Not saying this is right, but many Americans disagree with the very concept, and want to maintain their freedom to opt-out of everything that goes along with "society". Gault's Gulch and all that. And I think it was that famous British voice of reason Maggie Thatcher that said "there's no such thing as society".
This is so frequently misquoted. Or rather, quoted away from its context and taken to mean the exact opposite. Thatcher actually argued there should be a social safety net, but it can't solve every problem and it shouldn't be used as an excuse for not working.
In full, she said [1]:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
[It] is, I think, one of the tragedies in which many of the benefits we give, which were meant to reassure people that if they were sick or ill there was a safety net and there was help, that many of the benefits which were meant to help people who were unfortunate … [t]hat was the objective, but somehow there are some people who have been manipulating the system … when people come and say: ‘But what is the point of working? I can get as much on the dole!’
Do they have a public healthcare system? Nope. What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
I could carry on but it's a bit pointless since those are two massive things. You need to remember, how fucked up the US is, is well documented. It's documented by your own media. And confirmed and defended by people like you.
No kind of society doesn't look after it's own. That's what a society is.
I don't mean to apologize for some of the awful things that go on in the United States, but your comment seems to come from the point of view of someone whose understanding of the country is built on popular media and clickbait headlines, rather than first-hand experience, if I may be so bold.
Keep in mind that what gets reported on and popularized is what sells clicks/views/etc, and is not very representative of "normal life."
It's true that services and norms vary widely across the different states, and in that sense perhaps there is not a "society" so much as "a patchwork of societies, not always working together." But I don't think it's quite the black-and-white either/or question that seems to be argued in this thread.
Here in NZ, when the Christchurch Mosque shootings happened, the Police just rammed the offender off the road and cuffed him... without firing a single shot.
Honestly I think our Police do a lot of good. There's some bad apples, there's complaints - but that is normal. Overall, they tend to make good judgement calls (most of the time).
To the defence of the US, sometimes their system does work: https://www.1news.co.nz/2022/11/24/us-jury-charge-police-off... honestly though, shooting a guy in a car that wasn't in immediate danger to anyone else around him (he rung the police originally because he was having a mental health crisis - in NZ you do call the cops if you can) so they shoot him with beanbag rounds, tase him then shoot him six times fatally. A bit over the top...
[caution: good-natured linguistic pedantry follows. Apologies in advance!]
As a point of interest, this usage of "bad apple" derives from the old folk wisdom: "one bad apple spoils the bunch".
Unlike quite a lot of old folk wisdom, this saying is literally true: mold growing on one apple will quickly jump to and colonise other nearby apples, and overripe apples emit a gas which causes other nearby fruit to ripen (and then overripen) much faster than normal; so it's important not to store overripe/moldy apples together with regular fruit!
Anyhow, my point is just this: "bad apples" doesn't mean that something is in the minority and therefore doesn't have much effect and can be safely ignored -- it means that something is in the minority but is likely to infect everything around it if urgent action isn't taken to separate them. If that wasn't your intended meaning, then "bad apples" was definitely the wrong metaphor to reach for. :)
> It comes from reading/listening/etc the responses of Americans to all the crazy shit that happens there.
Right, no disagreement from me that these things happen. And responses are varied, as you say.
What I was trying to get across was that you get a very lopsided view by concentrating on "crazy shit" and people's responses to it.
For example:
I live in the US. It's snowing where I am. It makes things beautiful. Some birds are at the feeder, and the furnace just turned on. I'm thankful for the warmth. I have some cookies to deliver to the neighbors later on (they recently gave us a loaf of their bread, which was delicious).
----
There you go, that was some real American culture (still second-hand for you, and admittedly not entirely representative). Not very interesting, but it's home. Multiply that by hundreds of millions of people, and yes, sprinkle in a handful of crazy shit too for good measure. Maybe that gets you a little bit closer to reality.
Still plenty that needs fixing, of course. And I'm glad I don't live in Mississippi (:
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad other comments are or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You don't get to declare by fiat what constitutes a society, or what counts as "taking care of its own". Nor do you get to just help yourself to the assumption that other countries, which claim to have things like "a public healthcare system" and "police who have a duty to save you", actually have those things.
As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.
As for "confirmed and defended", since it's impossible to have a government that actually does the things you claim, of course I can "confirm" that the US doesn't. And of course I'll defend freedom, particularly when that means explaining what freedom actually means to people who don't understand it.
>As for "well documented", if you believe what the media tells you about anything, let alone the US, you are in no position to judge anyone else.
They show video footage... Jesus christ, you've bought into the Trump propaganda of fake news so much you're just saying believing the media is foolish. This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
Video footage can tell you that some small group of people did some particular things at some particular time and place.
Video footage cannot tell you what isn't on the video. Which is the vast majority of what the vast majority of actual Americans do with their time every day. Which does not look at all like your media-inspired, uniformed caricature.
> This whole the media is lying wasn't such a thing before Trump.
Excuse me? The media has always lied. The evidence for that is overwhelming for anyone who actually cares to look.
Decades ago, we had no way of knowing about the extent of lies being told to us by the media (and by our politicians, for that matter) at the time they were told to us, because we had no other sources of information. Now we do. We can spot the lies told to us by all of our so-called "trusted" sources, just as they can spot lies told to us by Trump. There are no genuinely trustworthy sources of information. I agree that sucks, but it's the fact, and trying to ignore it or sugar coat it just makes it worse.
The US is built on a fundamental distrust of mainstream authority. Our founders were religious radicals who thrived as long as they were exiled someplace where they couldn't affect anybody who mattered. Our folk heroes are dimwitted-but-clever rebels who defeat all the experts with old-fashioned know-how. The Russians sent men to space essentially as cargo for the mathematicians back on Earth to work out; we sent seat-of-your-pants pilots, and arguably our most memorable space mission was the one that got screwed up until our team improvised their way to victory. We proudly pay cash to lawn-mowers and restaurant servers we like so they can hide it from the taxman. So given all that, why would we ever meekly hand our humanity, our free will, to the bureaucrats in the police department or hospitals, just so that they can abuse it more efficiently?
German here. We do have a public healthcare system. That we can opt out of and go private. The trade-off is it being increasingly hard to get back into the public one, especially as people get older and thus more "expensive".
Insurances (including fire service or roadside assistance) has to be payed. You cannot just opt back into it once you need it. If parent is right and they had chances to opt into fire service but decided not to, you cannot just bill them for a single instance. Otherwise they're behavior would be reward, and everyone else had incentive to do the same.
Being older than 55 is the big one. Those making very little money can join a family insurance of their significant other. Or find a loophole, like getting into the public system of another country, then moving back.
For those younger, it seems to be mostly about not earning a lot. Here the limits are even smaller for those already private in 2002.
> Do they have police who have a duty to save you? Nope. That alone is just an absolute shit show. What sort of country says the police have no obligation to protect you? Only to show up and solve the crime once it's happened? What sort of society doesn't look after it's own?
What country puts that kind of positive obligation on the police? I'm not aware of any that do.
