Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

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I'd just like to point out one thing I've noticed quite a bit and would love Europeans to chime in - that is - European exceptionalism. We, Americans, were known for American exceptionalism but that has eroded to a point where I haven't heard a single good thing about America in the last decade or so. We're shameful and contemptful of our nation. Slightest positive thing is considered nationalistic and right-wing, so we've become accustomed to similar mindset as the Germans post-WWII with regards to nationalism.

But, I am seeing some rise of European exceptionalism and wonder if things have changed over in Europe? Is it more united? Even small things like '.eu' domain is proudly used. I'd be damned if I use '.us' domain. Just a small example of many.

About the only time I see HackerNews coming together is when we talk about semiconductor industry in USA. There is a sense of optimism to invest in US semiconductor industry - but it is short lived.

That cause we not only own .com we even own ICANN at it’s true root. We have nuclear powered carrier groups with real projection of power. Europe has nothing in real terms to compare. A simple example is two formerly grand colonial European powers both invaded and attacked Libya. They literally ran out of mumitions and ordnance. Obama had to come and save the day to destroy Libya. Another example is we left Afghanistan and Britain protested. They still could not stay there alone. And NATO only exists to serve us and help us sell more arms to client states. Europe is not an empire or close to it by any means. The 20th century was Pax Americana. The 21st started as us being sole game in town.now after multiple lost treasure after multiple wars we are slightly injured. But we are still much more powerful.

As for freedom of speech we don’t really have it when it is against the national security state and imperial ambitions. We jailed Eugene Debs the politician for advocating against entering the first world war. We imprisoned the director of Spirit of ‘76 for making a movie on Yankee Doodle which was supposedly anti-British. We now have multiple tech censorship platforms instructed by politicians and the media to censor and deplatform even more.

We have the dollar as the global reserve currency and we can export our inflation. If a country threatens the dollar as a reserve currency by trying to sell their petrol in different currencies we bomb them to hell.

We have a great medical care system for the rich. The lower and middle class need not apply.

We have more flags on display than anywhere I have traveled to in Europe (maybe I missed their national holidays). Just come to Fleet Week in San Francisco to see the flags and uniforms on full display.

It's not EU, but go to Switzerland. Swiss branding permeates literally every thing. Can't go for 5 mins before noticing a Swiss flag in Zurich. Even people of Wyoming would be put off by this much about nationalism.

To be honest, as a european, I don't really understand all this fuss about exceptionalism, being the biggest economy in the world, having the highest amount of billionaires in the world, etc.

I know that it is all a big deal in US and the Americans I speak with every now and then all proudly always talk that greatness, but I would just care about being able to live a life with dignity with socialised services, government pension, sick days, etc, that do not depend on a specific company benefit but belong to the human being as a human being

So I still believe US has greatness, I can see Jeff Bezos created an empire, but then courier have no rights and people dies in a warehouse peeing in a bottle, I see the greatness of Elon Musk but then he just behaves like a child on twitter with non-sense leeching taxpayers

I've gone a bit off topic, but my point is, I am an employee with a government pension, 8% holiday allowance, sick days contribution that are paid monthly from my salary to the department of welfare with pension plan, as many in Europe, and my boss isn't worth thousand times than the average employee and I am not sure if he's classified in the wealthiest person of the world, I don't mind, we're not exceptional, but do our job and have life, I guess European exceptionalism is the lack of it?

What do you think about mega corps in Europe? VW, Siemens, etc?

I was just trying to get some perspective, so thanks! I’d like US to adopt some of the EU bits but without losing the entrepreneural drive and atmosphere. I believe some of them are mutually-exclusive.

Also worth noting corporate policies in EU:

> Sometimes European integration is a byproduct of American policy. Stubbornly national elements of policymaking, such as corporation tax, are slowly being mangled into EU matters thanks to American action. A recent American-led push to set a global minimum tax rate for big business has done more to shunt the EU towards a common tax policy than years of nagging and legal tricks by Brussels. Within the EU, low-tax countries such as Ireland and Hungary wield a veto on its tax affairs. Diplomatic force majeure by America overcame that.

Source: https://www.economist.com/europe/2021/06/17/the-eu-made-in-a...

I am not sure what to think about those mega corps, my idea is that they exist, but their relationship with their workers is subject to the oversight of governments regulations and the relationship they have with the forming unions, etc.

I think their workers have a month of paid time off? The ability to have sick days without receiving them from coworkers? The ability to access socialised health care when they need it without going bankrupt? Paternity and maternity leave which might be nice or not depending on the union country in this case, for Siemens and VW in Germany I guess they have a lot of time off, as Italian I believe Italy doesn't have a good law on paternity leave, but that's improving afaik

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I think as a system EU is good for being working class, but to be honest in the past few years I've met some cases where I was not happy, I have lived in Germany for few years and I left because the last company I was working with fired 5 people who were trying to set up a worker's union, and my last boss in Netherlands was too self-centric on the way he built his startup, so on his exit he bought a big villa with swimming pool, a new tesla, but of the marketing guy who grew the company 150% YoY for the last 3 years, backend developers and frontend developers, CS, no one got anything

While a friend's company who exit being sold to a US corp, gave even 3k to people who were interns for less than 6 months, and people working there longer got even bigger perks.

So I think bigger companies are more regulated compared to smaller ones, so I am not worried about them, some smaller ones have owners appear to have a big ego and greed drive, which is something I would like to improve in seeing beforehand

Another thing I wanted to say is that when I was in Berlin I lived with an American European history/philosophy scholar for a while, and as far as I understood is that US has always been a working class supportive country up to a certain point after the WW2, so I am not surprised to learn that EU is a product of US, I think a lot of working class rights come from policies that originated in US, I just think that at a certain point US diverted from shared wealth and started caring too much about single people wealth

EDIT: So I think you shouldn't take anything from working culture, I think you guys should just go back to where you were a while ago

I'm surprised to read this given the political situation in the United States. As an outsider it seems like the entire Trump movement has a strong basis in nationalism and exceptionalism, and it was endorsed by half the country's population.

American exceptionalism (different in meaning to exceptional) as a concept and usage predates over a century. It was in fact a American communist construct:

The earliest documented use of the specific term "American exceptionalism" is by American communists in intra-communist disputes in the late 1920s.

…..

However, the specific term "American exceptionalism" seems to have originated with American communists in the late 1920s. The earliest documented usage cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is from the Daily Worker, 29 January 1929: "This American 'exceptionalism' applies to the whole tactical line of the C.I. as applied to America."[8] In turn, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (who was likely aware of this earlier use) condemned the "heresy of American exceptionalism" in a tense discussion with Jay Lovestone of the Communist Party USA, after Lovestone echoed the arguments of other American communists that the U.S. is independent of the Marxist laws of history "thanks to its natural resources, industrial capacity, and absence of rigid class distinctions."[8][10] The term later moved into general use by intellectuals.[10][11] "American exceptionalism" was rarely used after the 1930s until U.S. newspapers popularized it in the 1980s to describe America's cultural and political uniqueness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

Thanks, that's a super interesting history of the phrase!

Political rhetoric aside, reading NYTimes or WSJ, I seldom come across any sort of American Exceptionalism especially amongst the tech/SV diaspora. It is quite the opposite - we make fun of American Exceptionalism.

On the otherhand, I hardly ever hear a negative story in the media with regards to EU here in US-media.

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