I don’t think we have a shortage of intelligence here in America. I do think we have a shortage of motivation, and we focus on things that don’t matter, while disregarding things that matter a lot. We need to refocus in this country.
Having 2 ex Army personnel attacking our country is a pretty clear signal that we have problems.
I cannot convey how stupid it is to take isolated incidents in a nation of 340M and draw vast conclusions about the nation.
I take broad collective data about the entirety of the country and the rebuttals often come in the form of one-off type matters or the problems of a single city or some other take that lacks any generality. This is insane argumentation and is a giant tell that you shouldn't be discussing public policy.
America does not have a shortage of "motivation." America's economy has grown much more rapidly than peer nations for 15-20 years now. Americans work more hours and are more productive than basically every similar country. These are actual facts, and every economic expert worth a shit knows them. They are not hard to find. I cited to them a few days ago. They are not made up either. There's incredible concern among much of the developed world about how badly it is falling behind the USA.
There are things wrong with America, of course. I don't deny that. But what they typically relate to is that Americans have an abundance of freedom, which has both upsides - great economic performance and a magnet for talent from other parts of the world - and real downsides. The fact that we have a higher rate of drug addiction here is because an extremely free, extremely individualistic country is more reticent to exert the social pressures on drug users to stop doing this bad thing to themselves. The higher crime rate than peer countries is also likely a product of similar social pressures. The immigration issues are in part (but not exclusively) of being the most in demand country in the world to live in.
I think there's an extraordinary lack of perspective among several people in this chain (part of why I left and will remain scarce). Was Biden a suck ass President? Yep, he was. How much did that really matter to America's long-term trajectory? Probably not much. I hope Trump does better than Biden by focusing on his better policies and not his personal drama ... we'll see. But quite frankly, I think America is likely to be in a better spot come 2030 than it was in 2020, something that's been true literally every decade since we got out of the 1930s.
