America is not happy. All politicians approval ratings are in the shitter - Polidicks

No shit, we Americans aren't happy. Our politicians are worthless, money-leeching windbags who do nothing but bicker like children all day long while ignoring the problems we elected them to solve/prevent. Our nation is very slowly falling apart, piece by piece, as we continue to be apathetic as fuck due to inability to change a damn thing. If we could change things in a reasonable and timely manner, like how it's supposed to be, things would at least be slightly less shitty here. We could actually boot out the worthless politicians and replace them with people who give a shit about their job and their constituents. However, all of the systems currently in place are so rigged/broken/thoroughly circumvented that Money-Grubbing Shitbag Red and Also Greedy Asswipe Blue are the only options for Presidency, and smaller elections aren't much better either. You either pick the main candidates, or you pick someone third-party who's never going to be elected, but might (probably won't) force the others to change policy to meet the population's demands. Since almost everyone else besides you and a couple friends will just pick Dem or Rep with zero thought involved besides "I LIKE (COLOR)", it's pretty much impossible to get a third-party into the Oval Office, even though it might just be the first step to curing our political ills. Besides, things are heavily rigged toward the main two candidates in other ways as well. Between corporations using the big boys as shit-stained sock puppets, most third-party candidates having far less financial backing since they're not all worthless shills, and the sheer amount of idiots with no concept of politics beyond Red vs. Blue, it'd take nothing short of a Hallmark movie miracle and/or the biggest change in voter ideology in U.S. history to actually get a third-party President in office. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't bother with trying to fix this enormous mess. If we let these fucking morons continue driving this nation into the dirt without making at least a minimal effort to stop them, we'll be as much to blame as they are for letting it happen unabated. However, what I'm pointing out is just how amazingly-difficult it will be to effectively fight back against this bullshit. How we the non-corporate-funded citizens would ever manage to make a significant change, I wouldn't know, but trying and failing to finally change things is still better than letting the same political ass-ramming continue into infinity. Worst case scenario, we can always say we at least tried to fight back before fleeing this sinking ship of a country.

The people will rise someday, and break those ties that bind.

How about a total government structure revamp that allows more than only 2 shitty parties to choose from? This is how many different parties there's in my countries government to choose, from far right to far left. [url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_Denmark[/url]

[QUOTE=TurboSax;45657796]No shit, we Americans aren't happy. Our politicians are worthless, money-leeching windbags who do nothing but bicker like children all day long while ignoring the problems we elected them to solve/prevent. Our nation is very slowly falling apart, piece by piece, as we continue to be apathetic as fuck due to inability to change a damn thing. If we could change things in a reasonable and timely manner, like how it's supposed to be, things would at least be slightly less shitty here. We could actually boot out the worthless politicians and replace them with people who give a shit about their job and their constituents. However, all of the systems currently in place are so rigged/broken/thoroughly circumvented that Money-Grubbing Shitbag Red and Also Greedy Asswipe Blue are the only options for Presidency, and smaller elections aren't much better either. You either pick the main candidates, or you pick someone third-party who's never going to be elected, but might (probably won't) force the others to change policy to meet the population's demands. Since almost everyone else besides you and a couple friends will just pick Dem or Rep with zero thought involved besides "I LIKE (COLOR)", it's pretty much impossible to get a third-party into the Oval Office, even though it might just be the first step to curing our political ills. Besides, things are heavily rigged toward the main two candidates in other ways as well. Between corporations using the big boys as shit-stained sock puppets, most third-party candidates having far less financial backing since they're not all worthless shills, and the sheer amount of idiots with no concept of politics beyond Red vs. Blue, it'd take nothing short of a Hallmark movie miracle and/or the biggest change in voter ideology in U.S. history to actually get a third-party President in office. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we shouldn't bother with trying to fix this enormous mess. If we let these fucking morons continue driving this nation into the dirt without making at least a minimal effort to stop them, we'll be as much to blame as they are for letting it happen unabated. However, what I'm pointing out is just how amazingly-difficult it will be to effectively fight back against this bullshit. How we the non-corporate-funded citizens would ever manage to make a significant change, I wouldn't know, but trying and failing to finally change things is still better than letting the same political ass-ramming continue into infinity. Worst case scenario, we can always say we at least tried to fight back before fleeing this sinking ship of a country.[/QUOTE] The issue is we put those money leaching douchbags into office. A government only functions as well and as efficiently as its populace. The American people have no one to blame but themselves since the government ultimately answers to them but we don't do shit with it. I'm so sick of blaming a government that can't function if people don't fucking vote.

