Should they actually leave the country?

[mjr]

All of these "celebrities" who threaten to leave the country if a candidate they don't like wins the Presidency?

People said the same thing when George W. Bush was elected. They said the same thing when President Obama was elected. Now people are threatening to do so if Trump gets elected.

Many of them say it, and I think that NONE of them will do it.

But hey, the airlines are ready when they are...

Edited:

Case in point: Eddie Vedder threatened to leave if George W. Bush got elected. He's still here. "Babs" did, too, as well as Robert Altman.

Rush Limbaugh, same thing. He threatened to leave if Obamacare passed. It did. He's still here.

Stephen Baldwin said if President Obama got nominated (though he probably meant elected) he'd leave the country. He's still here, too.

Just asking.

[s_stabeler]

It depends on what you mean. If you mean that the candidate they don't like getting elected creates an obligation on them to leave, then no. It's usually implicit in such statements that the celebrity in question believes that the country would be unbearable for them to stay in if the candidate does what they are planning to- it could either be the candidate's plans aren't as bad as the celebrity expected, or the celebrity decided it wasn't actually unbearable.

If you mean they should stop claiming they'll leave the country when they actually merely dislike the candidate, then yes, they really should knock it off.

[HYHYBT]

At this point, I believe it's done more as a joke than as anything intended to be taken seriously.

[Estil]

You know how the left (as the US defines it at least) often insists that the US is just a rotten evil racist/imperialist/sexist/etc country and conservatives might respond with "love it or leave it"? Only problem with all that is, where would they go? IOW, is there a country out there that has about the same living standards/freedoms the US has and has no (or almost no) history of racism, imperialism, xenophobia or what have you whatsoever? A country where there's nothing in its history that it needs to be ashamed of for the previously named reasons.

[ben_who]

You know how the left (as the US defines it at least) often insists that the US is just a rotten evil racist/imperialist/sexist/etc country and conservatives might respond with "love it or leave it"? Only problem with all that is, where would they go? IOW, is there a country out there that has about the same living standards/freedoms the US has and has no (or almost no) history of racism, imperialism, xenophobia or what have you whatsoever? A country where there's nothing in its history that it needs to be ashamed of for the previously named reasons.

Kind of swings both ways, doesn't it? Right-wingers threatened to quit the country en masse if the ACA went through; where in the industrialized world are they going to go that doesn't have some form of single-payer system? Do they really want to go to countries where public schools require the teaching of the dominant Abrahamic religion as fact? Do they really want to go live where we're sending our manufacturing jobs?

Any country in Western Europe can give left-wingers a better deal. Where are right-wingers going to find a government that lets corporations have their way and is small enough to drown in a bathtub?

[Shangri-laschild]

I never understood why complaining about your state/country gets met with a "love it or leave it" mentality. There is no room in that option for trying to improve a state/country that you want to love but has a lot of problems. It seems to be a fairly common response to people complaining.

I think the point isn't so much finding a country that has a less crappy past than ours, it's finding one that has a less racist, sexist, "all the poor are criminals who want to cheat the system" attitude which isn't as hard to do.

[s_stabeler]

again, it depends on your POV of the situation. To the people who say "if you don't like it, leave" their view is that the people who think America could do with improvement want to make America something fundamentally different- to them, being forced to act like a mature human being is an infringement of their rights- and, since the United States was founded on the principle that they are inalienable rights, to them, being made to treat everyone with respect is a breach of the fundamental idea behind the Constitution- hence, they see it as an attack on America itself- hence "if you don't like it, live somewhere else"- if you hate America, aftre all, why do you live there?

Yeah- it's fairly stupid, but there IS a logic behind it.

[Shangri-laschild]

True though if they look at it that way, they also have to acknowledge (though I know they won't) that another thing all this was founded on was the idea that if the majority of the people don't agree, they have a right to try to change things

[Estil]

Kind of swings both ways, doesn't it? Right-wingers threatened to quit the country en masse if the ACA went through; where in the industrialized world are they going to go that doesn't have some form of single-payer system? Do they really want to go to countries where public schools require the teaching of the dominant Abrahamic religion as fact? Do they really want to go live where we're sending our manufacturing jobs?

Any country in Western Europe can give left-wingers a better deal. Where are right-wingers going to find a government that lets corporations have their way and is small enough to drown in a bathtub?

My question was where would those who think the US is the absolute worst in terms of racism/sexism/xenophobia/etc go though. Let's talk about western Europe for a moment, aren't they the ones that did that whole colonialism thing? Wasn't Portugal the last to let go of their African colonies (and they certainly didn't do so by choice)? Wasn't Spain under a fascist dictatorship up until the mid 70s? And France, oh boy are they nationalist big time, they're even openly calling for Muslims to not be able to wear their head scarves. Germany, eh where I do begin? But surely good ol' neutral Switzerland would be ideal right? Well...what if I told you it was not until 1990 that the last holdouts regarding women's suffrage in some Swiss cantons (the equivalent of states/providences) finally got with the times?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, you bet we should not overlook the dark times in a country's history when it failed to uphold its ideals of freedom and liberty. But at the same time, we should not feel ashamed and embarrassed because of where we're from either. Every country's history/culture (past and present) has had a good and evil aspects of it...no civilization in history has ever been anywhere close to being "without sin" in terms of racism/sexism/etc.

[D_Yeti_Esquire]

I sort of wish we'd go back to really teaching civics in this country. Most people don't know how to work the apparatus. Most don't get that this form of government specifically was always an experiment and was designed specifically to be slow.

I mean sure, everyone can move to like minded countries. Guess what happens after that? Boom. The entire reason people say things like that is they don't really respect the rights of other human beings that disagree with them to the point they feel the process has failed. No, you were outvoted. Deal. If we can't even deal with the civil version of this, what happens when everyone sorting-hats their way into The United States of Conservatism and the Liberal Union? Hugs?

So as much as I'd love the silliness of someone living in Belize, no one is actually helped by that. I'd say we're actively hurt by it.