Look, I'm not "proud of my country" because I do not own what other people do. I do own, in some small part, what the government does. I don't owe it to you or anyone to engage in nationalism. So sorry.

Hm? I wasn't replying to you.

And I get tired of people who tell people every bit as American as they are to leave. It's disgusting and unacceptable.

Look, I have spent some time in other countries, and I have spoken to people from them. It is NOT super common for many other countries to say much more than "Yeah, it's all right, I like it." And if they see some shitty things going down, they absolutely criticize it.

I wish more people loved their country enough to work towards improving it. That involves acknowledging our fuckups. I don't see denial as patriotic. Jingoistic, sure, but not patriotic. If it is a love of country, it is a sick one.

I guess you could, but "Canadians say 'eh' a lot" doesn't carry the same sting as "You frequently support brutal dictators and have funded the coups of democratically elected leaders who weren't explicitly pro-American, then talk about that region of the world which you intentionally and systematically destabilized…

The GUI strikes me as a bigger deal than the mouse, personally. GUIs were really important to making personal computers more than a niche product.

I don't know, "lol America" seems pretty tame considering we're massive dicks to the rest of the world and to a large segment of our own population. What do we expect? I mean, not all of us are like that, but the people who aren't are probably also the people who get that we've earned being on kind of crappy terms…

I'mma comment here and probably get a lot of people angry at me, but as an American, I am a little embarrassed that other Americans will take a legit criticism of America and refuse to acknowledge it because you say something as tame as "lol America."

You do have the ability to suffer a little ribbing at America's expense and address the content of the conversation. We aren't the hottest shit in the rest of the world. We've been kind of crappy to them. We're currently arguing that PRISM is cool because we're spying on non-Americans, for instance. We're kind of…

He thinks if we give people the "freedom" to misbehave, more people will misbehave. I think he's ignoring the fact that we make many many many things illegal that aren't elsewhere, and the penalties are stiffer.

I'm sorry to say it, but if America has become a joke to foreigners I think we've probably earned that several times over by now. Especially since we can't deal if someone mocks us since it goes against our weird need to say we're a unique and blessed country etc.

He is pretty correct, though. The American prison system is shameful.

I understand that acceptable targets of violence have historically been classes of people who people have arbitrarily decided aren't actually people. You have vividly illustrated you're not any better than that.

Local candidates don't do so hot if nobody cares about the platform you're running on. :-/

Yeah, but Texas really does objectively have worse prisons than most of the rest of the country. Higher incarceration rate, worse funding, overcrowding, worse treatment of minorities, worse violence, and worse guard on prisoner abuse, and a climate of unusually aggressive privatization (even for the US) on top of all…

It's a good thing there's a class of people it's OK to rape. Without people like you, what would rapists do?

You're talking about the fall of DOMA, but several states in the past year have legalized gay marriage in their states through legislative means. And without other kinds of lobbying, we wouldn't have justices aware that being gay is acceptable at all.

Oh, god, that guy's face twisting.

When that guy on the Twilight Zone broke his glasses.