the USA feels like a mental institution where virtually everyone has some sort of personality disorder... Anyone who thinks guns are the problem are completely disconnected with the reality, americans are so toxic and vile as a society I would expect them to be killing each other en masse regardless of access to guns or not.

@freemo Now make the transfer to the world. A lot of suffering going on, guns or no guns.

@admitsWrongIfProven transfer of what? There is plenty of suffering, the world is far from perfect. But as someone who travels the world more than most (living in a new country every other year or so, at least temporarily) I cant say i ever witnessed the level of psychosis as I do in the USA. Suffering doesnt equate to psychosis.

@freemo Hmmm, i only meant to say that the symptoms are worldwide, manifest themselves in the us a bit earlier. I probably did not explain myself very well.
Guns might not be the central issue here, even if handing them out like candy in the us might aggravate the issue we have.

I propose that the issue is that humans tend to react to stress in a manner well-suited to direct confrontation, while the problem we see is more systemic.

@admitsWrongIfProven

I suppose there is a bit of a spread of some of the psychosis.. but its very minimal compared to the USa.. In the USA its everyone with maybe 1% as an exception. In the netherlands I could spend a year meeting person and its a bad year if even one of them matches the typical psychosis I find in america.

We arent talking about "There are problems", we are talking about a very specific and toxic kind of psychosis, personality disorders.

I will say this though, while it isnt too common in much of the world it is fairly common (though not as bad as the USA) in english speaking countries, the UK is particularly bad, and a close second after the USA.

@freemo The question i would ask would be: "What makes this happen now, when we have the resources to do better?"

@admitsWrongIfProven

Well psychosis is infectious. When you spend your life growing up in it it becomes the norm and you adopt it. Its hardly a new thing, the same sort of extreme polarization and hysteria can be seen through a lot of the modern US history. Just look at the hysteria over communism during the cold war that lead to people like Lucy Ball being arrested for their opinions.

@freemo
Psychosis happening in the us, randomly, for no base reason? Spreading, for no additional reason but that it is infectious, right now, not ten or a hundred years previous?

Everything i heard about renewable energy points towards "we could". Everything i heard about nutrition points toward "we could feed everyone".
Why do we keep people in agony? Does it not make sense to seek a reason that causes people to behave this way, beyond "psychosis is infectious", infecting only one country, as far as i catch your drift?

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@admitsWrongIfProven

Well no, but it is a long established part of the culture. The best objective way I could think of to indirectly measure it, based on the assumption that it is driven by tribal instincts to fight across polarized lines we can just look at congress.

See this animation as a reference: youtu.be/tEczkhfLwqM?si=JXKA6I

One can see the beginings of a divide noticably forming starting in early 1990, but then post 2001 the divide becomes very dramatic with almost no bipartisan agreement of any kind.

Both of these seem to coincide with wars, the gulf war of 1990's and the middle eastern wars (specifically afganastan and Iraq) from 911 onward.

So would seem the triggering event were our two major wars a decade apart.

@freemo Ah, so you are implying your political system is a problem of note.
I can see that, it might well be why the US have such a negative effect on the rest of the world.

The place most amenable for humans to exist, producing the conditions to destroy humanity. Q would be pleased.

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