The left doesn’t have the money to prop up a decent counterpropaganda apparatus.

No. People don’t even recognize what’s happening, let alone how to respond.

In the US, at least, people have been trained to see democracy and capitalism as inseparable. People see the system failing because of corruption and greed, and blame democracy instead of capitalism. It’s a great system for capitalists. Everyone else, not so much.

The Senate not being population-based is part of the problem too. As are gerrymandering and not having universal adult suffrage or federal holidays for voting days. But a Constitutional Convention would be state-based, too, so we’d end up with something even worse than we have now.

Yes, but none of that applies to a South African born in South Africa to South African parents.

As someone who has extensive personal experience with severe mental illness, I appreciate very much your desire to defend us (your instinct would usually be right), but psychopathy is a weird one. If the previous commenter had said “mental illness” instead of psychopathy specifically, I’d be pissed. But there is evidence that psychopaths advance in business management. I realize it’s not exactly JAMA, but here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stephaniesarkis/2019/10/27/senior-executives-are-more-likely-to-be-psychopaths/?sh=24aa505d47c4

Modern US conservative policy isn’t a complex question. The answer is always money or sadism.

I don’t want to do-over the Civil War.

Both 9/11s were pretty freaking real, but you’re right on the US orchestrating the 1973 one.

Might have something to do with the slavery, imperialism, and genocide. Or the fact that French Canadians are primarily of French descent. It’s simply not comparable. Also, while people say French Canadian to describe an ethnicity and culture (again, one primarily made up of French immigrants), I’ve never heard someone call Quebec French Canada in seriousness.

That’s valid.

It may be Francophone, but it’s as fucked up to call this “French Africa” as it would be to call India/Pakistan/Bangladesh “British India.”

If they really want less of a rush to NATO, maybe they should stop invading their neighbors?

Well played.

Who doesn’t?

If you hear of a reasonable source with actual info on North Korean news, leave a link here. Otherwise, your concern is noted. Believe me, in the face of radio silence, most people are imagining much worse things of the regime than a shorts ban.

Auth-left calls it decadence, auth-right calls it degeneracy. Authoritarians hate any deviance from their norms.

Some search engines and social media platforms make at least half-assed efforts to prevent or add warnings to this stuff, because anorexia in particular has a very high mortality rate, and age of onset tends to be young. The people advocating AI models be altered to prevent this say the same about other tech. It’s not techphobia to want to try to reduce the chances of teenagers developing what is often a terminal illness, and AI programmers have the same responsibility on that as everyone else,

Kind of pathetic that it’s the first big one, given our economic structure and the fact that we’re nearly a quarter into the century.

They’re rich, but it also makes them stand out, gets them extra headlines.

What are they afraid of? Country matters? Nothing?

Basic rights for people who aren’t white dudes were mostly imposed by court order. That’s the reality. We have laws, it’s just that those laws were written at a time when personhood didn’t really apply to anyone who wasn’t a white man. And if no one who you consider a full person is capable of being pregnant, you’re not going to think to put in a right to abortion explicitly, even if it’s a basic requirement for equal citizenship for the female sex, because women (and trans people) aren’t really people…and so on.

Edit: I realize this is mostly due to the weird semi-religious fervor Americans have for our Constitution and government system.

TL; DR: We’re running Modern Democracy 1.0 with a Frankenstein covering of patches, while other countries just upgrade whenever they need you.

Also, there’s not a large, well-funded far-left movement in the US fighting to radicalize people.

People hate exercise, too. Not doing it will shorten their lives, but they hate it.

Child sexual abuse

They can open a pdf, or their Legislative Assistants can. That stuff is performative, making sure we don’t expect them to regulate huge corporations because they’re so incompetent. This is the stuff they’re interested in regulating, so they do.

The key is defining terms like “false” and “violent.”

Let’s not mince words. Pro-gestational slavery.

Watch 2 minutes of her speaking, you’ll understand. She’s a GrandKaren.

1869 at the latest (Texas v. White)

America dropped a lot of our soft power while we were busy trying to invade everyone in the early 2000s; China picked it up and did something with it. As an American, I can’t be mad that they were smarter than us. As a human, I’m disgusted that resource gaps between and within countries are so big that those approaches work.

Thanks. Might give it a shot. Don’t usually track my reading, but if I do, I won’t be feeding that data directly to one of the Frightful Five.

Wow. Thank you. Sorry if I was less-than-polite, this stuff really fucks me up.

That’s a different topic, as they don’t own the outputs in FOSS.

Specifically in this case, they want people they perceive as women (any human with a working uterus) to suffer so they are easier to control. I worry that your phrasing erases the sex-based violence part of this. Fascists are coming for most of us in one way or another, but this particular front is about controlling people they see as women. My husband (a cis dude) didn’t have to get parts of his body removed to have full citizenship rights; I did.

Maybe? Got any cheese or good books?

Yes. The closer labor costs are to zero, the happier the average capitalist is.

It’s harder to get people to return to the 1950s if they’re haunted by the realities of the 1850s. Best teach them everything was hunky-dory.

They lost the campaign. (And that’s not nothing, ending chattel slavery in the US was a boon to humanity.) The state of the war is still in question, however.

The only fully accurate term is pro-gestational-slavery.