Funny how just a few years ago saying "America is in the shitter and only getting worse" on SH would get you swamped and called an idiot... ...yet here we are. Were do we even fucking start? The politics... I suppose so. But I feel like we should save the best for last. Let's start with the fact that every day millions of people begrudgingly put up with the soul-crushing system. In America, not only are you just another cog in the machine, you are the cog in the machine of a mad-man's doomsday weapon, and you are a very replaceable cog. With so many desperate people out of work, a boss has total control of his own workers. Finding a good job in this economy takes years of patience, timing, and opportunity; one misstep and you're back to square one. A boss can threaten to fire you and you very well know that he/she can and will, because they lose nothing. You, as a cog in the machine, are worthless. You do not stand to profit from the grand machinations of the mad-man at the head of the machine, you only serve to grind fruitlessly for whatever semblance of a reward happens to seep downward to you. This is trickle down economics, and it is what has killed America. The first problem is that, just by plain old human nature, it doesn't fucking work. The only incentive the people at the top have to allow the wealth to drip to the bottom of the economic food chain is so that those at the bottom can buy their shit. Thus, they only ever pay just as much as is needed and employ just as many as is needed, never more. We, as citizens, do not stand to benefit from this system in any way. When you turn on the TV or listen to the radio you are bombarded with ads telling you what [I]you[/I] need to improve your life, what you [I]must[/I] buy unless you want to be a failure, because you deserve it. But when you realize it is all some grand scheme into conning you out of your money, you give up. You realize just how pathetically useless 99% of the population is, because of the almighty dollar. Culturally, we accept it, like that system is the way life has to work. So many movies or shows involve some schmuck going to his miserable day job only to return home, bicker with the wife and kids, and retire to another day of the shit. And that is [I]normal[/I] in America. We accept that we are meaningless. We accept that we are all just cows waiting to be milked. We accept how futile the whole system is. And yet we love every second of it. So many patriotic fuckwits will praise the unendings "freedums" and shoot down every problem with "we're still the best nation on earth". Wake-up call you fucking morons: we aren't the best. America never was the fucking best, because even when the system didn't poop all over the little guy we were still creating terrible wars half a world away, endorsing atrocities and funding the fuckwits who did it, and partaking in the shadiest bullshit ever witnessed (or fittingly [I]un[/I]witnessed) just to try and stop the Soviets who, despite being dead, we remain ideologically opposed to for no other reason than to give redneck Cletus someone to direct his anger at that isn't our failure of a government. America has always been a shitstain on the world, and prior to World War Two that was par for the course for a world government, but now the rest of the world is getting just as many "freedums" as us, if not more, and they aren't letting corporations pound them in the ass like some cheap whore that gives [I]them[/I] money for sex. Our most glamorous events in recent memory were storming into several undeveloped nations to hunt down a few select targets and proceeding to bomb the fuck out of their poor brick shithouses, painting the picture of an oppressive, massive, and culturally out-of-touch empire desperately trying to stomp out any resistance to its hegemony. What kind of picture does that paint in the Middle East when we go recklessly carpet-bombing a less fortunate society that has struggled for many years? That's where Cletus' rampant patriotism gets us: useless wars that seem to create more enemies than they fix. And sadly all these useless wars spawned from our pointless feud with the Russians, and even today being a supporter of communism in America will get you ostracized like its the McCarthy-era 