this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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Unpopular Opinion

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"The US should do X and they suck because they don't!" Each state has it's own laws on education. Some places suck, some do not. It's not a monolith.

"The US has shitty beer lol" We have some of the best beer in the world but it's local/state/region only and never exported unlike fancy Euro beer.

The US for better or worse is a, hmmm 🤔 a unity of government states under a federation called America. It's very hard to get federal laws and bills passed, especially for education. The states want the power to chooses for themselves what they do, and the federal government hangs above them, sometimes intervening.

We are a huge country that has a relatively unique circumstance of government, population, and young brutal history. I'm a Californian and I live in the Bay Area which almost literally a different country than most of America, especially the South and Midwest.

I'm so sick of people, especially smug Europeans, talking like they know Americans and America but they don't really know shit about us except the movies and going to NYC and Miami.

Yes I am having a bad day.

To be honest I love Europe and have friends there that I miss dearly! I've been many times. But dumbassery is dumbassery.

EDIT: You people are an exhausting swarm of pecking ravens and I've spent all the "toxic" energy I want arguing with half you because you just hear what you want to hear and fit the stereotype I loathe I think you only commented out of trained reflex and a few of you are just unsophisticated haters. Whatever, fuck you, and all that jazz.

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[–] stoly 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Preamble: this respon is the result of me learning a lot quickly and although the tone may have the scent of a smack-down, it really isn't. The only thing I knew before I started writing this was that both Michelle and Barack were lawyers, and lawyers are rarely lower class (unless they're shit lawyers, and even then... look at Giuliani).

The Obamas were well-off long before his election; maybe not rich, but certainly solid middle/upper middle-class. Michelle alone had an income of $317k. Even in the state senate, which dragged his salary down, Barack was pulling $90k - for a total household income of $400k. Once he entered the US, that number jumped into the millions.

They were both successful lawyers, and were solidly upper middle-class since well before his election to president. Barack himself went to Columbia and Harvard; both his parents were college educated - his mother was a PhD-degreed anthropologist; he himself attended a private prepatory school.

Barack, at least, did not come from a lower-class upbringing, and since marrying Michelle were well on their way to upper-class.

But that was a reasonable guess; he has been the only recent president who wasn't upper class, at least. You'd have to go back before Reagan to find a president who didn't come from money, and I'm not sure that even then would you find one.