In 2024, Trump met with the Palestinian imams who the DNC snubbed and said there needed to be a ceasefire in Gaza. This is a big part of why Trump carried Michigan. I doubt Trump convinced many Muslim Americans and their friends to vote for him, but it appears he successfully convinced enough of them not to vote for Biden/Harris.

I’m not saying this makes Trump better on this issue than Biden, because Trump was obviously lying. I am saying Trump read the room better and “did politics” better, because Biden/Harris wouldn’t even tell that lie.

Personally, I held my nose and voted for Harris, but there’s no doubt in my mind that she lost because she and Biden were out of touch on Palestine.

My point is that the only reason the USA “wasn’t fascist” in the 19th century was because the term “fascism” hadn’t been invented yet. It’s ahistorical to use that term. However, fascism is very much based on and directly inspired by the colonialist slave society that existed the USA in the early 19th century. Mussolini and other early fascists talked openly & extensively about this. As has been said, Hitler treated other Europeans like Europeans had been treating their colonial subjects.

I wasn’t talking about voting, and I’m certainly not discouraging anyone from voting. I’m not sure why you got that from what I posted. You were saying that the USA wasn’t fascist in the 19th century, and I’m agreeing, but with a big ol’ asterisk.

Universal healthcare is pretty cheap compared to all the money we’ve been hemorrhaging on wars, support to countries like Israel, tax cuts… hell, all of this is small potatoes compared to the economic destruction that’s been done with these tarriffs.

We could have good healthcare for everyone for far less money than has been spent fighting with Iran this year.

Also, the USA can still afford all this and more because we are the richest society in history. Let’s keep some perspective. Even with all the crazy bullshit that’s happened in the last few years, we’ve never actually been lacking for money. It just gets prioritized into stupid shit.

There’s enough money in this country to pay for everything we want, and still have lower taxes than Europe. We just have to stop letting hoarders control the money.

You don’t feel the system that enslaved human beings based on their race “exalts nation and race over the individual?”

I’d say the US wasn’t fascist in that period because fascism is a post-industrial ideology that’s interrelated with corporate mass media. But, when it did come around, fascism was explicitly modeled on the “slavery + colonial genocide” era of the USA’s development. Fascism in the 20th century was the logic of colonialism coming home from the periphery to the imperial core.

I think this was my favorite scene in Barry Lyndon.

So, I love boats and sailing.

Megayachts aren’t for people who love boats and sailing, they’re for rich people who love the privacy of having a mobile private island. In their operation (big diesel engines, fiberglass hulls made with MEK, dumping raw sewage and such), they pollute a lot more than basically any other method of travel/living.

The people at Gabe Newell’s company probably make decent money. But it’s a dangerous job working with extremely toxic chemicals (if it’s good for the boat, it’s bad for the environment, and it’s bad for the workers). A lot of them probably have to retire early with health problems.

I love boats and sailing, but this megayacht shit sucks.

So glad we’ve been spending billions building and stockpiling these things for my entire life, only to run out after [checks notes] six months of bullshit that accomplished nothing.

Yup, my friend is a lawyer and he refuses to use self checkout for any reason: he doesn’t want to assume the liability.

This would hold up better if I could get a non-shitty car made in the USA. Alas…

Truly, it would be difficult for the Chinese to do a worse job of making cars than the planned obsolescence crap we’ve come up with.

The USA has almost as many miles of railroad as the entire rest of the world. They’re just mostly freight trains. We’re not into passenger rail.

I live in Seattle. We have North America’s largest superyacht facility here: Delta Marine. Their starting pay ($22/hr) is less than the local burger place, Dick’s Drive In ($23/hr), and I swear to god I am not making any of this up.

The USA has the largest rail network in the world, although the customer service and schedules leave something to be desired.

Was it really that innovative? It was just myspace for college students

IMO it’s almost worse than if G+ flopped completely. Google+ was actually awesome for the specific world of smalltime pen and paper RPGs. But of course, that one creative community of people designing & publishing cool stuff wasn’t enough to justify its cost, or challenge Facebook for supremacy, so they pulled the plug even though plenty of people were still using it. Just a waste.

I get shit for this take sometimes, but I agree.

I like linux, but macOS does pretty much everything that linux does and also runs commercial software like Adobe, etc. For a lot of people, it just makes sense.

Not particularly, but I imagine it was just weird as hell haha

Cheaper than a large popcorn at the theater 😂

Right? Imagine if all of the money spent “building out” the metaverse had been invested in improving infrastructure in real life…

Imagine like four or five of us sitting in the front row of a crowded theater, chowing down on rotisserie chickens with our bare hands.

In retrospect I feel so bad for the people sitting near us 😂

Heat gun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QWu-7HddhM