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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • Stovetop@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoComic StripsNice Guy
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    7 months ago

    I don’t think it’s just a US thing. Even in places with more limited free speech, people can get away with saying ignorant and heinous things as long as it is technically within the letter of the law, or if the law is not strictly enforced.

    It’s against the law in China to threaten violence or use hate speech, for example, but in practice, I think the law may as well be reworded to clarify that such language is only really illegal when aimed at Han Chinese people.

    Not enough countries care about protecting anyone other than their primary in-group.






  • It is highly regional, too.

    Despite the existence of the Department of Education (which Trump is trying to dismantle), there is no national standard for education in the US. In general, each state is free to decide upon its own policies and standards.

    Some states, such as those in the northeast, have very high-performing school systems. So when that “1 in 5 are illiterate” statistic is mentioned (I actually have not verified that number, just quoting the prior claim as an example), it would be caused by low-performing states where the situation is much more dire dragging down the national average.

    Here’s a general look at quality of education in the US by state, though recommend folks look up their own numbers because I haven’t validated the numbers pulled in the article I grabbed this from.

    It’s not a perfect divide between red states and blue states (Florida appears good, California less so, as an example), but in general we see the lower performing states located mainly in the South where the Republicans have more support. Basically, a less educated populace is easier to manipulate.







  • Governments can and have just branded people and organizations as terrorists to justify conflict. That is typically why third-world countries like Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. have been so heavily devastated by the west. Stopping “Nazi terrorists” is why Russia is invading Ukraine right now as well.

    Be careful of when a country’s media starts throwing out the label “terrorist regime” to describe countries that would be convenient to invade. “Terrorism” is just as much made by fear, instilled by a country’s media, as it is the practice of creating fear directly.





  • Nobody is aborting 9 month old fetuses outside of exceptional medical emergencies, and denying women bodily autonomy is incredibly authoritarian.

    Nobody is aborting 9-month-old fetuses at all. Unless that fetus is already dead or dying, 9 months is well past the point of viability.

    24 weeks (5 months and some change) is when a fetus could viably survive outside the womb with medical intervention. 9 months is at the point of being fully developed, even if it is a couple weeks premature.

    Almost all abortions happen at 10 weeks or less, well before the point of viability. Almost no abortions happen after 24 weeks. Definitely none happening at 9 months.



  • Communism as drafted by 19th and 20th century thinkers will never work, predicated on the idea that labor is inherently undesirable and will not be performed by humans without immediate incentive.

    We will need to rethink our approach towards communism with consideration for the growing spread of automation. Like it or not, automation is going to lead to the end of capitalism when the majority of jobs we have today are rendered obsolete and the unemployed masses are forced to subsist through some sort of UBI.

    The goal is to keep the automation out of the hands of billionaires, however. If a society begins to approach post scarcity, which will finally render capitalism obsolete, the oligarchs will do whatever they can to re-engineer scarcity and bring us back to feudalism before they’d ever consider giving power to the people.