USA is not our friend
As a European Union citizen, the last half a decade or so has been a constant learning experience in understanding not only how little our big bad protector NATO chief country, USA, cares about protecting us, but also how much they really just want us to give them everything while they give us nothing in return, and that we should thank them for that privilege of a deal.
Turns out that USA is constantly manipulating, extorting, threatening with violence and war, creating divide and outrage, and is in general just about as anti-human of a place as Russia, with leaders that are as best as I can describe just pure scum.
NATO isn’t free, by the way, we pay a lot of money for the protection we’re not receiving. In fact it seems like USA is that bully who promises to have your back if you give him your lunch money, but then you do that, and get beaten up by the very same bully anyway. This is what USA does when it threatens to annex EU countries, countries it promised to protect.
You’d think it was just an error of an election cycle gone really-really bad, but you have to remember: the American people made Trump their president not once, but twice. I think this is indicative of who Americans really are. I’d love to wax poetic about Trump and his administration being psychotic piece of shit villains, but ultimately the American people wanted that. If you chose to not vote, you didn’t care, and are just as much complicit. The Trump administration is not a window, it’s a mirror looking back at the American people.
Corporations first
It’s painfully obvious how in the USA legislation is built around the idea that the most rights are not given to the people, but instead to corporations. The bigger the corporations, the more rights they get. At some point even the law becomes optional, apparently.
If you run a corporation in the USA that does some wildly illegal shit, don’t worry - presidential pardons come pretty cheap, so just put a few millions on an offshore account and you’re good.
In the USA no company needs to ask permission, they just do it. Look at Uber, who started its ride sharing business entirely illegaly, as in most juristictions an actual taxi license was required, but of course it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission if you have billions and the government gives zero fucks about the people who get hurt.
Or how about all the AI companies sucking up all the human creativity, copyrights be damned, to then profit off of other people’s work? And the USA courts say it’s a-ok, because the USA courts don’t give a fuck about the people.
These USA companies also come to EU and try their same illegal tactics here. They call it “disrupting”, I call it breaking the law, but of course whenever this topic comes up on Hacker News, the Americans there will tell me that us having laws that actually work is why we don’t have tech advancements like they do.
They tell me how we should really remove all our regulations and laws because bending over to the tech overlords so that they could poison every aspect of life is their idea of a perfect world. The ultra-rich in America are gods, and the Americans their worshippers. Praised be the people who make you pee in a bottle, for what a wonderful privilege that is!
American Exceptionalism
I really try hard to push through to myself that not all American people are the same, and I know that they’re not, but it’s so hard to keep an open mind to that when it seems that every online discource by Americans is ignorant, self-obsessed, demeaning to others and really just a reflection of the people they vote into power.
Culturally speaking, Europeans and Americans couldn’t possibly be further apart. Americans constantly insult us that we’re poor, and how they are rich. That we have no good tech companies, and how they do. Everything for them is about ultra-capitalism, money, making their billionares richer, and more money.
For us Europeans though, life does not revolve around money. For us, wealth comes from being able to spend time with our friends and loved ones, having plenty time off from work, having good maternity and paternity leave, accessible healthcare and education, consumer protection laws, employee protection laws, and in general having systems in place such that the world caters to the human, not to the corporation. We live for us, not for the ultra wealthy. Our life belongs to us, and is not for sale.
And we have those things not whenever a corporation decides they would want to give us those things, we have those things written into law, so that everyone equally gets these things, not only those privileged enough to work at a prestigious enough enterprise. We’re not narccisists and neither do we like to shit where we eat.
Independence from USA
USA is not our friend. At the best of times it’s just a gunrunner who milks us for money so that we could put ammunition into the weapons it has sold us, because it doesn’t allow us to make ammunition for those weapons ourselves. Americans are amazing at doing vendor lock-in. You could say that fucking their customer is their special talent.
USA is not our friend. At the worst of times it’s our enemy who threatens to annex our territories, destroy our economy, and support our other enemies, like Russia.
I’m working towards gaining independence from USA, by moving away from the products and services that they make. The unfortunate part is that USA seems to make everything I use, but the thought of them and their complicit big tech using my data or getting any of my money sickens me enough at this point that even if the alternatives are subpar in comparison, it’s worth it.
Now I’m not able to shield myself from USA products entirely due to work where we use a bunch of USA stuff that I simply cannot avoid, but as for my personal uses go, I don’t want anything to do with that country, if I can help it.