Hungover, what I miss?

To the point of the one above you, Belgium is technically younger than the United States.

But honestly, the only reason we really know how messed up a lot of these things are, is because of people digging into these things and finding out that power corrupts. We need transparency, integrity and honesty if we are to get to a point where we don't read the news with existential dread.

I think most of governing at this point is cleaning up messes from before and creating new messes along the way because we are incapable of solving problems sustainably.

Take immigration, which has become a widespread issue all throughout the west. Rather than figuring out how to stop people from wanting to run away to our countries, we prefer to exile these people, separate them from our society and, if at all possible, just make them not come into our countries at all. I'm not saying there's a simple solution, I'm just saying we are so focused on combating symptoms, we completely ignore the actual cause of issues.

I'm so proud that Congress has taken it apon themselves to do absolutely nothing.

Abuse of power isn't political and can come from either side. We need to limit the executive branch

a lot of them were hippies.

A lot of them were hippies that became selfish assholes. People change. Especially when there are propaganda networks working to change them.

We’re still the same divided country we were in the civil war

Except now every stupid, racist asshole has the ability to spread their message to millions of people.

Likely less than 1% of boomers were hippies. They call it "counter culture" for a reason.

What most people would consider "hippies" consisted of a pretty small group of people mostly living in California.

A larger and much less genuine movement came later when John Lennon decided to appropriate hippy fashion. But that's all it was (fashion).

People who truly held core values like "peace, free love and compassion" were absolutely not the majority but they were loud and colorful and now we remember that period of time as being overrun with hippies.

WW1 really was a different story. The US adopted the standards of its allies when possible, or otherwise just couldn’t use stuff from their allies. We produced things for our own use, but not for everyone on our side of the conflict. Plus WW1 was kind of a massive resource pit for everyone involved bc of trench warfare.

The fact that we couldnt share resources among allies in WWI is part of where the push for adopting a standard came from. And the reason it ultimately became the US’s standard is because the US production was removed from the conflict. Meanwhile European factories were getting bombed. Before the adoption of our standards, our allies were actually paying to establish factories in the US that would build to European standards.

WWI also had more specialized parts which was a mess, and the Europeans hadnt kicked that by WWII the way that the US did. We had already recognized the importance of standardization outside of military purposes by that point, so we were ahead of the game there.

Its more like WWII started it, and our persistence post WWII to push for our standards as the new ISO standards sealed it. ISO didnt exist until after WWII. It basically was created to be “the league of nations / UN for things”

The US as a whole can't really achieve Florida levels of.... Floridaness. You need fewer good paying jobs, higher costs of living, lots more old retired people running things, more drugs - all kinds, sunburn and sweat instead of frostbite and snow to shovel.

Yeah it is dawg. This is really completely new territory in almost every way.

I don't see how America is special relative to "the world". Many countries have gone through much more than that.

It is more like saying that if you survived a stroke, you will live forever.

Not for entities like me

Nixon was bad but super tame compared to Tangerine Palpatine.

Among the empires you just cited, let's consider the wars, atrocities, assassinations, crises, and plagues they perpetuated and endured

I think a big factor was world war I. Europe got decimated so the US had a major upper hand.

Then World war II happened and the US was still mostly untouched. We are seeing the fall out of a war that happened in the 30s/40s

Why wouldnt you?

Yeah, and Anakin just played with the kids for half an hour before ushering them to safety.