Most of the anti-American sentiment I've seen on SM over the last 2 or 3 years has been from Americans. It sucks here unless you're rich, racist, and/or incredibly stupid.

find criticizing a something stronger helped them feel better

🤦

Are you for real? And you are surprised US and USians get criticised?

I honestly think there are definitely, if not bots, agents/feds that come on here and really push to radicalize people.

As someone who is generally pro-America, pro- capitalism and pro-liberalism (as in, classical, not today's fucked version), it's really interesting to converse with people who are just as crazy as the "God is King" types, just flipped on the modern versions of conspiracies and bad takes.

Welcome to a non US centric platform. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit,Digg, etc are all US centric platforms so there will be a pile-on when US criticism is mentioned.

Lemmy.world is not a US centric instance so you don't see the pile-on. You get actual opinion on an over represented country.

I agree wholeheartedly. My assumption was that such behavior was simply a symptom of the relatively larger proportion of Europeans on this site, and their obvious jealousy and insecurity regarding Americans. I still believe that is the most likely explanation. To be clear, America has done hella dumb shit lately, and is deserving of criticism on many fronts. But what OP is referring to goes beyond that. It's emotional animosity that overflows the bounds of reasonable criticism and targets individuals rather than governmental decisions or policies.

The number of times that I have seen people refer to the American contribution to WWII as cowardice, meaningless, etc, is too damn high. 400,000 Americans died in that war. Read a fucking history book you ignorant, insensitive fucks.

It's certainly possible that there are agents in our midst sowing divisiveness, although unlikely. I don't have any beef with any nationality, because I don't judge people based on where they were born. That should be common sense, but it's apparently difficult for some people to wrap their heads around.

Lemmy was founded to be where anti-American Americans would go after a lot of their subs were quarantined on Reddit.

That said, it has a major American focus because a lot of users are angry with the American system and don't have a ton of experience with others directly. They've developed an echo chamber here and only got interrupted by the Reddit exodus.

Well, I'm a real European who is not a fan of the US. Not to the point where I'd prefer Russia or other dictatorship shitholes, but it's like having to choose between getting kicked in the balls really hard and getting shot in the head (just for context, I'm not one of the people who enjoy being kicked in the balls).

Every sane person in this situation would choose getting kicked in the balls, but that doesn't mean you're really happy about it.

You mean lemmy, the platform created and maintained by staunch marxist-leninists? That lemmy strikes you as anticapitalist and antiAmerican?

Weird.

I understand the concern and certainly believe that troll farms are slowly creeping into Lemmy as it gains traction. However, I think most of US bashing is authentic as it reflects the enormous impact of US political life on the rest of the planet. Moreover, other countries receive a constant flux of information about the US, to the point where it seems that US news is as important as domestic news. The fact that Trump remains omnipresent in the media doesn't help either.

It really takes living in America to appreciate how necessary anti-american sentiment is. Regime change begins at home.

Fuck the US hyper-centrism. If this place was so anti US, why are all the communities titled "News" and "Politics" exclusively for discussing seppo shit? This place is less US-centric than other platforms but is still extremely US focused. If you look for more than a second, you will find anti-russia, anti-china, anti-israel and anti-germany shit too (just to name a few). Finally, I just want to say, fuck the United States of America and everything that that hellhole represents. I am sorry that you have to live there

Stop fucking declaring war on your allies and neighbours if you don't want people fucking pissed at you.

When the sentiment is anti-west generally, and anti-EU, then it seems sus to me, just anti-American feels pretty valid.

America has made a LOT of mistakes, and started (or backed) plenty of wars/revolutions. We’re the only major industrialized nation without some form of healthcare for all. The gap between rich and poor is tremendous, and only growing larger. Our legal system has some flaws, to say the least. America is the richest, most powerful country in the world. We didn’t get that way by always making ethical decisions. There’s a great deal of legitimate criticism out there.

Plus, this is a worldwide site. If Americans themselves don’t always like how the country is run, why should people of other countries always speak positively of America?

I would be surprised if hostile countries thought that Lemmy was popular enough to bother infiltrating. They probably haven't heard of Lemmy at all.

I think the explanation is simply that Lemmy's users are all contrarians, or else they would be using Reddit. Frequently they are of the international leftist sort due to the founder effect.

No