Re: @Trevor Don't buy US kit
"You do know that there are parts of America that have no running water, or electricity or internet?"
Sure I do. And some of them are great places to be. Some of them ain't. But in virtually every circumstance, the people occupy those places by choice in the US. Not every circumstance, but most.
The fact that the US has poor people - or a handful of innocent actually good people - doesn't change the fact that the overwhelming majority of America is either outright bad people or apathetic to a dangerous degree. And I absolutely classify the apathetic as equally complicit with the actively bad people who are out there trying hard to keep the masses poor and powerless.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
If it makes you feel any better, I hold Australia in equal - if not worse - contempt. They keep electing Xenophobic asshats to power over and over and over. The UK isn't much higher in my esteem, what with their own brand of Xenophobic asshats being increasingly popular.
At least in Canada we have a piss poor excuse: over successive years we have been Jerrymandered so hard that the conservatives can get a majority in this country with less than 30% of the popular vote, but if either our centrist or our leftist party wants to win a majority they need 50% of the vote (taking into account the ridings that will never, ever change their colours.)
It's a shitty excuse - and we collectively deserve to have our asses kicked - but it's also an issue that Canadians are aware of and actively fighting. Electoral reform is a huge issue here. As are things like the TPP, spying and a whole host of other things that are anti-populace, but wholly embraced as "necessary" by the majority of American voters.
We also have an active enough political system that there are always three possible parties (right, center and left) with a plausible possibility of winning, and a few up-and-comers that are gaining strength. We don't just have "sort of centrist and right wing" as options (like the US) with the "right wing" party currently undergoing a civil war because half of the thing is off in fucking crazy cuckoo land and wants to drag the whole goddamned world damn with them.
So you go right ahead and call me anti-American. I am. But I am not "anti-American" as some form of reactionary diatribe where I "want what America has". No...I fear everything you have. I find you a danger to my nation's way of life. I find your culture to be an infection that is harder to combat every year and your xenophobia and paranoia to be dangerous to the stability of the world as a whole.
I am not merely irked with your country for teaching and preaching American exceptionalism. I'm irked because you lot actually believe that lunacy and because of it you are collectively unable to see the damage you do to yourselves and to the rest of the world.
Worse: other western nations are (for now) completely dependent on commerce with the US. That's slowly, but surely changing as BRICS countries rise to power, but it will be decades before any of us can really tell America to take it's one-sided "treaties" and go fuck themselves. Unfortunately, the damage you'll do to our countries in your desperate attempts to export your laws while you gaze about with your dull cow eyes blubbering over your waning international influence could still prove to be catastrophic.
We can only hope.