Yeah so bring some numbers to prove there’s a difference in scale.
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If you think about it, England is already kind of involved and relevant to the thread, because after all, what is America if not England’s most successful export?
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Did you read the last few posts in the thread? Where I had the same conversation about numbers with someone else? 4,000 people in the UK sleeping rough in total with hundreds in cars vs 16,000 in LA alone sleeping in cars?
Did you read the original post in the thread that used people living in cars as one of the main signs of the collapse of civil society in America?
It’s okay to not read this stuff, or not want to admit the problems in America, but I don’t think it should be up to me to talk you into it. It’s all right there.
But that’s what this entire thread is about.
OK so here’s the thing, I’m not trying to be defensive about America, I’m trying to be offensive against the UK. There are plenty of countries I’m willing to take shit from – Finland, Nepal, and New Zealand off the top of my head – but if I’m gonna be real, the Star Spangled Banner is no more or less of a hate symbol than the Union Jack.
Right. But the question wasn’t about Finland. It was about the UK. Dazzle lives in London. He asked if the UK should be added to this thread, and I’m explaining why not.
Putting aside gun violence and homelessness,
If the UK disbanded the NHS and took away everyone’s four weeks of paid vacation time, then we can start thinking about putting the UK in this thread.
You see?
That is the reality of the conversation we are having here. It’s a specific question with specific answers, not “me throwing shit” and not “you taking shit”.
Yeah, I see. England gets to enslave millions, displace even more through colonization, and reap the benefits to build a mostly functioning society and gets to go without criticism.
Your gaslighting is exhausting
Yes. It’s called compartmentalizing. It means that not every conversation about every topic is overtaken by conversations about other topics.
As someone who moved away from England 15 years ago and just got citizenship in a different country so I never have to live in the country again, I agree with you: fuck England. I could list all the things I hate about it and all the reasons why I want to live in Germany instead.
But very few of those reasons have much relation on the particular issues pertinent to America, as broadly outlined in the first post in this thread.
The conversations about what ails the UK at the moment is different conversation. It’s okay for it to be a different conversation!
Sorry. But I’d just made three posts explicitly outlining the numbers I was taking about, and was asked to do so again. That’s tiring too.
Compartmentalizing is toxic in politics. It implies that certain issues are not related when everything in the world is related. Intersectionality is here whether you want it or not.
You’re not convincing me of anything I don’t already know. Of course it is all connected! But not every conversation about one thing in politics has to become the same conversation every time!
That was the question I was answering!
“Is this the same conversation?”
“No, its a different conversation.”
Not “is the entire world connected through its shared history?” Because then the answer is yes.
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But why are you so hostile to having this conversation?
What conversation?
I’m not trying to be snarky. What conversation do you want?
As far as I know, I’m trying to point out to someone in the UK that the conversation and considerations about gun control and gun violence in the UK are different to those in America.
And that the conversations about homelessness in LA, and the solutions to those problems, are different than those in the UK.
If you want another conversation, you’ve got to say what that conversation is. It can’t be “the problems of homelessness in the UK and Los Angeles are the same” because that is the opposite of what I was trying to communicate with Dazzle, and you need something to back that up.
The conversation I’m trying to have is that countries shouldn’t get a pass just because they’re not America.
Okay. Sure. But what is the title of this thread? It’s a thread about uniquely American problems.
The thread called “UK political clusterfuck” isn’t overrun by talk about American partisan politics.
You coming after me for being off topic when you’re the one who necro’d the Feminism thread to talk about Atheism? Rich.
If I remember correctly, that was pretty relevant. Sorry if it missed the mark though.
Okay, let’s have the conversation.
Let’s start with this fundamental question, because it’s on this which I base all I have to say about this kind of topic:
With a specific problem or issue, is it possible that there a scale of the problem, that when it passes a certain point, the quality of the problem changes?
So if there is always a qualitative connection between two instances of an issue, are they always directly relevant to each other, or is there a point at which the scale difference between the two becomes a larger differentiator than their common quality?
Yes, but you never proved that, nationally, America has a worse homelessness problem than the UK, only locally to California – which does have a homelessness problem unparalleled to the UK.
I just checked the Feminism thread, and the original linked article was:
A Prominent Blogger Spoke Out About Sexism in her Skeptic Community.
When I necro’d the thread, I included the line: “This might not be the best thread for it, but this is where we discussed previous atheism/social justice crossover material in the past.”
So, a bad call on my part. I guess that there was no thread on the forum called “the atheist movement” is directly addressed in that article.
Unsurprisingly, that article comes to my mind all the time when thinking about these “everything is connected to everything” moments.
The meta-framing that every situation can be examined from the different frameworks of “what is the original sin?” is super interesting.
Like, in the War on Cars thread, every problem in the world is seen through the lens of car culture. If we just removed the cars, everything would be better!
In the partisan politics thread, everything can be solved by removing the opposing party, or healing the rift between two sides. Sort out gerrymandering and it’ll all be good!
If we had a thread for colonialism, we could have the same conversation about all the ills in the world could be solved if we just solved that one thing.
To be clear, I like this wide variety of lenses to view the problems of the world. If I put on my War on Car hat on, it reveals so many things that fade into the background if I had my other hats on.