Quote:
Originally Posted by Cimarron29414
Your post conveys the classic victim's mentality: "The deck is stacked against me, I will never do any better (without the help of the government)." You and I both know the hundreds/thousands of stories of people rising from very little and into something remarkable with nothing but determination on their side. I will have to take it offline sometime and tell you the story of my father. Suffice to say, you will NEVER convince me that the deck is stacked against anyone at this point in our time.
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Anecdotes mean nothing. There's plenty of data showing that people rarely make it out of the class they're born into, and that's not because people love living in poverty.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
Your experience as an American is that this people are fringe minorities. From the outside looking in, however, this is what we see. We see the paranoid, the tea partiers who are terrified of some vague socialist demon, we see the extreme and bizarre rhetoric of death panels and wild accusations of socialism, fascism, Nazism.
I used to wonder if this was an isolated thing, but I'm becoming more convinced that it's a product of American sensationalist media not presenting the moderate point of view. It's gotten to the point that for those of us on the outside there doesn't seem to be anything in the middle, and it becomes something of a farce.
This is the face your nation is presenting to the world.
I would consider it a problem.
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Well yes, but that observation isn't exactly controversial. The vast majority of us are well aware that the news has become more focused on ratings and less on quality (one might argue due to the for-profit business model). But also, as much as I'm all for being a good world citizen, the job our news does of conveying America to other countries is the least of my concerns on the topic.