Am I allowed to complain since I live in the USA ?
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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I’ve never understood the argument that you shouldn’t complain about the environment you interact with because other people interact with worse environments.
Like, okay, that’s good to keep in mind with respect to privilege and assumptions and such, but like…
I can’t deliver a first-hand account of someone else’s life, and I can’t identify the possible solutions to their problems as well as I can for my own — let alone access their world as well as my own, to try to fix some of the problems.
I think on some level the people who say “focus on those other people’s problems” know that those other problems are less accessible.
It’s not that they want you to do better activism. It’s that they want you to do none.
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We are so fucked.
I hope they find a cure lol (lots of love)
Hi America, the people around the world living through famines, wars and genocides would like to have a quiet word with you.
More people are food insecure in America than in Ethiopia in current year. More people are imprisoned and enslaved in the US per capita than the population of uighurs internationally or in xinjiang, while having incomprably worse prison conditions. Swat kills more kids than the average army at war.
And that's the official statistics that the government openly publishes, not including the tens of millions of undocumented people and cases of violence and imprisonment which fall through the laughably, arguably purposefully large cracks in us internal data collection.
Oh I'm fairly confident that we'll see our famine and genocide too. War? Idk there ain't no war but class war, so we see plenty of war, just one side is winning.
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If you think the USA's domestic policy is terrible and social murder, wait till you find out about its foreign policies. They do social murder too, but regular murder, mass murder, and terrorism sponsored by the richest nation are also on the table.
Actually fr! Studied a year there and I had no driver license back then… Which was fuckin painful as there was little to no other infrastructure! It was also fun to start uni with a 2 hour consultation about school shootings…
But the worst thing? They fucken start every conversation with a ‘how are you’ and look at you like you are boinkers if you say anything aside from ‘good’! Well I am not fuckin good at most times…
Lived in multiple eu countries as a contrast and its incomparably worse, while there is an amount of money I would go back temporarily but I would never settle down there
Wait, so y'all don't have to lie and tell people you're doing good? This is an American thing?
Hell that's regional even in the US. Most social interactions in the PNW used "What's up!" in whatever variation to mean "Hi!" and "How's it going/are you doing?" meant "Tell new how you're feeling or how your day/task is progressing“. Honest answers were quite normal. The only people who were bothered were the bourgie types, and fuck 'em in any case.
We also just didn't talk to unfamiliar people outside of social spaces if it could be helped.
Ehhhhh, this is not standard in all places. If someone asks me how I am I will answer honestly but vaguely. "Living the dream, I've been better, meh, good, pretty good." It's common for other people to answer the same way, too. The part that's not as socially acceptable is to go into detail about it if you don't know the people well/people don't have follow up questions about it.
Yeah...
I am an American but have had a lot of friends from all over the world.
We are kind of exceptional in the extent of normalized, utterly disingenuous 'standard social interactions and phrases' that we use.
We talk like NPCs using throwaway, canned dialogue lines, and if we don't do NPC talk, well then that is actually viewed as antisocial...
Even though basically everyone else in the world would view this all as the opposite, inverted. Such forced bullshit conversations are generally viewed as bullshit and disingenuous.
Land of the individual!...
So long as you conform to various social norms that are so routine most of us don't ever even stop to question their prevalence or function.
I hear ya, but I gotta say, America ain't nothing compared to Japan in that regards. They have actual standardized stock phrases for all types of interactions, at work and at home. I have been in meetings where some participants literally didn't utter a single word that resembled an original thought, and it was completely acceptable.
That is very true, Japanese corporate business culture is on a whole other level.
Somewhat ironically, all my experiences with actual Japanese people are via Karate... in the Dojo, very strict, formal, no nonsense.
But uh, just casually hanging out? At least the ones I knew,... much more rowdy, haha.
Unrelated to my earlier Karate experiences, about a decadr after I'd gotten my black belt, and had since laid off Karate a bit... I once randomly befriended a Japanese man... who claimed he had been an actual Yakuza, a Yakushi... he explained to me that he had fucked up some operation, and instead of losing a finger, his superior struck him with the blunt side of the... I guess it would have been a waki-zashi?... stuck him on the knuckle, and that finger of his was pretty messed up.
He took that, and permanent exile from Japan, over... losing a finger, and then likely just getting killed... he'd pissed off another group pretty severely.
... We then got to talking about Anime, Yokai, and of course Karate... said he was a 4th Dan, 4th Degree Black Belt and uh... yeah, he was very, very significantly skilled in a few basically play fight, not even proper sparring bs we got into a few times.
Initially, he said he wanted me to prove I wasn't bullshitting about my black belt. Gave him my Style and as much family lineage of it that I remembered... and he then, almost totally without warning, threw a punch right at my face.
I did nothing. Didn't move at all.
His fist stopped about a half centimeter from my nose.
He laughed, said 'You blinked', I laughed, and he believed me after that.
Why would you do that ngl. If someone asks how I am, of course I tell the truth. If they don't want to know, they shouldn't have asked.
You'll be at work, walking the opposite direction as a co-worker who you are seeing for the first time that day. "How are you?" You can't stop to talk, so you only have time for a 1-3 word answer max.
Yeah pretty much. Most of us don’t even ask.
Wow
That would save so much bullshit if I could just skip that stupid pleasantry.
I tell people how I'm doing now and then to throw people off. Feels sort of like a power play, but they usually seem to think "wow this guy is full of himself."
They probably get annoyed because you didn't say 'fine' and now they have to think about you to see if you're kidding or not which should hopefully make them think about asking in the future
That's the idea.
It doesn't work most of the time. I got a talking to from one manager. That one kinda entertained me.
If anyone asks me how I'm doing my bog standard response is "Fucking terrible but apart from that I'm OK."
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"How are you?" is a greeting, not a question.
...Unless it's from a close friend.
Well then the question mark is a lie
In the US. That's the point. If I get asked that, the other person generally has some degree of interest in my genuine answer
Yes, I'm affirming the commenter and letting other viewers know this is the standard and not just OPs perception.
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I've even seen it a lot that people don't even reply to "how are you", they just start talking about something else. So weird...
They interpreted it as [acknowledgement that they are aware of your presence], which it most likely is.
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From farther back that I care to remember
Mom has more fingers than daughter? This just feels like AI slop
Are you not human? Children don't grow all their fingers until they're around 16. Maybe do some research next time, gleepglorp.
Both of them staring blankly ahead's a big tell, too.
The weird sepia tone and rigid composition is a pretty solid indicator of AI generation (no idea which model[s] though)
All of them, it seems like.
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Thoughts and prayers
got license to complain then
So this is Christmas
Camera slowly pans across various shots of Americans
And what have you done?
1 800 number comes up on the screen for donations