I don’t think this concern is justified in most cases, but I’m not really in position to argue. If this were a common problem, I think I’d have heard about it, but outside of the occasional sensationalist news piece or Hollywood/TV thriller, I haven’t.
I do know an old joke, though: Before visiting a foreign country, it’s important to memorize three phrases in the local language:
I guess everyone’s got their pet theory for why the Dems lost, even though all the votes aren’t in yet, never mind any scientific analysis of them.
Speaking of the real world, who is standing by doing nothing and who is actively trying to kill you with a flame thrower? 😂
I don’t know what a “treat monster nature” is. I haven’t traveled much outside the core, so I can’t speak to this first-hand, but my impression is that most of the world is mostly a safe place to visit. There aren’t a lot of places that are going to punish you for renting hotel rooms and eating at restaurants as an American. Most people around the world know how to distinguish between America the empire and a civilian American spending money into the local economy.
I don’t fully understand your question, and I doubt that I’m qualified to answer, because I have virtually every privilege, and I’ve never thought about international travel but from my own easy mode perspective.
Neoliberalism has been “dead” for over a decade, and yet it lumbers on as a zombie ideology.
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
— Antonio Gramsci
Fascism isn’t on the rise in the US in particular and the West in general for no reason. The cause is neoliberalism, which is monopoly capitalism in decay. I wrote about this two months ago, but I’ll spare everyone the copypasta and just link to it.
The last ~45 years of grinding neoliberalism shows me little reason to believe that we can.
The US has never been and will never be a democracy, because it was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
The US working class got some temporary gains in the 20th century (and I could describe the extraordinary—unique, really—causes of them), but those are very unlikely to ever fully return under capitalism.
You say “travel the world,” but where realistically will you travel? Westerners tend to travel almost exclusively to other imperial core countries and to popular tourist spots in the periphery that cater to imperial core tourists.
Yes? “Consciously” and “knowingly” would be synonyms in the context.
I don’t think these are analyses of Palestine & Ukraine outcomes, I think they’re doomer vibes. I don’t have a crystal ball, but Western Ukraine as a rump state seems like the most likely outcome.
Are we too old to understand the skibidi kids these days? 😂