Not really. America stands for something, they wrote a whole document about it.

There is a big difference between being "American" and being something like "German" because Germany has existed for so long as different governments and the thing that ties it together is not an ethos, but an ethnicity. Being American is different, there's no ethnicity that makes one American, there is only it's ethos. The ideals written in the declaration of independence are American values.

And that's the weak link of tying ideals and values to a location like a country:

The group elected to lead and represent this location also represent ideals and values, so THEIR ideals and values become inseparable of the location they were elected to represent.

For a certain period in the mid-1900s, "German values" meant something different than it did before and after, because Germany was represented by a different leader...

And what I'm trying to explain is, that this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.

Germany had the Paulskirche-, the Bismarck- and the Weymar-Constitution, all of them before that certain Leader elected into power. He got to define who is worthy/unworthy, decide how to read the document his party represents and change the definition of "un-German"

> this paper doesn't matter if it is represented by someone who doesn't uphold its content.

Not at all...that's when the paper matters the most, because the electorate can see that the person in charge is not upholding our values, purely in contrast to the document. The document sets the baseline. Writing things down has value.

The words on the paper represent the ideas of what it means to be American. Trump has nothing to do with that. His actions, when the do not align with that paper, can be described as "anti-American".

The US has had a total of _one_ government and what it means to be American is in the founding document of that government. To be German is to lay claim to a history and cultural lineage that is filled with many different governments and even different states all-together.

The US has distinct regional and cultural identities as well, to be a Texan means something more akin to being German. Texas has a history that extends beyond the US. One can be American and Texan precisely because they are describe a different thing.

To be American is to ascribe to a certain set of ideals and, as far as someone isn't living up to those ideals, they are "anti-American".

Technically, the US has had multiple governments: the original 1781 Articles of Confederation qualifies, as it had a Congress (although a weak one).

What I read is "what it means to be American" is more clear in ideology and values as "what it means to be German", and I can only wholeheartedly disagree with that.

As someone who is neither born American nor German, I can tell you that both terms describe a subjective feeling and not objective facts. Moreover, they are terms to create unity/solidarity among those who identify with them and exclude those who don't.

Unlike of course someone born Italian telling you that it's clear for everyone what it means to be anti-Italian: ...don't know, doesn't eat pasta or sthg...? /s

Germany specifically hasnt existed for very long. its a younger country than the US, but it was made to combine people of an ethnicity

That kind of gets at my point. To be "German" means something different than being "American".

What libertarian utopia do you live in?

You forgot to mention that those people weren't considered "white" at the time.

> Your average cattle, sheep, or other livestock farmer

is a very different person in different countries. The US has large scale agriculture and use large scale equipment.

Those large scale farms aren't the ones who have a problem with John Deere or repairability. Corporate will handle that.

Would you be upset if someone at the WalMart central data center called the local police because they saw someone with a gun in a Walmart at a remote location?

That's what happened here. A private company saw a gun inside their property and called the police.

I would be unless there was a posted no guns sign. Remote areas are were it is most appropriate to have a gun for personal protection.

It is generally not legal to open carry in California.

> 5G SA isn't still available for the broad masses yet.. and they are talking of 7G?

Talking is one of the steps towards making things available to the broad masses. You have to start these things ahead of time so they are ready to deploy when the time comes.

I largely agree with you and, at this moment, LLMs still have shortcomings that allow me to get into the weeds and solve some tricky problems now and then.

> we gave it the largest premium territories

Not premium to humans.

Birth rates fall as prosperity increases.

Whatever this is, it's not prosperity.

What other countries have you visited?

GDP doesn't measure prosperity.

Prosperity doesn't measure happiness.

to replacement, we're rapidly falling below. distributuon and related trends are extremely grim.

> Basically, to empower the public now means, how to bastardize your arguments into an emotional narrative that is palatable to the commoners but probably misses all relevant arguments.

It's just to mobilize NIMBYs, a thing everyone was against when people were trying to protect their neighborhood against construction projects that would increase noise and stress the local public infrastructure, like high density housing.

But now that there's a different noisy project stressing public infrastructure, NIMBY seems like the right move, I guess.