Oh, I like this one. More Americans need to realize this

You assume the actors in the system act in good faith and that the system’s incentives are well designed. It is not.

What kinds of people want to join the organization responsible for keeping foreigners out? How many of those groups are racists that don’t actually care about the citizenship part? How do you measure the success of this organization?

When you start asking these kinds of questions, you start to see the cracks. Additionally, when you look at US immigration policies compared to other developed countries, they’re quite harsh. I emigrated to Korea. It’s quite easy if I have a college education and some work experience. I benefit Korea’s economy. My Korean friends who want to go to the US have a totally different experience.

Additionally, you need to look at the US’s history with regards to race. See the Japanese internment camps of WW2 or the fire bombing of Tulsa, OK. We don’t necessarily distinguish between actual citizens and foreigners.

You can also look at how illegal immigration is managed in the US. Look at Ron DeSantis in Florida. He spooked illegal immigrants in Florida with his crackdown on immigration. The orange farmers started panicking because there were no workers. The oranges were rotting. Did DeSantis prop up the orange industry and encourage them to hire Americans? The good faith act? Fuck no! He rolled back the crackdown, and the illegal immigrants continued to be used for basically slave labor. America doesn’t want legal immigration. They just want a group with no rights to beat the shit out of when they’re feeling bad and to use for labor that citizens don’t want to do.

Your argument of people behaving in good faith with regards to immigration doesn’t have a lot of evidence to support it when looking at history.

The right thing to do would be to pursue immigration reform first, give time for current illegal immigrants to become legal, crackdown on the employers of illegal immigrants, and then start enforcing immigration law more strongly. But surprise! It ain’t happening.

Of course, my comment assumes you’re trying to argue in good faith, which also may be naive. Let’s see

Shooting a dog is nothing compared to shooting a person, so it’s no problem if I shoot a dog.

This is the stupidest take I’ve ever fucking heard.

People don’t support hard progressives because they associate them with brain dead ideas like this. You’re part of the problem you hate. You’re just as bad as the fucking nazis because you’re helping their cause. And oh sure, it’s not bad now, but that’s what Germans said when those assholes were just starting to get moving.

Pull your head out of your ass and think in practicalities. Idealism should guide direction, but practicality should drive action towards that direction.

And I know this isn’t going to convince you. This is for the third parties reading this conversation. Don’t be like this asshole.

Edit: and fuck, if you didn’t now the term accelerationism before forming this kind of opinion, you truly have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Go read some shit

Edit edit: and I think you still don’t understand what accelerationism means because it makes no sense in the context of climate change, which you’ve mentioned is a larger concern. Unless you’re making the assumption that at any arbitrary point climate change is reversible, which would also be blatantly uninformed. Fuck, I hope you’re not old enough to vote

How are you defining “normal?”

I think the main thing is that Korea’s government still has some fear of its people, which is very, very important. Enough stupid moves and millions of citizens can be on your doorstep (see Park Geunhe).

Yes, there’s a bunch of corruption. Yes, working culture blows. Yes, birth rates have been tanking for a reason (but reversed recently?!).

But there’s a reason those soldiers heading to the parliament building had no ammo except one guy in a squad with less lethal rounds. There’s a reason the martial law was ended so quickly. There’s a reason Yoon is actually getting his on a reasonable timescale.

In Korea, once you hit that tipping point of people realizing you’re a dick, you’re gonna have a real bad time.

My initials are BJB.

I was in jazz band in high school. We were doing a joint thing with the choir, so everyone was running around moving stuff to make space. My parents had bought me a nice music bag with my initials on a plate on the front of it. Someone held up my music bag asking who owned it. I figured they just wanted to let the owner know where it was being moved to, so I spoke up… “Hah, your initials are BJ!”

Hence, my name became blowjob. The completionists called me Blowjob Betty (I’m male) to get that last initial in, too. At the time, I was quite quiet and took myself maybe a little too seriously. This ended that.

One day, I was at my buddy’s place, and he called me “Beege,” saying he didn’t want to say “Bee and Jay,” as it was too long. At that point, I said fuck it. My name is Beege. Let’s go.

Over time, my friends added an article because why the fuck not.

