People like you are why I’m so fed up with Europeans after the past 2 months. So angry that you can have the facts right in front of you but can’t put them together to see that 2 plus 2 is 4, only use them as fuel for 2 different sides of your argument. You point out how fucked things are here in one breath but don’t acknowledge that they’ve been fucked since before most of the people here were born and then blame us for not having the power to fix it with your next.

Do you get this angry at the Chinese, North Koreans, or Russians for not deposing Putin or the CCP? Because, newsflash, America is the most propagandized country in the world and has a militarized domestic police force. The US and Russia are far more similar than most people realize or want to admit/acknowledge.

Our children pledge their undying loyalty to the country every morning to the flag that is installed in every classroom in the country. There are only two other countries in the world with similar practices, and one of them was the Hitler’s Youth program in Nazi Germany. Military recruiters stalk the halls of our high schools and follow kids to their houses using the personal information given to them by the schools, including calling their personal cell phone numbers, to convince them to join the military. Hollywood is a massive pro US military machine. Any time you see a tank, jet, naval ship, or anything else in a superhero movie, it was bought and paid for to be in there by the US military with the stipulation that it be on the good guys side.

Any safeguards and checks and balances our system had were actively eroded starting all the way back to the reconciliation after the Civil War, from ensuring that the votes of leftists count for less than the votes of conservatives - if and when they aren’t just drowned out by cutting up the voting districts to bury them under as much red as possible - to putting people in places of import whose loyalties lie with the party first and foremost.

There isn’t a single country in the EU where a president or prime minister would have the power on their own to just decide and bomb fishermen, or abduct a leader of another country, or fuck children and get away with this.

And neither should Trump. The reason that he can get away with it is because the people who should be holding him accountable - from the justice system to the politicians to the military - are in on it. There are no legal systems that haven’t been undermined to make this very thing possible.

Hitler wasn’t elected, but he came in second and was appointed Chancellor by the incumbent president as per tradition because the Nazis were elected as the majority party in the Reichstag. Sound familiar? A minority party working their way into a leadership role that gave them full control of the country? At its height, the Nazi party made up about 15% of the German population. 15% was all it took to bring the entire world into one of the worst wars in history that left the Jewish population so decimated that they have only returned to pre-WW2 levels within the past 20 or so years. Republicans are not a majority party either and would actually never hold any major office again if votes were counted fairly. 60% of Americans are more leftist than the government at any given time - even when the Democrats hold power.

So why didn’t the Germans fight back against the Nazi party as things got bad? Trick question. They did. With guns, too. Except the Nazis had a quasi military force already deployed in order to put down any opposition. Sounds familiar? Because the US had that long before ICE and the DHS (who are both governmental bodies beholden to no-one) were formed following 9/11. Our police are a bunch of schoolyard bullies with surplus military hardware donated by the army or bought from the government and military industrial complex, taught to shoot first and ask never. Did you know that it’s a war crime to use tear gas? It’s considered chemical warfare. Except when you use it against your own citizens, then it’s okay. And they were born with itchy trigger fingers. Especially against anybody with skin a shade darker than pasteurized milk. Deporting people for looking too Mexican? We did that in the 50s, under Eisenhower. It was called Operation Wetback. We rounded up US citizens using military tactics and tossed them over the border into Mexico.

The government and corporations destroyed our unions and social support systems in order to erode worker’s rights and ensure loyalty through dependence. People often talk about how much money Americans make, but don’t see that the CoL is so much higher here that we’re worse off than any European country in terms of quality of life. The average lifespan of the average American has decreased for several years consecutively and is now equivalent to that of the average lifespan of the worst area of the UK. Americans are the most likely to die from preventable dieseases because we can’t afford preventative care. If you take the average cost of a house in any county in the country and compare it to the average salary in that same area, you’ll find that there is not a single place in the US where the average salary can buy a house. We are a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt.

