Why the USA is a disgrace

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Okay, so sometimes people comment that I'm "too anti-American". Well I have good reason. Some of the shit that they do has far-reaching consequences.

• The USA starts wars. They're the most war-hungry nation on the planet.
  
• They are the worst first world country in their handling of income inequality.
  
• Companies based in the USA extort people. This includes so-called "copyright trolls" and other companies like PayPal that freeze accounts without warning and keep all of their client's money.
  
• Prostitution is still prosecuted, and pornographers have not been forced to provide a safe work-palace, despite the enactment of a new law in California.
  
• Minors can be tried as adults - something not done in any other first world country.
  
• Criminal prosecutions are excessive.
  
• They trigged the GFC because they allowed predatory behaviour in the corporate banking world.
  
• Because they have corporations that are based on distributing creative works, they fight to keep copyrights and patents at unreasonable lengths, in measures that only benefit publishers and not artists or researchers.
  
• They believe they can dictate to other sovereign States how they should behave, and what policies they should enforce.
  

Feel free to add your own points.

Yay! Make America great again!

Oh hold on, that's what you're complaining about. Another thing you can add to your list is racism. It astounds me that people can still call for segregation nowadays.

I personally hate the British establishment. Not Brits, but the establishment that has been in place since feudal times. While America is like the big school boy bully, the British establishment are like the snivelling weak bully that hangs around the bigger one making matters worse. I think Britain is just as war hungry as America. Not that the public wants it, but the establishment does. We have a thriving arms industry that profit from this and also sell weapons to Saudi Arabia to wage war on Yemen.

We need to be conquered ... but not by America.

The UK is one of the most liberal and tolerant societies to have ever existed. Not prefect by any stretch of the imagination, and of course there are social injustices that still occur.

http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/d...B67E204749

By almost every indicator detailed on the OECD report the UK ranks above average/high in things like wealth creation and societal tolerances of political and religious POVs. Of course there some problems, like wealth inequality levels, but still a lot lower than many other western OECD states (incidentally the US spends way less on public care than we do as a % of total spend based on government expenditures).

In terms of corruption even transparency international ranks the UK as one of the lowest: https://www.transparency.org/cpi2015

The CI 2015 reveals the UK as no. 10 on the world for perceived corruption by given populations, pretty good but obviously not perfect: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupti...Index#2015

So I'm interested to know whom we should be conquered by and why?

One thing I don't understand is the continued self-loathing by westerners of the states they live in. I am not a patriot. I am a liberal and an egalitarian and I advocate all means to elevate the world in general to grow and develop. Opportunities to all regardless of their country, religion, race, beliefs etc. The west as we know it today has developed egalitarian values to the highest point that I think has ever been achieved in the entirety of human civilization, and I am eternally grateful that I was born and raised in a country where I can think and say whatever I want without fear of being murdered for it by state mandate. I want to stress that life is not perfect, not utopian. But it's a hell of a lot better than almost everywhere else in the world.

We should be advocating and petitioning change and evolution from within, not advocating the closing down of the entire system to hope that something better will come along, in my view.