I always find these sentiments puzzling. As someone who tries to be nice to everyone I simply don’t encounter people like this. I’m not sure if I’m subconsciously avoiding bonding with such people, I’ve been lucky, or what. But I have a pretty big social circle so the second one seems hard to believe.

Sure why not? My wife studied there and loved it. Great opportunity to visit other European countries too with how their visas work.

Not really though. If anything the fascists have tried to push people into violence so they can arrest them. This is exactly how the FBI disassembled radical eco-anarchist groups in the 90s.

Your summary of the current situation is also pretty exaggerated. ICE is committing crimes against humanity but not mass murder. We have free press and those people have lawyers, family, etc. We would know if they were being exterminated, if that’s what you’re implying.

The reality is a coordinated general strike would much more easily bring a fascist government to its knees than even an army of Benjamin Songs. You are not going to defeat the US military and if you give them the political legitimacy to escalate to that kind of conflict we’re pretty much cooked, if we aren’t already.

That’s not to say if they do bring the war to us we shouldn’t fight back but it hasn’t happened yet. And we don’t want it to. We want to fight on ground that works to our strengths, not theirs. And a civil war where they control the entire military and policing systems is not to our advantage.

Dickens over here just trying to distract from his rizzlessness.

I suppose it could be taken either way. I agree with you that successful nonviolent resistance often involves more confrontational tactics.

I’m just tired of leftists acting as if the only reason we don’t have a better society is because people refuse to just start shooting. Reality is much more complex than this. But maybe the author was not making this exact argument.

Tired strawman against nonviolent resistance which has proven effective in many many situations. There is no universally right or wrong tactic to resist. It depends completely on the circumstances.

God did a shit job at calibrating our hormones if he didn’t want us to be horny all the time.

The only logical conclusion is that god loves big anime titties too.

I was gonna say, is this a deliberate reference?

Maybe. In the throes of a moral panic I think we need to be careful about our intuition though. We are being inundated with “common sense” narratives about the harms of social media, which undermines our ability to think clearly.

That’s not to say you’re wrong but I would challenge you to find evidence for this position, since that’s the only way to be sure we’re not just suffering from group-think here.

What’s the evidence for this?

Interesting. Is the narrative around kids and social media nothing but a moral panic? Only time will tell…

Most of the places I shop don’t even have automated checkout so yes.

I’m gonna need more voice clips y’all. I don’t know who any of these people are.

Yes you can.

ICE is a natural evolution of the way American police have operated for decades now. It’s wild that people don’t see that. They didn’t just appear from nowhere.

Are they worse than police? Arguably yes, but they didn’t just appear spontaneously from nowhere. Our failure to reign in the police and force them to obey the law led directly to the behavior we now see from ICE. We’ve let the white supremacists run wild and refine their techniques for a long time now.

True but I don’t really see those as merely economic metrics, with the exception of income inequality. They’re affected by many things, not all of which are part of the economy directly.

By which metric is the economy better than the US’s?

Overall the US economy has been fairly strong since the mid 2010’s, with the exception of inflation and a Covid related unemployment blip. And a chronic shortage of housing that has been brewing for decades.

Of course, the products of that economy haven’t been distributed equitably so perhaps that’s what you mean?

If you see it again post a picture.

Just move somewhere on a metro line. There are many possibilities, it all depends on your budget and priorities. Personally I’d want to live in a more urbanized area. Driving in the area sucks ass so somewhere walkable and bikeable is best In addition to metro access. MD and VA are probably best due to DC residents being the president’s serfs at the moment, but if that doesn’t bother you there are plenty of great neighborhoods in DC. Arlington is cool if you can afford it. But it’s been a long time since I spent much time there so I think things are pretty different now.

Hey, sometimes it does!