So don’t blame the people working with sticks and stones for not having stemmed the tide, blame the people trying to smash down the shitty dam with hammers and the people who set the course of the river.

As a trans woman, I’d rather take my chances charging ICE agents with a knife than trust you lot to have my back in any way, shape, or form. I’ve seen what you think of us who are trapped here. Over and over.

Sorry if I’d like ANY response to the attacks on trans people across Europe, the UK, Canada, and plenty of other places.

I want people out there like the Black Panthers, too. I want Europe to divest themselves from the American military industrial complex. I want to watch American companies who support and enable these fascists see their profits shrivel up as the economy collapses. I want to watch Google and Facebook and Twitter burn.

But all I hear from Europeans on here is how all Americans are fascists for not being in open war with the regime while fascism tightens its grip on your own right-wing parties, and I’m sick of it. If you’re not proactive, you’ll be in the same boat as us. Italy had fascist gangs attacking people in the streets a few years back. We used to say “it could never happen here” when reading about Nazi Germany and wondering just how they could let it happen. And then it did happen here. Now you’re the ones saying it.

I am hating on Europeans. Because Europeans have been hating on me and mine for almost a year now, regardless of what people do here.

Fascist gangs were roaming the streets of Italy a few years ago. Your fascist parties have been waging war against trans people like me for over a decade. Where is your resistance to them? Your solidarity with the weakest amongst you?

European hate is misplaced. All we want is justice and a good society, but we have to fight against 70 years of work to destroy our ability to fight as well as the ignorant and hateful minority of the populace who support these fuckers, and they’re the ones the most willing to commit acts of terrorism. The people protesting are the average person who balks at the thought of fist-fighting in the street.

The protests last year were some of the largest in US history. There have been smaller protests popping up constantly since the first few months of the regime.

The protests last year were some of the largest in US history, up there with and possibly larger than during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement.

But go ahead and ignore those. Keep proving my original post right.

It took a decade for the Civil Rights protests to get any real change to happen, and that was only after the murder of MLK caused the black community to burn down entire city districts and cause billions of dollars worth of property damage. Your average person - even in Europe - won’t go that far unless pushed.

Europeans were perfectly fine with Nazi fascism right up until it was knocking down their door. They’ve been perfectly fine with allowing their right-wing parties to fall further and further into fascism right alongside the US. Italy had fascist gangs roaming the streets attacking people a few years back. You’ve been perfectly content to watch as European politicians target people like me almost as badly as Republicans have. Where are your protests in support of trans people? I guess it doesn’t affect you, so you don’t care.

So go ahead and keep acting like you’re so much better than Americans. All of you are just proving my point and showing the exact reason that I’ve had enough of Europe and Canada. Pot, meet kettle.

I’ve been in full support of anything Europe and Canada are doing to hurt America and fix their own issues, but the constant vitriol against the people who actually want to fight the fight has made me sick of the armchair generals all over Lemmy.

“But why don’t Americans protest? All they do is sit back and take it up the ass!” I hear every European crying as they ignore this right alongside all the other protests.

Combine the two ideas and make cheesy garlic bread with them.

Put a bucket over his head and you can take the entire set.

Gay, lesbian, etc. are sexualities, which has nothing specifically to do with gender per se. Gender is a performance we do based upon what our culture expects of us based on specific labels and (often physical) traits. Think “goth girl” or “punk” or something. When given a label like that, you probably thought of a specific set of physical traits and behaviors, including fashion, hairstyle, and makeup. That’s gender in a nutshell. Sexuality is more “if not attractive, then why x shaped?”

It gets complicated because people really like to put things into an either/or box when life is so much more than a or b. Originally, sexualities were defined as two states: heterosexual and homosexual. Hetero, meaning other, means an attraction to the other sex (generally thought of as the opposite sex/gender due to a lack of information on intersex folk and the aforementioned two boxes appeal in the human psyche). And the opposite would be homosexual - an attraction to people of the same sex. But this is an elementary level of understanding, like when we teach kids about the 3 states of matter and leave out things like plasma.