1950s. And yet we as a people continue to resign ourselves to this shit because we know we have no control, that we are nothing in this system. There's 300 million people here and most are too hungry, tired, or financially worried to give a fuck about whether our system is amoral or not. They don't consider the wretchedness of trickle-down economics or observe other countries (like those in Europe) that do it better. We would rather be force-fed information that aligns with our ideology by sources that flat out lie (like Fox "News") than sit down and discuss such things as "compromise". We do the same bullshit we did against the Soviets, but in an inter-party scale of "the other party is the enemy and they are wrong about everything". Politics is a fucking grudge match that sees less involvement from the citizens than the average debate on which Twilight character was better for Bella. Its fucking pitiful that our citizens are either so apathetic as to not want to do anything, or would rather have it boiled down into simple party loyalty bullshit so their pea-brained minds can comprehend it and they don't have to do the work of "researching candidates" or "making an informed decision". Part of that is the lack of education here. Nobody values it because anything that doesn't immediately land you a job is a waste of money. And why should citizens have to pay [I]for education?[/I] It should be a guaranteed right, but that would mean the colleges that undoubtedly contribute to the shitty lobbies will no longer contribute, and the big boys in charge lose some more money. Same with healthcare. You know you live in a shit place when [I]keeping people alive[/I] is a business. And I can't fucking blame them. As I have said so many times before, the general consensus among the people is that we feel powerless to control our destiny, and we all are. What is the point of trying when most of your candidates are corporate puppets and those that aren't quickly get mobbed and shit on. Our government is both the scariest thing in the world and a bunch of absolute fucking pussies who won't do anything without corporate approval, because it is common knowledge that it is corrupt. We see it every election with mass amounts of lobbying and gerrymandering, and nobody cares because the only people who can stop it are the people who stand to profit from it. The "grudge match" politics only serve to distract us from the overlying issue: our whole government is a broken, corrupt, ever-expanding and twisted bureaucracy where achieving any sort of progress is clearly an accident. And the system, in turn, helps to make you feel like a useless corporate plaything that only exists so that the upper classes can leach off of you. America as a whole so badly slants itself in favor of the filthy rich, and they will never change that. My advice to Americans: we need to fucking leave. It is hard, and life in another country will be just as bad until we get the benefits citizens do, but it ensures our children don't have to suffer through this shit. The USS America is sinking fast, and we need to get our spots on the fucking lifeboats. There is no way the system can sustain itself; the super-rich can only feed off those below them for so long before either the population gets pissed or the money runs out. The government remains completely incapable of solving the simplest issues, not do to incompetence but because preserving the status quo favors the rich, but the world around them will continue to hurl problems that they will be unable to solve. It is only a matter of time until the factors combine and America fucking implodes. Sorry about the rant, but living here pisses me off. I, as a middle class white boy with a fairly well-off family, never see these issues personally (but I do see them first hand: a simple stroll down the street is enough for anyone too see) but that doesn't make them any less shitty. America may look like a good option compared to the rest of the world, but the bar is so fucking low it shoots through the floor. Being "great" compared to Somalia or North Korea is not a fucking achievement: it is normalcy. But compared to other developed nations, America is shit and only getting worse, and that shouldn't fucking happen.

