The United States on the global stage: good guys or bad guys?

That must be why the world was so stable before the US became a world power.

Oh wait, that’s nonsense.

Yeah it is.

It’s an absolutely immense difference. You sound insane to suggest otherwise.

North Korea literally shoots you if you try to leave. And yet people still risk their lives to try and get out.

If you want to leave the US… You can just go. You need to find someone willing to take you, but the US doesn’t try to stop you from leaving

That alone is a pretty telling fact.

That’s a nonsensical point and you (hopefully?) know it.

“Because things are bad, it’s okay to actively continue to make them bad.” Is that what you want to imply?

As @Dissensus argues, Kim il Jung is not bombing people all over the world, bullying the world with sanctions whenever they can and want. Yes they are bad guys too, threatening war on South Korea all these years.

And that’s disregarding how they treat their own people. Because yes, Kim treats his people atrociously. But I wouldn’t want to live in the USA either, especially not were my skin rich in melanine.

It totally isn’t, because if you are going to blame the US for a lack of stability, then you need to actually make the case that things were stable before the US for involved in things.

But i don’t think you can, because they definitely weren’t.

I’m trying to understand if you grossly misunderstand what life is like in the US, or grossly misunderstand what life is like in North Korea. I’m guessing it’s probably both.

Because people risk their lives to come INTO the United States. They risk their lives to get OUT OF North Korea.

Your position is insane.

No it isnt. Look I’m not denying NK is worse than the USA. Not by a long shot.

I’m just saying that the USA isn’t all what it’s cracked up to be. Theres better places, healthier states. That is the point I’m trying to make.

And exporting your awfulness is a “bad guys” thing in my movie.

So, all the governments (many democratically elected) the US led coups to overthrow don’t count (Chile, if you want a hard example)? All the First American peoples the United States massacred and broke treaties with are irrelevant because they weren’t ‘stable’ enough for you? It seems like if a place was not a literal paradise before US involvement, you won’t accept the position that the United States took actions that made things worse/less stable or at the very least, were uncalled for.

What I said upthread is not a remotely controversial position regarding the US having a destabilizing effect on the world. There’s a litany of peer-reviewed monographs making the same point. It’s literally taught as part of college curriculums. I like to assume people here are good-faith, rational actors, so I’m frankly flummoxed this is a position one could have here. Is this a matter of definitions?

Not in a hundred years or so.

Can’t say the same for, say, China who is doing it right this second.

Also I ate today. So I’ve already got a lot up on your average North Korean.
Hell, I told Trump to go fuck himself many times and I’m not dead or vanished.
Again, a major plus over all the countries in question.

This, at least, I’ll agree with. But it’s not yet to the point of China or Russia by a long stretch.
Which isn’t to say you can’t see it from here, because you can. If we don’t take the next exit we’ll likely get there.

You kind of did, in that line i quoted previously. But if you are agreeing that life in North Korea is in fact a horrific hellscape, and that life in the US is not remotely comparable, then cool, we are in agreement.

The US absolutely did lots of things that I’m not proud of. But so did every other country in the world. And places we didn’t go, also tended to be unstable.

So i don’t think that it’s a coherent position to blame the US for that instability in places like the middle east, because the the US didn’t make it unstable there.

You can lay the blame for that just as squarely at the feet of Europe. Or really, any of the multitude of various empires that dominated that region over the ages and drew map lines arbitrarily.

The US could have never gotten involved at all, and it would still be a mess.

You’re just blanking the US now, because we’re the most powerful nation on the planet (until Trump destroys that, but whatever). But that’s a fairly recent thing. That wasn’t the case until, like, the 1940’s.

And you guys basically fucked up literally everything prior to that point. Like, you started global wars where tens of millions of people died.

Start a new thread folks, please, if you want to expound on how evil the US is.

Sure, there’s more than enough blame to go around, I’m not arguing that the United States is the worst nation in the world and that has ever existed. But, that other people were bad too does not excuse the bad actions we took. The USA is bad, the United Kingdom is bad, much of Europe is demonstrably bad as well (other places too, past and present). That they’re all bad does not average out to us all being neutral. We can all be bad and it’s helpful and healthy to acknowledge that.

But yes, this is veering off topic for this thread and I have a desire for some gin or rye whiskey.

Sorry, i didn’t even realize this was in the BLM thread. I dunno how we got to “the US is as bad as North Korea” here.

No, not at all. We need to be better. That’s kind of the point of this thread, i think.

YES! and that’s the point I was trying to make.

You suck. You’re so loud about how awesome you are, but you suck and need to do better. This is me addressing the USA, not you personally.

I thought the point you were trying to make was that the world saw us a villain. We do give out almost $50B in foreign aid, and provide much more in military assistance throughout the world.

I get it that we have done a lot of bad things for our own interests, but we also do good. What other country gives out as much aid as us?

In absolute terms? None. As a percentage of GDP? Quite a few.

I don’t think this is actually true, when you factor in the donations by private individuals in the US, which doubles the next closest country (as a percentage of gdp).

(This is 2016 data. US charitable donations are now over 2% of GDP, apparently)

Very few of Americans’ charitable donations are for programs outside of the United States.

You got a source for that?