Because people have preferences and all straight men aren’t attracted to 100% of women, and then there’s lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and then there’s how gender presentation plays into our attraction like with butch vs femme lesbians or how men and women both can appreciate a girl who could bench press them. And then some people are into femboys and women only while some are into men that belong in the Scottish Highlands wearing kilts and claymores and women who own fainting couches and ball gowns and wouldn’t even glance at anything outside of those 2 groups, and then some people are only attracted to specific body parts (dick or pussy) but are less strict on who those parts are attached to, and then there’s the people who don’t care about anything beyond personality, and then…the list goes on and on.

And then it gets even more complicated when you start talking about romantic attraction, because that’s entirely its own spectrum as well. People can be romantically attracted to the same or different genders compared to sexual attraction. Some people are sexually attracted to multiple genders but could only see themselves dating one specific gender, some people experience no romantic attraction at all or no sexual attraction, or even both together. The human brain is a massive mess and there’s simply no way to easily quantify the human experience - if we even can at all. I saw a post recently that went something like “the brain is 3lbs of mostly fat puppeting a meat suit by using less electricity than a light bulb, and if it can hallucinate algebra into existence then I’m fully willing to believe that it’s also capable of identifying its own gender” and I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

They mistook your comment as disagreeing with their take on how there are real victims of Grok’s porn and CSAM and saying that they themselves were supporting CSAM, rather than saying that you agree and were saying Sweeney is supporting CSAM.

You know those signs at roller coasters that say “you must be this tall to ride”? The US is that, except the sign says “you must be this rich to play”.

I was literally just about to post this:

Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.

Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I’d suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It’s built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it’s an “immutable” version of Linux, which means that it’s a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.

Netanyahu actually would’ve been another good comparison.

My comment wasn’t a “Russia = bad” deflection, but a comment about world leaders’ response to the invasion of Ukraine and what I expect their response to the continuing aggression of the Trump regime to be: strongly worded letters and not much else.

Also, let’s get our facts straight on the genocide in Palestine. The US hasn’t put any boots on the ground yet, despite Trump’s promises from earlier in the year. As of the time that I’m writing this, the US is enabling the genocide but not an active participant. That could change tomorrow or may have already changed, but we don’t need to make things up about the government when there’s already so many evils to point at. They’re already war criminals, we wouldn’t want them to get off on account of making false accusations.

I haven’t watched the Simpsons in over a decade so I don’t get the reference, but my point was the similarity between the world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine and the likely response to continuing US aggression.

A lot of strongly worded letters and not much else is what I expect.

What’s it going to take to truly stop Russia?

Don’t forget about the Sword of Damocles that is the lack of social safety nets. Also, political ignorance is a feature, not a bug in our political system. A quarter of the American population would kill the rest because they think the regime is “hurting the right kind of people” and not anybody that they care about. This also includes the minorities who will soon learn that being “one of the good ones” just means that they go to the showers later rather than sooner.

I’ve seen one of these talked about before, and the mechanism seemed to be in that one that there’s a gene in our DNA that triggers us to grow new teeth (that’s how we replace our baby teeth with adult teeth), but that that gene turns off after we grow in our set of adult teeth. It’s apparently the same gene that allows sharks to grow new teeth. What the drug does is it turns that gene back on, allowing us to grow new teeth to replace lost ones.

This might not be the same study though, as I’ve also seen one previously years ago that was about a drug that turned on a gene in our teeth to allow them to repair the enamel in them and fill in cavities by putting biodegradable gauze soaked in the drug inside a cavity and letting the tooth do the rest.

When you ask a Mechanicus player what their type is: 316 stainless.

My problem is that I love the state/region I live in, but large swathes of the rest of the country are a risk to my life and my age, skills, and minority status don’t make me appealing from an immigration standpoint, let alone that many places have just as much of an issue with people like me as the Republicans do.