UnderpantsWeevil @ UnderpantsWeevil @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Even more so when you remember that the original "we need to get rid of all those immigrants" argument stemmed from migrants costing the country too much money.

Trillions for deportation. Not one penny for infrastructure or social services.

Too many Americans seriously believe failure to carry state documentation makes you legally a non-person. And being undocumented while brown flags you as part of an invading army.

He's no better than an Arab, a Russian, or one of the dreaded Chinese and deserves to die in misery as an example to others

Just like Netanyahu with the handling of Gaza. Lots of people approve. Some people think he's not going fascist enough.

More than 17% Those are just the ones who'll admit to it.

All those Dems clutching their pearls over "Defund ICE" posters are very happy to see Hispanics ethnically cleansed.

George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader's Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in "Hutt Space" - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. "The Clone Wars" wasn't just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope's Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was "Episode IV" should say it all.

One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director's notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.

It's an early YA novel and propaganda piece. Very good at what it set out to accomplish. Obviously, not good for a material understanding of the world.

Florida is well on its way

Well, I'm glad Mamdani won in NYC and zionist liberals can finally put to rest the need to vote straight ticket Democrat.

It’s a hundred pages of diatribes, some misogyny, a story beat, another fifty pages raving about bureaucracy, a story beat, and 100 pages about brainwashing and how socialism fucking sucks.

The joke of 1984 is that Orwell neatly described the modern capitalist British State virtually to a T. Hell, it wasn't all that far off from the contemporary British State, given the conditions of paranoia and economic decline the island suffered during the postwar aftermath.

In the era it was written, a lot of the diatribes about the nefarious villains of socialist politics felt like a guy throwing on a big spooky ghost custom with a light under the chin. But in the modern moment... fuck it if cops busting down my door because my elementary-school son was tricked into accusing me of ThoughtCrime during a mandatory Two-Minute Hate doesn't feel like a thing that could really happen.

Then the most half-baked “how do I tie this bad essay together?” ending.

The execution was a forced ending. But the psychology at the end - this desperate liberalist clinging to an individualized, compartmentalized psychic resistance - absolutely strikes a cord. I know plenty of people (hell, I regularly indict myself) over the reflexive meekness draped atop rebellious fantasy. This growling whipped-dog sentiment, where liberals will say everything in a loud whisper, but duck their heads in terror at the first whiff of authority or consequence... as we move further and further towards fascism. I see it everywhere.

Orwell very neatly diagnoses the failure of the liberal opposition in the personage of Winston Smith and his peers. And it is even further pronounced in the meta-textual narrative, as Orwell himself is an embodiment of Winston. A man who has rewritten history at the behest of his imperialist paymasters (after a career as a fucking Burmese cop and nark, ffs) goes to his grave subsuming the revulsion of his own country with a fear and antipathy towards a distant foreign land.

As a coming-of-age book, particularly for American teenagers, "Catcher in the Rye" resonates for a reason. It does an excellent job of capturing the moment from a sympathetic point of view. And then you read it ten years later, thinking to yourself "Holy shit was I really like this?" only to realize you absolutely were.

American businesses will spend millions of dollars to hold an event almost no one outside their little circle of friends will even hear about in order to tell the public to do a thing they have no real choice in.

Learn about early American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and the period shortly before it.

The Regulator Movement in North Carolina, also known as the Regulator Insurrection, War of Regulation, and War of the Regulation, was an uprising in Provincial North Carolina from 1766 to 1771 in which citizens took up arms against colonial officials who they viewed as corrupt. Historians such as John Spencer Bassett argue that the Regulators did not wish to change the form or principle of their government, but simply wanted to make the colony's political process more equal. They wanted better economic conditions for everyone, instead of a system that heavily benefited the colonial officials and their network of plantation owners mainly near the coast

During the American Revolution, many prominent Regulators became Loyalists, like James Hunter who fought at the Battle of Moore's Creek Bridge. ... The Regulators notably were never against the monarchy - their issue was with local corruption and elites abusing them.

Dunmore's Proclamation was formally proclaimed on November 15. Its publication prompted between 800 and 2,000 slaves (from both Patriot and Loyalist owners) to run away and enlist with Dunmore. It also raised a furor among Virginia's slave-owning elites (including those who had been sympathetic to Britain), to whom the possibility of a slave rebellion was a major fear.

Later British commanders over the course of the American Revolutionary War followed Dunmore's model in enticing slaves to defect—the 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation, which applied across all the colonies, was more successful. By the end of the war, at least 20,000 slaves had escaped from plantations into British service

Shays's Rebellion was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts and Worcester in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades.

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, Massachusetts merchants' European business partners refused to extend lines of credit to them and insisted that they pay for goods with hard currency, despite the country-wide shortage of such currency. Merchants began to demand the same from their local business partners, including those operating in the market towns in the state's interior. Many of these merchants passed on this demand to their customers, although Governor John Hancock did not impose hard currency demands on poorer borrowers and refused to actively prosecute the collection of delinquent taxes. The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands of merchants and the civil authorities, and some began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures.

Just remember that the American Revolution was a bourgeois revolution that failed to address many of the underlying economic conditions plaguing the colonies from the outset. Yes, the American merchant class beat back the British Monarchists. But no, that wasn't a happily-ever-after for the proletariat of the nascent nation.

Celebrate the Birth Of Your Country By Blowing Up A Small Part Of It

China Has Invested Heavily in Rwanda’s Healthcare and USAID’s Closure Opens More Doors for Chinese Influence

Invoking, once more, the evergreen adage

Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time Britain visits we get a lecture.

~ Dr Lubinda Haabazoka, Director of the University of Zambia Graduate School of Business and former President of the Economics Association of Zambia

Warren Buffet and Bill Gates did this joke already.

Write an Op-Ed about how they aren't taxed heavily enough. Then spending millions to prop up conservative political campaigns dedicated to cutting taxes.

Quit buying this horseshit. You'll know a millionaire is lying when their lips are moving.

Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.

Maybe. Microsoft's biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don't see that failing them anytime in the next decade.

But retail consumer spending? That's something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.

Inflation, in absolute terms, is a larger benefit to people with higher interest rates.

Fair enough. I'm more thinking in a discrete sense... "saving money" versus "owing money"... rather than implicitly how much less are you paying.

That's a historically unusual artifact of the financialized housing market in a country where the population outpaces new available housing units while the economy continues to grow.

Go to Italy or - God forbid - Iraq or Ukraine or Myanmar, and you'll find record inflation combined with falling real estate values. Buying a home in Lebanon or El Salvador or Bulgaria in 1975 wasn't a good move. You had to be a certain proximity near the US/EU money printing machines and a distance from the US/Russia bomb dropping machines to get that arbitrage to work.

At this point? Fucking good. Americans clearly don't deserve domestic manufacturing capacity.

China Century. Just embrace it already.

Damn, if you posted this six months ago, people would have tried to ban you for it.