Over 20 years later, and it’s still my name. It actually taught me to not take myself so seriously. Although, one interviewer at a job had a really hard time keeping it together when HR told her my nickname without catching the meaning. She and I are good friends now.

In any case, I always get a slight chuckle inside when people hesitate slightly after introducing myself. I’m great at keeping a deadpan face about it now, too

I’ve been jamming to this for the past few weeks. It’s actually within my pitch range, and long live workers’ rights

Presidential pardons are only for federal crimes. Rape is likely a state crime. I haven’t checked

My ideas are similar to a couple of other comments, but maybe I’ll phrase them in a way that unites them and is easy to understand. Let’s see.

American exceptionalism is deeply ingrained in culture and associated with patriotism. See reciting the pledge of allegiance in schools. This includes the concept of the American dream: working hard = good life.

I’m not sure if the US was ever like that, but it’s certainly not like that now. The key thing is that it’s becoming more evident if you pay attention. There’s a rift between people paying attention and people not paying attention. The people paying attention have discarded the American dream and maybe even exceptionalism, but those not paying attention have not. Additionally/alternatively, people may see different reasons for the American dream no longer being valid.

So you kind of have 2 + N camps. One camp still believes in American exceptionalism and the American dream and gets pissed that other people are seemingly trying to change/ruin it. One camp believes these concepts are dead and blames on various systems that need changing. (More on that later.) N camps believe these concepts are dead because of <insert media bias here>, e.g. blacks, Muslims, communists, foreigners, pick your poison. Sadly, this last group is the most visible because they’re the most rage-inducing.

So the first and last sets mentioned above provide pretty clear reasons for anger: either frustrations at what should be fellow Americans in solidarity or bigots. The systems people also have a reason to be angry: the systems are well entrenched via various methods, and it’s unclear how to start untangling the mess. Some blame billionaires. Some blame politics. Some blame both. But even if there’s agreement about which problem is the highest priority, people get frustrated about conflict around potential solutions or the general inability to acquire focus on solutions due to the sheer number of them.

Combine all of this with an economic squeeze on standard of living, the rage-bait nature of social media and mainstream media, psychological negative bias, and just general (unfortunate) virtuous cycles, and you get a recipe for an ever growing angry society.

The people with the most ability to fix this have no incentive to. The people in power benefit from the current system. An angry and divided population is easier to manipulate and control. It also helps that the US is very geographically large, making physical threats less of an issue (except for CEO assassinations, I guess).

Lastly, the internet fucks us. Research shows (normally I’d cite sources, but I gotta get back to work in a minute. Internet points to whomever can find the source and share) that the social media echo chambers aren’t actually the problem. People can be very open to new ideas depending on the presentation and the source. We already had echo chances of geography before the internet, and people were generally more trusting of the people physically nearby, even if their ideas differed. The problem is the anonymity of the internet, the volume of conflicting/unfamiliar ideas, and the way they’re presented (e.g. rage-bait). Given that Americans are spending more time on the internet, they’re exposed to more seemingly madness from crazy strangers and sometimes associate even the people around them with those crazy online strangers. We group them into these tribes and define them as the enemy. When we start recognizing that these people could be our neighbors, societal trust plummets. When you can’t trust the people around you, how are you supposed to relax and feel safe? If you feel like you’re always in psychological or physical danger, won’t you be more prone to anger and defensiveness?

We weren’t ready for the internet

Actionable, yes, but it’s lacking specificity. What phrases or concepts in the post were condescending?(Not saying I agree or disagree, but I’m a fan of making feedback more effective.) Ideal feedback should also have examples of an improved version of the behavior, if possible.

I can corroborate, anecdotally, the behavioral side of this.

When I have conversations with notoriously angry people and can maintain my chill and treat them with dignity (despite whatever behavior they’re exhibiting), they usually chill out. The more of angry person they are takes more effort, but patience, calm, and respect diffuse things very effectively. The patience is really hard, but it has worked for me.

The problem, which is relevant to the physical changes you described, is that the effect is only temporary in isolation. I have found the repeating this over time with a person does cause their baseline anger level to reduce over time, but it’s a fuckton of work and difficult to scale due to the time commitment. It also doesn’t scale via media because this kind of behavior doesn’t draw attention. It’s an unfortunate bug in our psychology