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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • America has been a third world country for decades now. The only reason that it hasn’t felt like it is because there’s so much money still circulating in our economy from helping the world rebuild after WW2 and selling military equipment and culture during the Cold War (plus the whole American Empire thing, can’t forget that). By all the metrics that are used to rate the quality of health of a country - things like infrastructure quality, wealth inequality, healthcare costs and CoL vs income - the US is much closer to third world countries than to comparable European countries.

    As somebody once said, America is a third world country in a Prada belt.





  • They don’t need the excuse, just look at D.C. in the past week. And escalation will only make things worse for them. They’re looking at an armed insurgency situation akin to the “War on Terror,” which proved that an entrenched group amongst the populace is impossible to oust because anybody could be an insurgent, and taking one out will create more people willing to take revenge. There used to be an excellent Flash game about this very point where you shot cruise missiles at terrorists walking across the screen. And every time that a missile would explode, it would inevitably hit civilians in the area, and those nearby would turn into more terrorists. You’d just continue to fill the screen with more and more terrorists than there were originally until eventually you gave up.

    Somebody a few weeks ago said in a thread on a similar subject that the military’s conclusion was that you need about 3 soldiers for every insurgent in a population. There’s no way that they can draft as much as theoretically 75% of the population.

    It’s a whole lot of bluster, and if we could get organized we could topple the whole thing. ICE has homes they go back to at the end of the day. They don’t have army bases to hide in.


  • It absolutely is. It’s a thought process people use to make their actions easier to justify to their own sense of morality and empathy. Militaries drill that same thought process into soldiers for the same reason. It’s much easier to shoot something than it is to shoot somebody, so your enemy must be less than human to make pulling the trigger easier. So you turn a group of people into the Other. And the more you do it, the easier it gets, and all it takes is somebody convincing you that the wrong group deserves the same treatment.

    “My enemy isn’t human. My enemy is less than human. Since the dawning of Mankind, this has been the battlecry.”

    Also, I take issue with the entire concept of “sin,” so that argument holds no water for me. I mean, what a meaningless “argument”. How does it absolve them of anything??

    I don’t care one way or another about the theology around the word “sin,” but it’s the perfect word to describe their actions. By reducing them to subhuman, you make it easy to remove their free will in the equation - it becomes the “just following orders” excuse - and it’s incredibly important to remember that they chose to do this. Nobody is born hateful, hatred is learned. They made the conscious choice to be hateful and act this way, and they should be held accountable for that choice.

    People have a hard time accepting that the worst people this planet has ever seen are as human as you and me, but to deny it is to turn a blind eye to the fact that the people in that video could be our neighbors, friends, or family. Because we know them, and they’re good people, so they’d never do something like that, right?





  • Immigration is the most limited it’s been in US history, accounting to somewhere around 2,000 legal immigrants annually. We could start by raising that cap. If your parents or grandparents immigrated to the US before roughly 50 years ago, they were “illegal” immigrants. There was no such distinction until fairly recently. Anybody who immigrated through Ellis Island would be considered illegal today.

    ICE is completely unnecessary. It’s only been around for about two decades - I’m roughly twice as old as that branch of the government. The same with the NSA. Both are largely security theatre started post-9/11 that are ineffectual at the jobs that they supposedly were created to do.


  • It probably wasn’t clear, but I was agreeing with you but expanding on the point. Because the science says that there’s no correlation between age and leftists becoming more conservative and never has been, but there absolutely is with accrual of wealth. In the past, these were largely the same thing. That’s why it seems like people aren’t becoming more conservative as they get older anymore. Because the paths to wealth have largely disappeared.

    And of course most conservatives aren’t wealthy, but if you look at them for just a short time (especially in the US), you’ll see that they don’t think of themselves as poor - they’re just “temporarily displaced billionaires” who will make it big any day now and then they’ll own the boot rather than be squashed under its heel. Or they’re just bigots. There’s always that option.




  • There’s more to it. Including the pretty standard past fact that people usually become more conservative as they age ( though i see that shifting as I age)

    This one is absolutely bullshit tied to the accrual of wealth. People don’t become more conservative as they get older, they become more conservative as they start to benefit more and more from the system, as was the norm up until about Gen X. People being worse off than their parents were at the same age absolutely has shifted the political leanings of generations (there’s also the fact that each successive generation leans more leftist than the previous due to simple exposure to people and ideas that are different from you, but that’s another topic).

    I’m reminded of the wonderful video that the beautiful talking skull Shaun did about Harry Potter and JK Rowling a few years back. Specifically, the part about how you can watch her political stance change practically in real time as the books go on. The books start out raging against the machine, but as she began to gain wealth and benefit from that machine, it shifts towards supporting the machine until at the end Harry becomes a magic cop defending all the issues that were criticized in the early books and nothing fundamentally changes in society.