[QUOTE=TheDestroyerOfall;45658646]The people will rise someday, and break those ties that bind.[/QUOTE] I can pull meaningless, overused quotes from my ass to. "Freedom good, Politics baaaaad. Four legs good, two legs bad." - Pvt. Martin, 2014.

[QUOTE=TheDestroyerOfall;45658646]The people will rise someday, and break those ties that bind.[/QUOTE] what are you talking about we aren't thinking of rebelling against a tyrannical regime

[QUOTE=cdr248;45658782]what are you talking about [B]i'm not [/B]thinking of rebelling against a tyrannical regime[/QUOTE] ftfy

This is actually encouraging. It means Americans aren't quite as stupid as I thought, and are wising up to the fact that everything is shitty and meaningless "Morning in America"-esque platitudes aren't going to cut it.

[QUOTE=Used Car Salesman;45658907]This is actually encouraging. It means Americans aren't quite as stupid as I thought, and are wising up to the fact that everything is shitty and meaningless "Morning in America"-esque platitudes aren't going to cut it.[/QUOTE] So you expect people like me to find a weapon and strike down innocent politicians and turn our country into....some other form of government? Yeah things aren't PRISTINE DIAMOND PERFECTION in America, but does it really really have to be? There is no possible way to reach Utopia, keep that in mind.

[QUOTE=Xyrec;45657416][video=youtube;WGiX5tbLKiY]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiX5tbLKiY[/video][/QUOTE] This is actually a great movie and despite being made in the 70's is still relevant today.

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45658952]So you expect people like me to find a weapon and strike down innocent politicians and turn our country into....some other form of government? Yeah things aren't PRISTINE DIAMOND PERFECTION in America, but does it really really have to be? There is no possible way to reach Utopia, keep that in mind.[/QUOTE] There's a difference between reaching for an Utopia and wanting things to be less shitty. I don't think an armed rebellion would be a sensible thing though.

[QUOTE=_Axel;45659006]There's a difference between reaching for an Utopia and wanting things to be less shitty. I don't think an armed rebellion would be a sensible thing though.[/QUOTE] Then what the hell do you want? You all need to think and be specific on what would really really work? We're talking about wanting to change something that's been set for over 200 years now.

[QUOTE=FlakAttack;45658977]This is actually a great movie and despite being made in the 70's is still relevant today.[/QUOTE] Yes let's yell out the windows, that's going to do something. How about save the yelling for outside the windows of actual congress men who will hear it?

-snip bad reading-

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45659043]Then what the hell do you want? You all need to think and be specific on what would really really work? We're talking about wanting to change something that's been set for over 200 years now.[/QUOTE] Actual healthcare, less government sponsored abuse by big companies, someone with actual common sense in government, a non-retarded political system, an end to your rampant terrorism?

I said america was shit 3 years ago and, nothing has changed. The political system that is. I actually like some of the culture and people I've met.

Reverse Citizens United. Ban partisan gerrymandering. Those two simple steps could do wonders for bringing integrity back to the US political system. Everyone just moans and says good luck getting Congress to accept that. And, well, it's your government, Americans. If it no longer serves the people it should be representing, do something about it other than bitch online and refuse to vote.

[QUOTE=ilikecorn;45659053]No but for the amount of money I pour into taxes I should at least expect some basic god damned services from the government, instead I get "lol pay for your own healthcare", and absolutely abhorent infrastructure/schools, a group of alphabet soup agencies that are steadily increasing their own power to fuck over the average joe, and a congress that wouldn't do a damn thing about any of these things. It doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to stop being the piece of shit that it is. When it's nearly fucking impossible to get disability or unemployment, you've got a problem. When you work, things like disability and unemployment are taken from your check, to pay for others who are on it, and yet when you lose your job your likelihood of being on any of these is next to 0, sometimes for up to 6 months, hell, sometimes never at all. That kind of shit is unacceptable.[/QUOTE] But Obamacare went into action didn't it? and what alphabet soup agencies? I have no idea what those are. Honestly none of this shit is currently affecting me, my family's medical care is just fine. I am just fine. I have a nice home, I eat alot of great delicious food, and I can buy a shit ton of video games. I ride my bike all over the city and besides general Chicago crap like the potholes and the Mayor being daft with the Traffic cameras, everything is just peachy here. Unless Congress does something, really something to upset me, then I'm quite content.

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45659108]and what alphabet soup agencies? I have no idea what those are.[/QUOTE] The NSA, the FBI, the DEA...

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45659108]But Obamacare went into action didn't it? and what alphabet soup agencies? I have no idea what those are. Honestly none of this shit is currently affecting me, my family's medical care is just fine. I am just fine. I have a nice home, I eat alot of great delicious food, and I can buy a shit ton of video games. I ride my bike all over the city and besides general Chicago crap like the potholes and the Mayor being daft with the Traffic cameras, everything is just peachy here. Unless Congress does something, really something to upset me, then I'm quite content.[/QUOTE] Suppose you or one of your relatives is diagnosed with cancer, and has to pay for treatment. Or what if the person in your family with the highest income gets fired and can't find another job?

