[Xelbair]

'You' elect the government. Even if you didn't vote for ruling parties, majority did.

Also it seems to be a common thing in Europe to refer to other's country populace OR government as plural 'You'. From my small sample size of 3, Americans were always confused by this and thought they were personally attacked.

[sjapkee]

>'You' elect the government. Even if you didn't vote for ruling parties, majority did.

It's funny that people still believe governments let people elect anything. You can vote, you can ignore elections - result will be the same, your opinion doesn't matter

[Xelbair]

Then maybe some forces - economic, or realpolitik ones, or whatever etc - make the current situation a reality, no matter your political allegiance. Maybe it is infact an optimal resource distribution for current situation.

Or system is fundamentally broken, and You, as in populace, need to change it. you can talk to people, political party allegiance does not need to be a tribal relationship.

take your pick.

[umanwizard]

> 'You' elect the government. Even if you didn't vote for ruling parties, majority did.

So what? Even if 99% of the population agrees with doing something, that has no bearing on whether I agree with it or am responsible for it.

And, anyway, no major candidate would have lifted sanctions on those countries, so nobody could have voted against them even if they wanted to.

> Also it seems to be a common thing in Europe to refer to other's country populace OR government as plural 'You'. From my small sample size of 3, Americans were always confused by this and thought they were personally attacked.

Perhaps Europeans, with their higher-quality parliamentary systems, are more likely to uncritically accept the idea that governments actually represent their people, whereas Americans are more likely to realize it's a sham.

[Xelbair]

>So what? Even if 99% of the population agrees with doing something, that has no bearing on whether I agree with it or am responsible for it.

You are a cog, participating in system, voting in it and acting in it. You could wash away your responsibility only if you go back to serfdom.

>Perhaps Europeans, with their higher-quality parliamentary systems, are more likely to uncritically accept the idea that governments actually represent their people, whereas Americans are more likely to realize it's a sham.

well.. not really, i would say Europe is worse off as EU is basically one-party system with flavor distinctions. It is different on country-level but that varies on case by case basis.

Nevertheless the idea of democracy stays the same - you vote, directly or indirectly, on issues - every citizen is a participant in decision-making process.

No matter the political system, or ruling entity you have it will always have those 3 goals(in order), cynically speaking:

- self-preservation

- changing resource distribution in it's favor

- expanding it's influence outside the borders

The only thing keeping our rights(and that includes human rights) is the fact that governments can be replaced by different one(in healthy systems) with populace support, or that populace will revolt and reenact french revolution again(in unhealthy systems), or outside forces will take over.

Systems can be changed - either by evolution or revolution. Take your pick.

[lsaferite]

To be clear, less than 1/3 of the voting age population of the US voted for Trump and less than 1/2 of actual voters voted for Trump. That is not a majority in either metric.

Lumping the entire population of a country under the term "you" when discussing contentious actions of the government of a country is inflammatory. You (yes, YOU) are directly accusing an individual by using the personal pronoun 'you'. The general populous of a country has close to zero say in what their government does on a daily (even yearly or longer) basis. Do I have anything against your average Iranian, Israeli, or North Korean? No, not unless they are directly in support of the objectionable policies of their respective governments. Barring evidence of this, I presume they are like most other citizens of a country, mostly along for the ride.

So, perhaps instead of attacking individuals who quite probably had nothing to do with their current government making the decision they made you should attack the governments in question and the leaders of those governments.