vonbaronhans

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I love poke balls with the super big and legendary ones turned off, more like the Melee and Brawl ones.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

I'd like to add some nuance to your observation.

We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the "Standard American History Myth" by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a "failure to live up to those ideals"). That's the simple history we teach our kids here, it's what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it's taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There's no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn't do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

And that's the big thing. We just... simply don't have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn't, and if we did, they deserved it.

I only really came to grips with America's dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically "internment camps") during WW2.

That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we "never done anything wrong, really" but we're also pumped up on religious symbolism (we're a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

"Divinely inspired" crybully, basically. There's a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He's the embodiment of "I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor."

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

I mean if you want to blame liberals and leftists go on ahead I suppose, thanks for being unhelpful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I wouldn't bet on MAGA suddenly waking up to class conflict to the point of guillotines unless Trump points his grubby little finger at them.

What a world that would be.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Rise up against whom though? Their violence is not driven on principle. It's out of trust and loyalty to a con man who told them to "fight like hell". What makes you think they'll turn on him? Other than a tiny handful of folks, when have the leapords eating their faces stopped them from offering their faces up on silver platters at the leopard's feast?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Will they ever wise up though?

Scoreboard shows these people, the most violent among them, are disconnected from reality and blindly trust Trump and his cronies.

I can't even get my MAGA mom to believe Musk did a Nazi salute. "Apparently he was throwing his heart to the crowd." Granted, she's not politically engaged, she just listens to my dad who stopped watching Fox News because it wasn't conservative enough. So yeah.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'd somehow never heard this argument before, so I found some random article about it: https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2023/06/slavery-militias-and-methodologies-thoughts-on-carl-boguss-madisons-militia

I can't speak to the quality of the source above, but they argue that your basic thesis is true, but is not the full story. All the former colonies (including non-slave states) wanted militias instead of a peacetime national military, which was as much or more of a driver for adoption of the 2nd amendment than the idea of using militias for appearing slave rebellions.

But that's just literally the first article I read about it, so I dunno.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm no economist, but I hear the economists are not thrilled with what Trump is doing to the economy. We're headed for a recession at minimum, if those folks are anything to go by.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Since when have universal healthcare advocates sided with health insurance CEOs?

Did I miss something?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

At this point, I don't know if America can heal with Mt Rushmore still there. I'm not saying we would blow it up, but I do think it might be good if it was blown up.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Survey researchers are well aware of the biases from different data collection methods. Phone polling tending to overrepresent old folks is a a big one. They try to balance that out with various statistical weighting methods, usually by combining with census data or other demographic survey sets.

It's unfortunate, but yeah we do have about a third of the country going hard conservative/fascist.

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