and everyone knows you’re using the no tip button.

How socially insecure do you have to be for this to be a concern?

Don’t answer that. I’ve come to realize that we’ve long since crashed through the basement floor in regards to how well socialized and confident our populations are.

The next part of that lie is the fallacy that we have some kind of intrinsic “freedom of speech.”

People think our “freedom” gives us a view into the rest of the world and how it’s still the best thing in the world to live in the USA.

All you have to do is open your web browser in the airport of another country. We have a sliver of perspective here, we don’t get to see what challenges other countries have overcome, from healthcare to housing the homeless to giving people actual freedoms by giving them peace of mind about their future.

If nothing else, you get to see how much the rest of the world really hates the US government and would be happy if we stopped building bases and blacksites in their countries.

There are a lot of liberal and leftist gun owners, they just don’t wear them as identity or gender affirming care.

“How do you know if your conservative neighbor bought a new gun?” “Don’t worry he’ll tell you.”

But more broadly, yes we’ve let the right RUIN the very principles that we could have held onto and come out on top. If we kept guns and the American flag we wouldn’t be in a fascist state right now. I’m not even kidding. We gave them nationalism AND the tools to keep it.

Fucking soft-ass whinging lefties are still circling around issues of principle when we’re literally losing the entire country. “Oh no, that guy said the R word once! We should make 48-minute essay pieces on youtube calling out their bad behavior while flying the flags of our own particular ethnicity or identity as we retreat to Discord to get emotional comfort from our niche group of parasocial clingers who will never actually challenge us!”

I am fully aware this is going to piss off some Lemmy users who read it and they will obtusely think that I’m anti-pride or saying that we should use slurs. I’m not saying that (but thank you for proving my point). I’m saying we fixated on the wrong problems. We have tripped up BADLY because our idealism had no wiles or strategy. I guess it was all worthwhile if you can be the most ideologically pure leftist in the camps.

Circulate this on right-wing sites and social media, not Lemmy.

We need more conservatives and liberals realizing that they’re in a class war, not a race war.

What would that represent? How much you love/hate kids over time?

Fascists have a long history of sexualizing the subjects of their persecution, it’s all part of domination over other humans to feel superior. Once the group you hate has been dehumanized, you can treat them as property or worse.

I remember growing up and learning about how horrible the past was to children, with everything from forced marriages to older men, to having to work in literal coal mines and industrial machines. How there was a serious phrase “Children are to be seen, not heard” as advice for parents to keep their kids silent. To say nothing of how literally beating your children just as daily ritual was considered normal for centuries.

I thought “Wow, thank God I am growing up in a civilized era that respects children as human beings.”

“I am the author’s thinly-veiled fetish” is a phrase and a meme for a reason.

The people who need to read this cannot read.

I wish that was a joke. There is a direct correlation with the rise of fascism and the decline of American reading scores. Currently nearly a quarter of our adult population is functionally illiterate. Meaning they can identify words, they can send texts, they can reply to messages or read headlines, but are incapable of anything more advanced than that.

We somehow think that there’s a sharp line between “cannot read at all” and “can sit down with a paperback and be whisked away to another world” when actually it’s a spectrum, like everything else.

Really what this means is that a sizeable set of our population, because they suck at reading, also suck at forming language in their heads, and because of this cannot manage and consider complicated, abstract ideas or reframe thoughts into words that can be analyzed. When you live like this, you tend to just go along with whatever other people are doing and you have intense emotional reactions to everything you see.

Religion makes no sense when you think about it at all, so my imagery is more in line with our current “fairy tale” version of Christianity that most Americans have grown up with, without actually reading the book in any capacity. (Actually reading the book is what made me leave.)

Evil is rampaging across the country, the worst people in the world are being given positions of power, hate and racism are being made into policy and the people you hate most who scream about race are being given uniforms and guns and concentration camps, the Epstein-patrons are celebrating, there is a sweeping movement across evangelicals pushing back on empathy and Christian values broadly. Human rights are being taken away, as well as basic services like healthcare, food and housing for the poor and families are being torn apart without consequence.

I’m not religious but if I were and watching all of this, I would probably believe that a deal was really struck or that this was all some kind of Revelations prophecy.

If you know you know. If you don’t, asking about it gets entire posts nuked.

Ah yes, the monthly “Trump is senile” post. Been going since 2016.

Should we meet back here in another ten years when he’s on his fourth term without consequence or care from anyone in power?

