• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • And here you have it: the serf mentality of the median American. Speaking out against your in-group, lest things could ever become better? Madness, better tell everyone to shut up about the fact that the ship is sinking, at least we’re not directly ingesting arsenic. If things ever become better, thank the heavens that they happened to fall down that way, because that behavior leaves you at the behest of whoever is leading the chorus, even if that person had been clearly screwing up for months, with no hope of ever influencing it yourself.


  • My more liberal friends haven’t liked Biden basically since the start. He was just the only option against Trump, whom they hate (a wonderful position our duopoly has put us all into). I will never be a fan of anyone that cheerleads for politicians though. It’s cringe to me. They work for us, not the other way around.

    By “hardline dems” I don’t mean “more liberal” or “more leftist”, I mean the “You criticized the official party line? Behold, I will immediately misrepresent what you said and paint you as an enemy”. They’re actually preventing their own party from becoming more effective.


  • Plenty of people on Lemmy immediately attacked you if you mentioned that Biden was going to tank the election or that he had mental health issues, and even though they became a little bit less aggressive after the debate, they still insisted and would call you a Trump supporter if you even suggested that the Democrats should have someone else run. Now that Biden is out of the race and Kamala is projected to have a much better chance than him, they’ve been proven wrong, but none of them will apologize for having denied reality.


  • I can forgive someone for being disconnected from reality, but when that someone goes and berates others for stating that a person obviously suffering from age-related issues does, in fact, does suffer from age-related issues, insists that it’s impossible for anyone else to compete against Trump, and has the knife ready at their hand ready to jump at you with accussations of being a Republican for raising very reasonable concerns, that’s a pretty heavy issue, and plenty of Lemmy users have done one or several of those things to the point that, frankly, discussing politics on this site has been just almost as unbearable as doing so in Reddit.

    I’m not going to receive apologies and I’m not expecting them, but I’m at least going to ask you to take a long time (weeks, months) wondering from time to time if you’re suffering from cognitive biases in your opinions. This is not an insult, everyone suffers from cognitive biases, I did suffer from pretty heavy ones a long time ago, but if they’re provoking harm (and most specially, doing political damage), you should at the very least take a look at them.

    On a side note, I have to say that I didn’t expect much from Kamala other than having a reasonably better chance than Biden of preventing the US from further falling into fascism, but she has surprised me positively by confronting with Netanyahu as soon as she got a bit of spotlight.








  • The ruling party in Spain is socially progressive, so they’re shooting themselves on the foot with this one.

    No one wants to tell the government they’re watching porn, especially in a Catholic country like Spain.

    Spain is majority Catholic, but in terms of people having mostly secular lives, it’s very similar to France. If anything, religion has more weight in institutions in relation to its social significance than it should as a leftover from our fascist dictatorship from 50 years ago.


  • We may be talking about someone who handled logistics, or cooking, or maintenance; they might have been punished by life enough in the 30 years have followed; they may be someone who didn’t know what they were getting into, but once they were on the ground, tried to minimize the harm they brought upon others; they may be someone who realized what the army was doing was wrong too late, and was branded a traitor for refusing orders or revealing evil shit that was going on behind the curtains.

    All in all, you’re either defending that once a person does one bad thing, regardless of their context, they have become essentially tarnished forever, and no matter their growth or already suffered punishment they should continue to suffer forever; or else you’re just rationalizing the fact that you want to throw fireworks no matter the harm you bring upon others. Think about this all for two minutes before you say something stupid.






  • I actually disagree with this sentiment.

    There’s clearly a split in the Democratic Party regarding the candidates and leanings of the old guard, vs a very large portion of their voter base that wants structural reforms in the country (universal public healthcare VS increased access to insurance, for instance), and I bet a large portion of the latter feel whipped into having to vote for a lesser evil rather than for a political project they actually have passion for.

    Meanwhile, Trump was an outsider of the Republican party who managed to get their voters in love with him, to the point that he managed to hijack the party and leave it ripe open for a transformation from neoconservative to proto-fascist, despite the Republican old guard initially being hostile towards him.

    The Republican party has managed to stay competitive, despite their political goals being less popular overall in the US than the Dems’, precisely because they allowed themselves to mutate and stay responsive to the changes in the electorate, the obvious tragedy being that democratic institutions (mostly referring to both political parties) have been far more willing to incorporate far right nutjobs who want to end democracy than they have for left-wing populism that wants to make housing affordable.


  • Germany’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 32% of the population.

    Germany’s 3rd most spoken language is French, by 9% of the population.

    France’s 2nd most spoken language is English, by 24% of the population.

    France’s 3rd most spoken language is Spanish, by 9% of the population.

    UK’s 2nd most spoken language is French, by 16% of the population.

    UK’s 3rd most spoken language is German, by 5% of the population.

    Source: https://languageknowledge.eu/

    While you could say that France is a bit behind the curve in comparison with most other Northern European countries, native English speakers are far worse at learning any other language. I’m not even French, but the circle-jerk English speaking communities have about French people sometimes gets pretty embarrassing.