Do they have a public healthcare system? Nope. What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
I could carry on but it's a bit pointless since those are two massive things. You need to remember, how fucked up the US is, is well documented. It's documented by your own media. And confirmed and defended by people like you.
No kind of society doesn't look after it's own. That's what a society is.
Keep in mind that what gets reported on and popularized is what sells clicks/views/etc, and is not very representative of "normal life."
It's true that services and norms vary widely across the different states, and in that sense perhaps there is not a "society" so much as "a patchwork of societies, not always working together." But I don't think it's quite the black-and-white either/or question that seems to be argued in this thread.
It comes from reading/listening/etc the responses of Americans to all the crazy shit that happens there. There are factual things that happen. They are talked about, Americans are talking about them, I listen. That is first hand experience of the American culture I talked about.
Here is the thing. The Americans I meet, you should see how embarrassed they are when you start talking about the latest American stuff you've seen. The faces of the Americans I worked with when I talked about the time the cops shoot up a stolen UPS van in the middle of the highway killing everyone including the hostage and endangered the lives of random drivers who couldn't get away. Like they know that stuff happens. And at the same time, there are Americans I've met personally and talked to frequently online who would defend that. "They stole it, they couldn't risk the lives of the police officers", etc.
When talking about culture problems, how Americans act is first hand experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mosque_shootings
Wee video here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/11195...
Honestly I think our Police do a lot of good. There's some bad apples, there's complaints - but that is normal. Overall, they tend to make good judgement calls (most of the time).
To the defence of the US, sometimes their system does work: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/24/us-jury-charge-police-off... honestly though, shooting a guy in a car that wasn't in immediate danger to anyone else around him (he rung the police originally because he was having a mental health crisis - in NZ you do call the cops if you can) so they shoot him with beanbag rounds, tase him then shoot him six times fatally. A bit over the top...
[caution: good-natured linguistic pedantry follows. Apologies in advance!]
As a point of interest, this usage of "bad apple" derives from the old folk wisdom: "one bad apple spoils the bunch".
Unlike quite a lot of old folk wisdom, this saying is literally true: mold growing on one apple will quickly jump to and colonise other nearby apples, and overripe apples emit a gas which causes other nearby fruit to ripen (and then overripen) much faster than normal; so it's important not to store overripe/moldy apples together with regular fruit!
Anyhow, my point is just this: "bad apples" doesn't mean that something is in the minority and therefore doesn't have much effect and can be safely ignored -- it means that something is in the minority but is likely to infect everything around it if urgent action isn't taken to separate them. If that wasn't your intended meaning, then "bad apples" was definitely the wrong metaphor to reach for. :)
Right, no disagreement from me that these things happen. And responses are varied, as you say.
What I was trying to get across was that you get a very lopsided view by concentrating on "crazy shit" and people's responses to it.
For example:
I live in the US. It's snowing where I am. It makes things beautiful. Some birds are at the feeder, and the furnace just turned on. I'm thankful for the warmth. I have some cookies to deliver to the neighbors later on (they recently gave us a loaf of their bread, which was delicious).
----
There you go, that was some real American culture (still second-hand for you, and admittedly not entirely representative). Not very interesting, but it's home. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of people, and yes, sprinkle in a handful of crazy shit too for good measure. Maybe that gets you a little bit closer to reality.
Still plenty that needs fixing, of course. And I'm glad I don't live in Mississippi (:
You may as well read "Florida man" headlines and come to conclude that all 20 million people in the state are crazed meth heads brandishing alligators as weapons at gas station clerks to rob cigarette cartons. The rare sensational shit is what gets reported, not normal mundane everyday life.
You are very poorly informed and confidently blind to your biases.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.
As for "confirmed and defended", since it's impossible to have a government that actually does the things you claim, of course I can "confirm" that the US doesn't. And of course I'll defend freedom, particularly when that means explaining what freedom actually means to people who don't understand it.
They show video footage... Jesus christ, you've bought into the Trump propaganda of fake news so much you're just saying believing the media is foolish. This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
Video footage can tell you that some small group of people did some particular things at some particular time and place.
Video footage cannot tell you what isn't on the video. Which is the vast majority of what the vast majority of actual Americans do with their time every day. Which does not look at all like your media-inspired, uniformed caricature.
> This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
Excuse me? The media has always lied. The evidence for that is overwhelming for anyone who actually cares to look.
Decades ago, we had no way of knowing about the extent of lies being told to us by the media (and by our politicians, for that matter) at the time they were told to us, because we had no other sources of information. Now we do. We can spot the lies told to us by all of our so-called "trusted" sources, just as they can spot lies told to us by Trump. There are no genuinely trustworthy sources of information. I agree that sucks, but it's the fact, and trying to ignore it or sugar coat it just makes it worse.
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
Insurances (including fire service or roadside assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had incentive to do the same.
What is the rising cost of going back to being on the public system?
For those younger, it seems to be mostly about not earning a lot. Here the limits are even smaller for those already private in 2002.
What country puts that kind of positive obligation on the police? I'm not aware of any that do.
In full, she said [1]:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
[It] is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate … [t]hat was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system … when people come and say: ‘But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!’
Nationalistic flamewar is not welcome here, regardless of which country you have a problem with. Please don't do this on HN again.