A vouch option for Flagged submissions would be appreciated. I wonder if it used to be there but was removed.

this is one that would actually invite curious discussion if some people weren't clutching onto their "God Bless America (We're #1!)" pearls quite so tightly

There was a time where I was quite interested in listening to people from America talk about their fascinating and crazy sounding country, but as time goes on I find that to be much more repetitive and not insightful.

Now I'm more interested in what people from other countries have to say about America, and I find it fascinating how Americans online find this unsettling and sometimes get snippy about it really weird ways.

Sometimes I wonder what political threads on HN would be like if Americans weren't allowed to participate in them. For the people in the crowd who take things more literally in know this isn't possible, it's just an interesting thought experiment.

Would that result in more 'creative' conversation?

Maybe for a while until new patterns/tropes/memes were built up by the users that could comment on them. Maybe the issue with the political discussions that too often the people talking about them are too close to them, too immersed in them?

Some sort of meta-moderation system to prevent abuse of flagging would be welcome.

It's not perfect, but it ain't nothing

AFAIK, upvoting a flagged submission cancels out the flagging to some extent. I don’t know the internals of how this process works. I’ve upvoted the submission in an effort to get it unflagged (it still may not get to the front page or may rapidly drop down though).

Instead, it's basically just political whining.

Now you have some very talented/consequential people just refusing to visit the country. Regardless of any qualms about the "content and logic", this should set off alarm bells for any American. Plus, this would've been a whine if he'd complained and had gone anyway. But he is not going, and has explained his decision. That makes it more of a statement.

First watching the tearing up of the societal contract in the US over the past decades turned this into a country that feels like it is on the brink of a collapse. No longer can regular Americans rely that working hard will give them a good or even decent life. This means intense pressures are at work with some very desperate people, bringing out the ugliest (but also sometimes the most beautiful) bits of humanity, all while you have richer folks at the top who act like how their country operates at large is none of their business as long as there is a cut in it for them. Why should I care about the US if you guys don't even care about it yourselves?

Second the US is highly unreliable. Laws, democracy, human rights, treaties, consumer rights — all are treated as negotiable, optional things that you use against your enemies and ignore when it affects your own. With enough money everything can be bent around. There are no principles at work that one could rely on and that is no foundation to build a life on unless you are literally ready to join the ranks of people acting like cartoon villains — something only people do who have no self-respect for their limited time on earth.

Yeah, I don't see myself even visiting the US in my lifetime.

Hehe, reminds me about a video I saw some years ago.

They asked ordinary citizens what a reasonable distribution of wealth should be. Like the share of overall wealth owned by the richest 10% (or 1% or whatever), vs wealth owned by the rest of the population. Let's call this ratio "X".

Then those citizens were asked what they thought the wealth distribution was actually like (let's call that "Y"). No surprise: people thought wealth was much more UNevenly distributed than it should be.

Then they showed what the distribution was like in reality (let's call that "Z"): way more extreme.

So, wealth distributed way more uneven than people thought, and that in turn way more uneven than what people thought it should be.

That alone explains a lot of what's wrong with the US imho: broken/corrupt politics, outsized influence of tech bros (including outside US), a health problem bankrupting people, people turning to drugs, a militarized police force, incarceration ratios, homeless epidemic, etc etc.

Especially in a highly developed country where total wealth is enough to have everybody live comfortably & care-free.

As opposed to some poor war-torn country where wealth is also unevenly distributed, but it's obvious and everybody knows it. And overall wealth is a lot less to begin with (so people being desperate isn't surprising).

US' downfall turning it into a banana republic, its erosion of democratic institutions, human rights etc, is a logical result from the above. I'm not expecting that to improve sadly :-(. Things will probably get worse & there will be blood in the streets.