It might surprise some peeps reading this thread that many Canadians are rather close observers of Americans; but inherently we have an outsider’s perspective. We can see: Y’all don’t know the soup you’re swimming in, because it’s all you know. IMO many Americans are utterly clueless about the rest of the world, or history, including their own history, and this too has clouded their apprehension of reality. For example, many Americans think they’re living in a democracy, but they’ve got no clue how others practice democracy in their own countries – so they can still believe the lie they live under. Part of this is enabled by affluence, but much of it is just down to arrogance and/or straight-up ignorance.
With direct relevance to the subject of this thread: Here in Canada and in every other G7 country other than the USA (not to mention the OECD countries I can think of), WE ALL FUND PUBLIC EDUCATION BASICALLY THE SAME WAY, whereas the USA funds public education through property taxes. Practically everywhere else in the world, funds are pooled at federal and/or the state/provincial level, and are dispersed to schools on a per capita basis (with additional apportionment based on special needs; such as ESL students in the metros where immigrants are ‘absorbed’, or handicap/ disability/mobility requirements, which vary from one school zone to the next). This is NOT SO IN THE USA where property taxes are the main source of education funds; and these are apportioned to the schools in the taxed districts themselves. This means: In the USA, wealthy neighbourhoods have very well-funded schools where they can employ Princeton grads as middle-school teachers; whereas in the poorer neighbourhoods they have grossly under-funded schools with outrageous deprivation.
I could expound on this point and attendant social ills at length, but instead I’ll just lump together a pastiche of different catch phrases as a kind of conceptual shorthand: “Urban Decay”, “War on Drugs” and “Management by Numbers”. I could cite umpteen statistics about police interactions, traffic pullover rates, conviction rates and sentencing discrepancies – where, for example, white people and black people arrested and charged for the same crimes, get drastically different sentences.
It’s really quite striking to many Canadians, the American’s way of doing things down there. Y’all think that it’s actually democracy when your “Sheriffs” and “Prosecutors” and “Judges” actually ‘run for office’ and get elected, the way the rest of the world elects their politicians and school trustees. Most Americans have no clue what professionalization even is; and so they even vote for “County Coroner” and such, with the result that people with no scientific or medical training whatsoever, are the ones to determine cause of death in many, many counties across the USA.
Perhaps in big cities like NYC, LA and such, they’ll have an actual pathologist working as the coroner. In many places in the USA, the coroner is not any more than an undertaker – and Americans think that’s how democracy is supposed to work.
So, exactly how does one get elected Sherriff, Prosecutor or Judge in the USA? It seems to me, one of the fundamentals is to be ‘Tough on Crime’ and such; and to this end ‘Fear of the Black Man’ has served as a handy device since the very founding of the nation. We Canadians can see it quite clearly; perhaps because when America’s slaves were escaping their slavery, for many of them it was Canada that they escaped to, through ‘The Underground Railway’.
As a result, Canadians have closely observed American’s ‘Fear of the Black Man’ for a couple of centuries now, and it’s pretty clear to us that the sole remaining ‘Super Power’ in the world needs a permanent ‘underclass’ kept deprived, under-educated and desperate enough to enlist in the military. This is essential if the Pentagon is to go on defending corporate interests on foreign shores all around the world. (Spare me any pretense of defending democracy and such; y’all didn’t restore the Emir of Kuwait ’cause he’s so, like, “democratic” and shit.) If ‘Black People’ and poor people of whatever colour had actual upward mobility in the USA, the American military might actually have to wage peace for a change.
That’ll be the day!
For more detail about the rampant injustices of the American “Justice System”, read
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...9dd_story.html
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Originally Posted by CurEUs_Male
What's your point? You're talking out of your ass as usual.
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