[QUOTE=Miskav;45659084]Actual healthcare[/QUOTE] Obamacare [QUOTE=Miskav;45659084]less government sponsored abuse by big companies[/QUOTE] Pretty sure that kind of abuse really only happens in China, and if in America, unfortunatly only to illegal Immigrants. [QUOTE=Miskav;45659084] someone with actual common sense in government[/QUOTE] Oh please, do tell me who this person is, so we can elect him as our savior of America for a few years, then go back to whining and complaining about this shit all over again? [QUOTE=Miskav;45659084] a non-retarded political system, an end to your rampant terrorism?[/QUOTE] Name that system, we're all ears.

So before Obamacare everyone was happy for it because it was going to help poor families out. Now it's evil? I have a feeling all you people are doing is pissing in the wind, sitting at your computers to cry about a broken country. You know, if you really really really feel like this country is broken. The get the flying fuck off your fat asses. Take a train, bus, car, plane, bike, or just walk to Washington D.C. Go up to the Capitol building, and complain where the politicians can actually HEAR you moaning. [editline]11th August 2014[/editline] I'm done with these threads. It's either pulling out the same quotes from books, movies, and video games to make some point we've already heard dozens of times. Or it's just complaining about wanting to change things, or stating things without providing real hard examples of ways to change things, rather than copy off the other country's homework. You can cry and be miserable, I'll be here, happy and content until the Capitol actually DOES something to step on my foot.

Before Obamacare, everyone was happy for it because it promised to be something resembling a proper health insurance system. Then it got gutted and corrupted from attempts to compromise with the GOP (who were basically treating Obamacare like political terrorism despite it being a Romney plan to start with). Pvt.Martin, have you ever heard the story about the frog in the pot of water?

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45659335]You can cry and be miserable, I'll be here, happy and content until the Capitol actually DOES something to step on my foot.[/QUOTE] Being content with what you have isn't really going to help your country get back on its feet.

[QUOTE=elixwhitetail;45659376] Pvt.Martin, have you ever heard the story about the frog in the pot of water?[/QUOTE] You ever heard the story about the story that's trying to make a point that we've all heard a thousand times?

[QUOTE=_Axel;45659391]Being content with what you have isn't really going to help your country get back on its feet.[/QUOTE] But I don't think anything is wrong. I'm not struggling under the American Government. I feel no strife or stress besides personal family issues. I'm content because none of what everyone is saying, is truly affecting me, thus I ask, why should I join in this orchestra of whining?

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45659411]But I don't think anything is wrong. I'm not struggling under the American Government. I feel no strife or stress besides personal family issues. I'm content because none of what everyone is saying, is truly affecting me, thus I ask, why should I join in this orchestra of whining?[/QUOTE] Because you care for others and are not an egoistical dick?

When did I say I had an ego? So let me get this straight. If I personally feel like I have no problems at the moment with the American Government, because I don't feel affected, Then I'm some Egotistical asshole who pees on homeless people's faces while wiping my ass with money? Is that what you all think of the other side whose just does not care about any of this political bullshit and just wants to enjoy their lives?

[QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45659458]When did I say I had an ego? So let me get this straight. If I personally feel like I have no problems at the moment with the American Government, because I don't feel affected, Then I'm some Egotistical asshole who pees on homeless people's faces while wiping my ass with money? Is that what you all think of the other side whose just does not care about any of this political bullshit and just wants to enjoy their lives?[/QUOTE] There's a difference between not feeling involved and thinking things are fine and dandy as they are. [QUOTE=Pvt. Martin;45658952]Yeah things aren't PRISTINE DIAMOND PERFECTION in America, but does it really really have to be? There is no possible way to reach Utopia, keep that in mind.[/QUOTE] That post gave off the impression that you were thinking nothing was wrong with America as it is.