Somebody who doesn’t take proper any care of their teeth.

They’re not doing it to be contrarian. They’re doing it because the Republican party has spent more time than they’ve been alive establishing themselves as the anti-establishment party as well as the victims, and the good ol’ fascist play of giving young men disillusioned with the bad things in their lives an easy target to blame rather than blaming the people who are actually at fault - the Republicans.

There are 40±year-olds who were surprised when Rage Against the Machine didn’t support Trump. What machine did they think they were raging against? The Democrats of course, well known for being the party of the establishment and the status quo. Not like those scrappy Republicans, looking out for the common man while the Dems look down from their big-city ivory towers with disdain.

Kids have little in the way of influence outside of their parents up until they’re in their teens, and they take stuff at face value without questioning it too much.

On the one hand, this is great because a kid can ask a question, get an honest answer, and accept it as fact. This is why every generation seems more socially progressive than the last. You tell a kid that men can love other men, women can love other women, and that sometimes people are born in the wrong body, and they go “Oh, okay. That makes sense.” And now that’s part of their understanding of how the world works.

On the other hand, if a kid is surrounded by their MAGA parents and their parents’ MAGA ride or die friends, they’ll grow up thinking that Trump is right and everybody else is bad. Conservative households especially foster a cult-like mentality it seems, where questioning the beliefs hoisted upon them by their parents is out of the question, and I feel that that has something to do with the conservative mentality. They always accuse progressives of brainwashing and indoctrinating the youth because that’s their relationship with their own kids. My dad grew up in a very conservative household and it wasn’t until he went to college and both got away from his parents as well as met people who grew up in different circumstances than he did that his beliefs completely 180’d.

Revelations 13: 16-17

And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.

Don’t forget the flipping tables, beating bankers and money-lenders, and saying that rich people don’t go to Heaven.

The US used to be a lot like this too. Food service workers smoking cigarettes while they carve meat and then throwing the butts in the drain. Smoking sections in restaurants being most of the restaurant while the non-smoking section was a corner of the restaurant where they just sat you between all the smokers like the smoke was gonna hit an invisible barrier. Everybody was smoking all the time. My grandma once served my grandfather his breakfast in an ash tray because she was so sick of him putting out his ciagrettes on the plates.

It wasn’t until around the 2000s that things really shifted in the US, and now the thought of a smoking vs non-smoking section of anything other than a little room at the airport where the smokers all squash into to smoke is unheard of.

Considering that studies have shown that conservatives have smaller regions of the brain than normal in the areas that are attributed to things like empathy and compassion - yes, yes there is.

I can’t say anything for sure since I haven’t had a real vacation in 15 years (that wasn’t just staying at the nearest major city for a 3-day holiday weekend), but the cost of flying is a very sore point even in the continental US.

There are tons of beautiful and fun places to visit in the US, but especially if you’re driving, time becomes a limiting factor. I know people who drive from Massachusetts to Florida pretty much every year to go to Disney, and it takes 2 or 3 days of travel to get down there. The stats say that we have less vacation time than similar countries (Europe, Canada, etc.), and the average American will never leave their home state and will die within 25 miles of where they were born.

The average American has less than $300 in their bank account. There is no county in the US where somebody making the median salary can afford the average cost of a house for that county.

Vacationing in Europe and going on wine tours would sound like a once-in-a-lifetime trip for the majority of Americans.

Every one of your complaints stem from Americans not marching in the past.

This is largely my point, but the more accurate description is that Americans were convinced that those things are bad and should be protested against rather than protested for.

You can’t come in here and disparage more than 3 million people (now corrected in the final tally to 13 million people) in an organized protest across a country the size of Europe with that background of stomping down people’s ability to protest because a country the size of a single one of our states organized 150,000 people to protest in one city in a country without all those barriers. It would be like me coming in here and saying that the UK doesn’t care about the genocide because they had 0 people protesting in London during this protest, or complaining that Russians and the Chinese aren’t protesting hard enough.

Historically, most major protest movements in the US since WW2 have come from college students, as they have the financial security to spend the time and energy of being activists while also being the youngest group usually to be politically active, but this is yet another area where the US has cracked down on protesting. Since the Vietnam War protests, the cost of college has risen something like 1,000x (not percent - one thousand times the cost) as a direct retaliation to the protests. Colleges across the US have been protesting the genocide in Palestine since it began and have seen massive police crackdowns including arrests, students being kicked out of college, police stealing or destroying students’ property, and students in custody being denied access to life-saving medication.

The last time major change resulted from social upheaval in the US was when MLK was murdered and billions of dollars was burned to the ground in riots that shut down entire cities for a week, and the government has spent the 50+ years since convincing the population how that change was the result of very peaceful and polite protests that didn’t inconvenience anyone. The Million Man March was a threat and a display of force that left white people all over the country shaking in fear in their suburbs, and today people think it was a jolly jaunt through the city like a Pride parade.