Yah this argument makes no sense even if I imagine being a corn-fed chud in the hills, isn’t this exactly the same “Bring down authority” narrative they’ve been preparing for years? Isn’t this LITERALLY Q-anon’s entire theater play but happening in real time?

Wow what warriors for saving children, look at 'em go! Look at them storm the capitol to bring down this evil cabal who are now actually admitting their existence in public, no code words, no secret basements! Wait, they stormed the capitol already? And it was because of no reason at all?

Well I’m sure they have something big planned to finally put an end to this deep-state scourge to life, liberty and children that they’ve been railing against for decades.

“It’s good innocent fun that boys do, we have to stop persecuting these men for just doing what all men want!”

This is going to be the pro-pedo narrative that the entire right does their abrupt 180 with.

I am sometimes saddened that “Authoritarian Good” doesn’t seem to exist.

I mean, it’s not hard to figure out values. Sure, some morons might think the good things you want are bad, but they’re MORONS we can ignore them.

“Oh no! Save the billionaires! What if we become wealthy one day?” No, you won’t. If you love them so much throw yourself in the pit with them.

Democrats didn’t release the files for the same reason Trump didn’t. It doesn’t even have to be that prominent democrats were on that island (although it’s safe to say they were) it just takes a few CEO’s and other financiers of our current government to say “Nah, kill that” and it will NEVER see the light of day.

We are constantly losing sight of what all of this is really about and who’s really in power here. They want us screaming about Dems versus Republicans in this WWE theater spectacle so we don’t start a class-war. And it’s worked perfectly.

My father was a product of this era. He had some kind of neurodivergence as a child, failed every course at school, had an impossible time reading, got beat by both his parents constantly. Contracted polio from public pools and spent years doing physical therapy to recover. Went on to get a sports scholarship but couldn’t keep grades up, got sent to military school, got kicked out, was given a job in the family oil business doing gravy work analyzing survey maps, left after a week. Ran away to Europe to dodge the draft, came home and did massive amounts of drugs and then met my mom and told her “it’s okay, I had polio as a kid, you can’t get pregnant.”

And that’s where I came from.

No happy ending. He kept my mom and sibling abused, drugged and drunk until they died of liver failure, another sibling on the way, another sibling brought a weapon to school and lives in a halfway house. My father drank himself to death after losing all family property to scams, both his and those of others. My cousins stole the family inheritance and cut off contact with me.

So yeah, that’s what I think of when someone talks about the 50’s as “the good old days.”

I love every time a politician introduces another bill to “make crime illegal” when they can’t think of ANY other way to make the public think they have a real or valid job in the state.

I’m reminded of the recent Florida bill that “bans airplane contrails” to appeal to the absolutely smooth-brained conspiracists. (The bill imposes a fine of tens of thousands of dollars to any company found to be spraying mind-control chemicals to turn your children into trans frogs. Take THAT Illuminati!)

It’s a “meh” comic, but a good reminder that there are LOT of job-offer scams out there, and they’re very sophisticated.

They will call you and talk to you, they will set you up for an interview, they will “transfer” you to different people, they will have you fill out an application or test and finally they will bring you into a zoom call or other kind of tele-meeting for “onboarding” and at that time they will ask you to pay for “some small costs” of having certain equipment sent to you or application/security clearance fees, and they claim they will refund it from your first paycheck.

The moment any employer asks for payment for ANYTHING up-front, it is a scam. Every time. Run away, call consumer protection never mind they scrapped that, call authorities, doesn’t matter, just hang up or get away asap.

• Do not give any personal information to any company you haven’t checked out thoroughly.

• If they require any payments for anything before paying you, it’s a scam. Worth repeating because the number of people who fall for this is insane.

• If the job seems too good to be true, if the application process is stupid-simple, it is probably a scam.

• If the people who reached out to you won’t give you contact info other than themselves, it may be a scam.

• If the job offer seems too good to be true, if the pay is far more than you expected or asked for, if the work is so easy anyone could do it, it’s probably a scam.

• Check the company profile and call their main number. Many times the scammers use an existing company in another country or a defunct company as cover. If they’re an active company, you can often confirm with them through the main number if the offer is real or not, but be warned there are even scammers who make fake business websites.

• The people contacting you may speak perfect english, have no accents, and be confident and professional sounding. Do not trust stereotypes to be an accurate warning against foreign scams.