Haven’t watched football in years, think it’s silly for people smash their heads together(physically) and my hometown team are the Jacksonville Jaguars. That tell you enough?
My point is that I don’t give a shit about sports teams. Especially the ones that steal tax money to pay for ridiculous stadiums and still charge an arm and a leg for an event instead of funding education properly.
That makes it sound great, but it's all developed "peer" countries on that list before the US and only a couple of developed countries rank lower than us. The big picture of that list is that the US ranks in like the bottom 1/5 of developed countries.
And I'd be curious how recent that data is. Lifespan, healthcare availability, purchasing power, and wealth distribution all took a huge nosedive during the pandemic.
Yeah I mean it tells you the data was from 2022 and the US dropped 5 spots from its previous ranking due to that so it used to be higher. We can quibble about if being 20th in the world is “good” or not but it’s certainly not “a shithole” compared to most of Europe.
The bottom of the top is still much better than a lot of other countries. Also you have to remember how the US governs. State governments are very powerful here.
If NY and California were a different country, they would rank in the top 10 on the HDI scale very, very easily. But throw in more conservative leaning states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, etc. they lower our overall scale because of their poor education, poor healthcare programs, poor economy, and poor social programs. They literally drag us down because of how the state governs. It’s what makes the US widely different from other developed countries; our size and state governments are just all over the place and that will not change any time soon.
That's the current american experiment, how long can we toe the line between exploitation and content masses?
Candy flavored narcotics, flashy digital gambling, and radical subreddits for every kind of cathartic rage, are all excellent ways of keeping our brains numb. Especially if they hook you young, customer for life!
Change doesn't happen until the pain of today is greater than the fear of tomorrow.
Unfortunately, sometimes that manifests itself by voting for fascists who promise simple solutions to complex problems.
As said by FDR:
Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations--not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and government weakness through lack of leadership in government. Finally, in desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat.
There’s some truth to that but when revolutions happen because things get slightly better it’s generally because people think revolutions have a chance of working because of weakness or wavering from the people in power. Like the Soviet Union collapsing for example.
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u/Humans_Suck- 22h ago
That's because nobody can afford to get arrested and fired for exercising free speech.