few other lame-ass slogans as many times as they can just to feel part of something, conforming to degeneracy. It's just more chaos.

There's a LOT more, but it'd take a book to cover it all, and even my long-windedness has its limits. Smile

All this stuff creates tribalism, to a cultish degree, and nobody's patriotic because they hate too many of the other people in the country. We're all patriotic for what our vision of the country is, but not the other side's, and since they're not going to be eliminated, that's pretty much where we're stuck.

I'm as guilty of it as anybody. I'm not going to cheer for plans to institute theocracy, because it goes against me; they want non-believers out of the way, and I'm one of 'em, and since I'm not going to convert to something I find absurd, I gotta keep a supply of ammo around. And I'm damn sure NOT about to be patriotic about a country where Nazis are counted as "very fine people," when, honestly, I think WWII rules still apply and they all should be shot in the face. If that makes me intolerant, eh, so be it, I am absolutely fine with that. I've beaten the crap out of a few bigots in my younger days, and it's not a thing I regret, even when the bones in my hand pain me on cold rainy days. I'm down with free speech -- you have the right to say whatever racist stuff you want, but that doesn't mean you won't pay a price for it if the stuff you want to say puts innocent people at risk. Nazis are not innocent... they're not just trying to get through their day. So, yeah, I'm not going to "rally around the flag" when a sizeable percentage the country can't agree that that shit is not part of what America stands for. They aren't my kinsmen and I'm not theirs.


And I know it's the same on the other side. Some people have been trained like dancing spaniels to think universal health care is somehow a terrible evil thing, or that black people not wanting to be shot by cops somehow makes them "terrorists," or that women should have all their choices limited to what some old white guy thinks is best for them, or that you're ruining their lives if you tell them it's stupid to use racial slurs. Hell, they can't feel good about the country until everyone has to say "Merry Christmas" in unison and nobody's got to feel challenged. I disagree with all that, but I get it; those people feel as passionate about that stuff, for whatever dumbassed reason, as I do about not being forced to go to church or put up with swastikas flying.

So, we're all destined not to come together, and we'll regard each other as "unpatriotic," because we are all patriots, really -- we just don't want the same country. Our versions are incompatible, and somebody's going to have to win, somebody's going to have to lose, and that changes every election cycle or two and we deal with it.

It's still the greatest country in the world, by a long shot, but it's not that nice a world, so that's not that hard to to. It's like being the prettiest Denny's waitress...

Deus X

Deus X

zsomething wrote:It's still the greatest country in the world, by a long shot, but it's not that nice a world, so that's not that hard to to.  

And the world is a better place than it would have been if we'd gone back to our pre-WWII isolation. Just about everyone on the forum would be in a gulag somewhere. It was a binary world after the war and thank-fucking-God the U.S. won.

You don't have to do a lot of reading--Solzhenitsyn is a good place to start, him or Anne Appelbaum--or know any refugees from Eastern Europe to realize that the U.S. was on the right side of that conflict.

zsomething



Deus X wrote:
zsomething wrote:It's still the greatest country in the world, by a long shot, but it's not that nice a world, so that's not that hard to to.  

And the world is a better place than it would have been if we'd gone back to our pre-WWII isolation. Just about everyone on the forum would be in a gulag somewhere. It was a binary world after the war and thank-fucking-God the U.S. won.

You don't have to do a lot of reading--Solzhenitsyn is a good place to start, him or Anne Appelbaum--or know any refugees from Eastern Europe to realize that the U.S. was on the right side of that conflict.

Yep.

I don't even have to read a book on it. Know what's crazy? My dad was in Berlin during WWII. Nope, he wasn't German, or a Nazi -- he was a diplomat from Hungary, working in Germany. He was friends with Luftwaffe pilots (they'd be eating at a cafe and the Americans would fly over, and they'd have to get up and go fly after them), and he was friends with Jews (who warned him not to be seen talking to them or he'd get in trouble -- dad didn't care, he talked to who he wanted to). He had to get up in the middle of the night and shovel British incindieries off his roof. He once had to pull a gun on an SS guy who tried to "commandeer" his car, and once had to drive into the woods because a plane started strafing the road.

He was held as a prisoner-of-war by the Americans because they considered him a "security risk," but he got out because a Colonel (who we used to visit in Pensacola when I was a kid) needed him as an interpreter (dad spoke five languages). While in the P.O.W. camp he saw some crazy stuff. One German had been breaking out of the camp to visit a girl, and the American guards shot him... then they got his friend to show them how the guy had been breaking out. When the guy went to a hole under the fence, showing them where the guy had been sneaking out, the guards shot him and pretended he'd been breaking out, too, just for the hell of it.

Even seeing those bastard guards, my dad still new that the better side had won the war, and that the Germans were monsters to do what they did.

The world needs countries like America to lead. That's what made us great. And that's why it's so creepy to see waves of isolation/nationalism creeping into this country now, and people supporting the very stuff they once fought against. I don't think a lot of them know history. Or at least understand it.

user5ae940b0b9a19

user5ae940b0b9a19

Hello

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Deus X

Deus X

zsomething wrote:
The world needs countries like America to lead.  That's what made us great.  And that's why it's so creepy to see waves of isolation/nationalism creeping into this country now, and people supporting the very stuff they once fought against.  I don't think a lot of them know history.  Or at least understand it.

All that raving about the Military-Industrial Complex fails to point out that it was America's ability to fund both guns and butter that drove the USSR into the ditch and nobody with a brain the size of a Le Sueur pea would prefer that they'd won the Cold War.

Also, the people posting that stuff fail to acknowledge that all that money spent on Defense goes into the civilian economy.

The Department of Defense is the single largest employer in the United States, with 1.4 million uniformed personnel on active duty, and more than 700,000 full-time civilians. The defense industry, meanwhile, is believed to employ another 3 million people, either directly or indirectly.

What’s more, these are high paying jobs. In 2010, when the average worker in the United States earned $44,400 in wages and benefits, the average within the aerospace and defense industry was $80,100, according to a study by the consulting firm Deloitte. And 80 percent of that industry’s revenue comes from the government.

https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/militaryindustrial-complexs-waning-political-influence

Don't get me wrong, America has committed plenty of disasters, debacles and  fiascoes, from the land-grab of the Mexican war to Vietnam and Iraq but, on balance, I'd rather live in a world where the U.S. is the Big Dog than any other country. And there's always going to be either a Big Dog or nations fighting over who's gonna inherit the title.

People seem to forget that the Second World War was the most destructive conflict in history and, since America emerged as the preeminent power, there hasn't been another war anything like it.

Telstar

Telstar

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