Let’s make a comparison: the city of Boston, Massachusetts had an estimated 2 million protesters on Saturday. Massachusetts is just about half the size of the Netherlands, with a population of about 6.5 million people (compared to the roughly 18 million who live in the Netherlands). That’s a protest roughly 1/3rd the size of the entire population of the state. Obviously, people were coming from all over the place (other states included, Boston is one of the major cities in the region), but that doesn’t count all the protests that happened in small towns across the state and region as well. We know for a fact that these protests were larger than just about any other time in US history.

Absolute numbers absolutely do matter, because it becomes harder and harder to coordinate and handle the logistics involved the more people you have and the larger the area that you are coordinating across.

An estimated 2 million showed up in the city of Boston alone on Saturday, and these protests were coordinated across thousands of miles by ordinary people using social media and cellphones, not some sophisticated form of logistics network or something. Europeans don’t understand the sheer scale of the US. Americans are standing up for immigrants at home and thousands of miles away being kidnapped. There were protests in small towns all across the country where they’ve never had more than a deputy sheriff drive through. It’s closer to setting up simultaneous protests in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and the Hague than it is to setting up a protest in one city in a country that you can drive across in a single day. These protests made the top 5 of the largest protests in US history.

Europeans also don’t truly understand the conditions of the US. The government has spent every day since the death of MLK making these kinds of protests as difficult to pull off as possible. People are desperate but not so desperate that they have nothing left to lose, making them more desperate to hold onto what they do have. The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck without access to medical care that won’t put them in massive debt or bankrupt them, or any other form of support network that Europeans take for granted. We’re dependent on our employers for all of those things. We aren’t even guaranteed the 2 weeks of vacation time that is considered the norm here. The average lifespan for an American has fallen for several years in a row now and is equal to the average lifespan of the worst county in the UK. An ambulance ride with no medical care expenses added on can cost you $600 after insurance. The average American has $300 or less in their bank account. Wealth disparity in the US today is higher than it was in France at the time of the French Revolution. We’re a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt. A coat of shiny paint over a society and culture built to keep the masses in check.

You might as well criticize the Arab Spring protests for not drawing big enough crowds.

More people showed up for TACO’s birthday bash on Saturday than at the Hague. By your logic, that means the Dutch care less about the genocide in Palestine than Americans care about celebrating Trump’s birthday, and Americans basically don’t care about that at all based on the numbers.

So what principles do the Dutch have again?

Edit: Important addendum I just saw in another post:

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/27600754

They’ve been saying this in some form or another practically since the Industrial Revolution itself. For many of these backbreaking jobs, immigrant laborers are cheaper and more effective than automating them. UPS and FedEx use barcodes and scanners on each package to (try to) ensure that they all get to the right address, but it’s still people shoveling them into and out of the vans.

I hate to say this, but you could go back 40 years and this would still be true. 6 years ago, TACO was still in office.

Unless you move to Italy, where they’re paying people to live in castles because so many of them are falling apart and in dire need of repair and people to maintain them.

Considering that he and Epstein used to fly on Trump Airlines flights with a bunch of the contestants for Trump Beauty Pagents that Trump said he liked to surprise “by opening the door while they were in the changing room,” one doesn’t have to guess too hard on that one.

We haven’t even seen any real effects of the tariffs yet. The last time a US administration did this, it caused 10 years of some of the worst economic downturn in world history - the Great Depression.

I think it’s also the speed and number of connections leading to the topic change. I think many neurotypicals would jump from the carnival to the rodeo, or to the bee story, but they wouldn’t jump all the way to wondering about wasps from talking about the carnival in one go.

From the outside, the topic change is so different that neurotypicals can’t follow the connections.

Hillary also had to contend with Bernie as her opponent in the primary, a much more beloved candidate who polled better than both her and Trump, and was also handicapped by the Dems running a crooked primary by saying that they didn’t have to and would never pick Bernie as the candidate, even if he won the primary. She also called herself a “Goldwater girl” during the campaign, a man who ran for President on segregation as a campaign promise. People also had a negative view of her because she’s a Clinton, and there was a bit of dissatisfaction with “political dynasties” after the Bush era.

And Harris ran a campaign that tried to appeal to conservative voters with promises such as building the wall on the Mexican border and campaigning with Cheney, which caused her to immediately begin losing percentages in the polls amongst independent voters. She also has a legacy of questionable actions against minorities of color during her time in California, which I saw a number of people criticizing.

Not to say that sexism and racism didn’t play a part because oh my God, even here in liberal Massachusetts I see that shit. But they also did the usual Democrat campaign strategy of not appealing to their base because they were courting a mythical moderate conservative voter that doesn’t exist, and that’s a losing strategy. Dems fall in love, Republicans fall in line. AOC is so popular because she speaks to the issues that people have, and she does so passionately.

Despite that, I unfortunately remain unconvinced that she could pull out a presidential victory because of the aforementioned racism and sexism that’s so prevalent in this country. As someone wiser than me once said, racism is so American that when you criticize it, people think that you’re criticizing America.

What the fuck are you on about? I never said that they started street brawls with the church. I agreed with you about them hating and attacking socialists, added that they only kept the name for the party because of the recognition factor/popularity of socialist policy at that time in Germany, and then said that if I remember correctly, Hitler made agreements with the church for funding and support despite his personal feelings on the matter. Nowhere did I say the Nazis beat up Christians or members of the Church.