Americans after one bad election: “Everyone in the whole history of the world is trash and we should all be exterminated”

It’s so tiresome to read people regurgitating 50s era John Bircher agitprop that was churned out by the same folks lynching Emitt Till and Michael Donald.

One of my favorite old “Soviet” jokes is about a CIA agent and a KGB agent sharing a drink at a bar in Berlin.

The CIA agent says “We Americans are always so impressed with Soviet propaganda. You can get so many people from so many countries and in so many languages to believe the exact same things. Incredible.”

The KGB smiles and drinks, then responds “Thank you. But the things you get people to believe are truly incredible. We can’t hold a candle to the America propagandists.”

The CIA agent sputters in indignantion before relying “Nonsense! Americans don’t use propaganda!”

The KGB agent just laughs and finishes his drink.

get ready to live like the Slavs did under the Soviets

It’s funny because this story could just as easily be about an LGBTQ community living in Reagan’s America or hippies living under Nixon.

Some of us are way ahead of you.

The problem is that (as has been mentioned up thread) implicit threats are powerful because of the way they destroy a community’s history.

You can stay silent for a while and fly under the radar and get by. But eventually, you get older and you need to communicate the “correct” ideas to a generation that has only ever heard the party line.

How do you convey to your kids and grandkids that eugenics isn’t good science, that vaccines don’t cause autism, or that homosexuality isn’t a sin when you’ve got the government blaring the opposite and you’re too afraid you’ll be inadvertently ratted out by a tactless youth?

Over a long enough timeline, you either need the legitimacy of open opposition or you need to recognize that your belief system will die with you.

I’m a regular Lemmy hater. And I’ll happily list off all the obvious habits (and even entire communities) that Lemmy has inherited from the R-word site.

But I’ll say this much in Lemmy’s favor. It’s not Voat. It’s not 8chan. It’s not Rumble.

The liberals and leftists that decamped Spez’s Omalas for something better do seem genuinely interested in pursuing it. They’re not turning this iteration of social media into some cesspool of scams, snuff films, and child porn.

You’d think that would be an easy bar to clear, but this community has done it while so many others haven’t.

Basically, I said Hamas committed a horrible act

The problem with liberals is that they feel the need to apologize even before they make their point.

Then they’re shocked by how easy it is to bully them.

If Spez wasn’t taking the Trump Coin to do ideological warfare on his behalf, he’d either be out on his ass or six feet under like Aaron Swartz. Then you’d have another Millennial corporate shit to hate in his stead.

At some point, you can’t hate the player, just the game.

do you actually believe the stupid shit you’re saying

Westerners only believe the stupid shit their domestic government tells them. Putin-shills only believe the stupid shit Putin tells them. So he’s clearly a Putin shill (or a bot or a Wumao, who can say?)

Obviously, Ukrainians must fight to the last man because Russia is run by exterminationists. But please don’t ask why Western hedge funds are salivating to get into Western Ukraine and claim all the formerly public land.

That’s how wars always work. You stop at the other guy’s border because you’ve made your point.

I mean, if Putin just wants to stop fighting, he could completely just you know: stop fucking fighting.

I cannot imagine a world in which Russia withdraws from the front lines and Ukrainian militants just call it a day. Way too much blood on the ground for people to just turn themselves off and call it done.

If Putin extended an offer that didn’t involve him eating the barrel of his own gun, Zelenskyy’s own guys would lynch him for taking it.

The founding fathers never anticipated such dick-headery

George Washington was the richest man in the New World at the time of his Presidency. Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay weren’t far behind. And quite a few of them (particularly the Federalists) were notorious for the wealth they accrued on currency and commodity speculation. That was one of the sticking points of the First National Bank. Whomever controlled it could effectively finance scams and flim-flams at a rate unheard of prior to the institution of modern banking.

Go ahead and sell books you’ve never read nevermind haven’t written, and memecoins to dumb twats after you are out if you want, but this shit can’t happen in active office.

This is the whole reason people seek active office. Politics is just another avenue of celebrity, with the bonus of influencing policy in such a way that you can direct public spending into private pockets. This is the latest means of doing so. But its an age old tradition, older than the nation itself.

Idk about the sole point. Lots of people speculated on them believing there wouldn’t be a rug pull within hours of the coin’s official launch. Crypto is the new Box of Rocks. All advertisement, no substance.

