Yeah… it also felt like an unnecessary gut punch / pedantic when typing it… but I decided it’s kind of important too

Have a great day

I think some of why is related to how most people in a traffic jam go “damn this traffic” not “damn, I’m making this worse”

That’s evidence for some people having more than a knee jerk response, it’s far from statistically saying it’s the most common rationale. Smart people are also amazing at having a knee jerk reaction and then making it sound well reasoned with clever arguments.

I agree its not just a knee jerk reaction, and I know I don’t have a good basis for how many are knee jerk vs rationalised but I do know I’ve been around plenty of people that seem to have a knee jerk reaction and plenty that demonise the culture, hell half the world is being bullied not to have windmills and some of that is blanket anything green is dumb

*represent their country

He’s a US exported issue but he impacts quite a few countries, and their ambassadors

It’s probably more than “reliant on good-faith actors”. The Perils of Presidentialism by Juan J. Linz in 1990 is a decent paper comparing the instability of parliamentary democracies vs presidential democracies. Parliamentary democracies aren’t perfect, we have Hungary, but in hindsight it shouldn’t be surprising that presidential two party democracies are unstable. If you get two ideologies that are different enough then the government swings between the ideologies with the executive pushing for its side and opposite side getting angrier until, after a few oscillations of increasing amplitude, something snaps.

A lot of genAI now links to sources, that are frequently wrong, and I haven’t noticed that changing fanboys obnoxious praising them

I’m not a US citizen but I thought it might be worth writing some of my rationale for leaving the US incase it helps you.

As far as I could tell, anyone that could spell democratic backslide thought it would happen in the US. Many in Trump’s orbit even seemed to be targeting it. The main thing in dispute seemed to be how much it would happen. In my understanding slipping down the scale from democracy towards autocracy tends to come with a government ideology, demonising science/experts, persecution of minorities, erratic aggressive foreign policy, targeting of political enemies, removing checks on overreach/corruption/fraud, state controlled Fed, and federal officers harassing the population.

I was worried I might be overreacting and wanted to have some idea of the odds so I basically read every executive order that they sent out. It was only a few weeks until I put in my resignation & made plans to leave. I encourage everyone to read their executive orders. Personally, I don’t think it’s easy to reassess the US for another 8 years (two into the second term post Trump 2.0). This is mostly given the mass government firings, partisan heads of agencies, mass resignations over perceived corruption, partisanship of the supreme court (measured by differences of rulings compared to the lower courts), removal (some still in progress) of institutions and removal of personnel that target corruption/fraud. There are a lot of ways this could improve but I’d ague it’s pretty risky over that timeline and just really tough to access a short term swing compared to a long term one. That amount of time is a decent portion of someone’s life.

I’d also argue that the commentary about people running is a bit misplaced in this situation because this is arguably the most powerful country in the world. For me, not being a citizen, that meant I should minimise my contribution to it succeeding and that meant removing my taxes and contribution to the workforce. I think that rationale can hold for citizens but also agree that there need to be people in the country fighting more against Trump 2.0 or it’s going to get worse for most of the globe.

For me, I then thought through what entities seemed best placed to resist a potential rogue state (and definite erratic state) as large as the US. For me, that seemed to have one line item: the EU.

It’s really not that hard to leave a country. I’ve done 1+ years in four foreign countries now. I could have spent the rest of my life in any of them. My least favourite was the US. Twice I only had $7000 to my name (and depending on your country of citizenship this is probably the biggest barrier, besides actually choosing to leave the first time) with no job

Yeah, my pedantic unnecessary retort was going to point out the GDP thing but then note that there’s some interesting commentary around saying “size” when five Canadian provinces are larger. But mostly that was me still being annoyed at the Davos soundbites

That’s pretty funny. Both that I didn’t get his name right (I’ll put it down to him being irritating in a way I block things out); and that I got three comments effectively pointing out that California has a GDP higher than most countries without pointing out the name was wrong.

Fair. The US state with the next largest GDP is Texas and Greg Abbott is there

deleted by creator

I wasn’t trying to rank them

There must be 1000s of people that lead a state that aren’t there (given ~200 countries). What makes this guy’s presence so special? Or, perhaps, his presence is also out of place

Same goes for Gary Newsom

For those ignorant like me:

• VXUS = Vanguard Total International Stock ETF
  • https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/vxus
  • Seeks to track the performance of the FTSE Global All Cap ex US Index, which measures the investment return of stocks issued by companies located outside the United States.
  • Broad exposure across developed and emerging non-U.S. equity markets
  • Follows a passively managed, index replication approach.
• EUAD = Select STOXX® Europe Aerospace & Defense ETF
  • https://www.select-funds.com/

I found this Reddit list, but I thought I’d see what Lemmy comes up with:

https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/comments/1k0hvd4/what_assets_are_the_best_alternatives_to_us/

I didn’t think about that. It almost looks metallic, or like the shading you see with 3d modelling software

I wonder what we can do to help motivate including links to sources

I messaged the moderator asking if we could update the channel description but haven’t heard back

Obviously that is part of what they are saying, they just haven’t taken the care to exclude the “we are proud of the US since only 1/5 of us want to take Canada”. In a situation like this, you’d expect more care. And this isn’t a slight one off, it’s very common type of comment for commentary about the US, particularly domestically.

All they had to do was swap these paragraphs and it would help the implication:

Only 17 per cent of respondents said they want Canada to be a U.S. territory or state. That number climbed slightly to 23 per cent of respondents who want Greenland to become a U.S. territory or state.

U.S. President Donald Trump has been aggressively pursuing an expansionist agenda during his second term.

Far better to be explicit and state what you mean:“17 per cent of respondents said they want Canada to be a U.S. territory or state, indicating low domestic popularity”. But even then, for an international audience that is a horrifyingly large amount of domestic support that if aligned with similar issues tends to include roughly 1/10 Democrats so any sort of “its just MAGA” is lies to help feel less bad about countryman.

Seriously, what are you doing defending this sort of indifference to clarity, and collateral insults, when discussing a head of state and country this egregious?

Yeah… I kind of wish it was a request of the channel. I’ve found a few of the sources now and it’s mostly on this channel people seem to post other people’s images with no references