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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 28th, 2024

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  • Pretty much. Secular education tends to begin with Columbus sailing across the Atlantic and seldom ventures north or south of our boarders – let alone touch on the rest of the planet until World War 2, after which a lot of curriculums just end. Elective courses are better… which is why nearly every year at least one of the states try to ban them.

    Most of our protestant schooling likes to make special note of the fact that people fled here to escape religious persecution, that this or that sect wouldn’t be possible without American Freedoms™. Hell, Mormon scripture straight up says the US is a promised holy land.



  • You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

    The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.



  • You’d rather believe Trump is result of foreign interference, that our own institutions would never result in this without being sullied from outside. It’s fan fic, it’s Cold War nonsense.

    Trump is the consequence of our political systems, of our spiteful culture, of our economics that promises success and leaves people sick, broken, and in debt. So what if the Russians had a few hundred Facebook posts? That “seed” would not have taken if the soil weren’t already fertile. Frankly, I don’t think it made a difference. We were barrelling toward Trump with or without the oh so spooky slavs typing on a keyboard.



  • Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.

    Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn’t necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.




  • neuroplasticity is limited to what our genetics will allow

    sorry, what do you mean by this? Surely the benefit of a learning and growing brain is that it can respond and adapt to situations faster than germ-line genetics ever could. Why would there be a genetic limiter, what purpose would that serve?




  • From further up the thread

    A liberal is someone who:

    • Upholds the modern nation state and is thus against monarchy (against whom the first liberals rebelled against)
    • Upholds capitalism and market economies, and with it property rights
    • Upholds electoral parliamentary systems of governance
    • Usually believes in some version of the social contract or similar theory from which the legitimacy of the nation state and capitalism is derived.

    This describes the bulk of the Democrat and Republican parties. US politics doesn’t have a left-wing as it is understood in the rest of the world, our center is between two right-wing ideologies.


  • I never said I wasn’t voting, or that others shouldn’t.

    Or maybe because they obstruct fucking everything. JFC. And then they can stack the courts.

    Or maybe because the Dems still try to reach across the aisle. While the GOP doesn’t.

    This is what I’m saying! Democrats keep trying to meet Republicans in the middle, and Republicans just push further and further to the right. That is, regardless of intention, enabling! I feel like you are asking the world of voters, when the party itself won’t even play hardball with the fascist nutjobs they’re supposed to be opposing