I started rawdoging urls a while ago.

Works best when you’ve got a web ring or other friendly community of contributors to reference against one another.

But those are few and fair between in the modern day.

But people are too used to products that are free because they make the person using them the product.

That’s definitely one model for operating a public service, but its far from the only one.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea;

The problem is in how its assessed. A market-based tax will be vulnerable to market manipulation. A tax accessed by the agents of lobbyists and kleptocrats will be administered to the benefit of their patrons.

This isn’t a policy failure quite so much as it is a democratic failure.

I think you’d be surprised to discover how many people speak English as a second language, thanks to its extensive use in business and law. Even (perhaps especially) in China, where US-Chinese trade relations have been going strong since Nixon shook hands with Mao.

Only in the last ten years has the relationship between Wall Street and Hong Kong/Shanghai degraded and the appeal of English as a business language fallen by the wayside.

Been happening for a lot longer than we like to admit. Students coming to the US for education and then returning home to work have been the norm since the early '00s, on account of the US higher education system being highly subsidized by the States and Feds. This made US education relatively cheap for its quality, especially at the state university level.

But that was good, actually, because we became a nexus of research and development. Lots of students came, got education, and left. Lots more stayed around, lured by the high paying jobs at domestic firms. A few even joined the education staff of the universities themselves. A bit of brain drain was fine, so long as we produced far more than we lost.

Now we’re just hemorrhaging talent and expertise because we no longer value the work product of the professional classes. We’re pricing people out of public universities and imposing strict ideological tests on the students we do let in. We’re going full eugenics mode on senior staff and administration. And we’re turning education more and more into a means of profiting off credentialing than accruing working knowledge or performing independent research.

America is dismantling all of its socialist institutions.

Like many industry observers accurately stated that the shortages will subside long before any of the CHIPS spending could even possibly make a difference.

If you consider advanced microprocessors a strategic asset, the immediate short-term pinch in supply isn’t the problem. Its the long-term overseas outsourcing of production to regions we consider at high risk of foreign conflicts (Taiwan and South Korea). Simply moving finished chips across the Pacific Ocean is its own strategic problem.

One could easily argue that our steadily ratcheted hostilities toward China, Russia, and Iran is the actual root cause of our problems. And we’d do well to in-source production for supply flow reasons, but our real panacea might be to simply stop fucking around at the periphery of a rival imperial power.

But if you consider the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian peoples as inherently adversarial to the American way of life (on account of them hating us for our freedoms), then relying on Samsung and TMSC as your primary supply of chipsets seems imprudent.

Of course, if you wanted to give the economy any hope for viable electronics while also massively screwing over imports, this would have been your shot. So it seems strategically at odds with the whole “make domestic manufucating happen” rhetoric.

A big central problem of the US chips strategy is that we’re not building capacity, we’re building investment incentives. The goal is to make local manufacturing profitable rather than productive. But that’s at the root of the ideological divide between American and the BRICS we’re positioning ourselves in opposition to.

We wouldn’t be threatening war with these countries if we had a strong global socio-economic consensus.

Property taxes funding education, in a state like Texas where school districts are seized by the state and systematically dismantled by private equity interests operating in state-appointed positions, is a fucking joke.

This isn’t strictly an issue of taxation. Its an issue of (un)representative governance forcing people into a privatized model by leveraging the pain caused through dysfunctional public services. “Oh oh! Crimes up! We need even more cops! Oh oh! Schools are failing! So we need more… checks notes football stadiums and administrative offices.”

It’s deliberate mismanagement intended to destroy confidence in public institutions.

Lets suppose he lives in CA where the annual rate for owner occupied is 0.74%. His house would be worth approx 1.6 million dollars.

That’s largely due to the property inflation from the tech sector and not consistent across the state. You could be in San Fransisco and see your land 10x in value as the city explodes around you or you could be at the ass end of Oakland or the rural east end and still live in a slum.

This guy could also be from Texas - in the exurbs of Austin, Dallas, Houston, or El Paso - and be looking at closer to 1.5-2% annual rates. Very possible he acquired some dirt cheap land in Beaumont or Bexar County only to see his $5k plot balloon to $100-200k over the course of 20 years.

Which induces a lot of absentee landlordism, as property is held in trust and financialized rather than being bought/sold at the retail level.