wjrii @ wjrii @lemmy.world

Posts

54

Comments

1,540

Joined

1 yr. ago

I may have a bit of a rose-colored view of the US, or at least its potential to have its conscience pricked by the notion that tomorrow can be freer than today, but if we don't care about that anymore, then whatever it was that made America a more palatable hegemon than the USSR or China is gone. The USA is just another transactional actor, and not even a particularly reliable one. At this point, Trump has literally threatened more individual souls with annexation than China has.

Tacoma's gotten big, and the new Ranger too, but Ford has the (slightly homely) Maverick and Hyundai has the Santa Cruz, which is basically an Aussie-style Ute. The Ridgeline is getting bigger too, but I think its guts are still a unibody SUV/minivan frame that should be pretty easy to live with.

You're not wrong, but due to many reasons, most of them cultural and political, most of them CAN still do normal truck things, assuming you don't need a long-bed, don't mind your very expensive toy losing its value as it gets beat up, and can fix or tolerate various frills failing over time. I am starting to see well-worn work trucks that were almost certainly bought used but would have been considered luxurious when new. There's at least a modicum of utility there that the chassis and motor can still have a second life as a truck after a few years as a grocery-hauler. There's also still one dealer near me that stocks row upon row of white Silverados with steel wheels and vinyl interiors.

The Cybertruck is very bad at truck things regardless of how you feel about its resale value, and at this point it's just a way for assholes with too much money to make their entire car a MAGA bumper sticker.

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

This is the crux. It's a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me... combining the "melting pot" and "salad bowl" tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst... well... not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.

Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% "white," likely to mean "of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory," and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn't had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more "assorted crackers." Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures... OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don't have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you're describing can be more celebratory than divisive.

I'm not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we've been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.

I really enjoyed Prodigy, but good lord the Dauntless is fugly.

Surely "personal liberty" will include respect for bodily autonomy of all people, and support for free markets will be deeply understanding of the pressures that cause migration and empathetic to the migrants.

RIGHT?

Yay, we all have the personal liberty to choose oppressive employment conditions over literal starving, as the low cost of considering humans disposable and the increased profits from untempered collusion and/or monopoly abuse means that only oppressive employers will have any leverage in the "free" market! YAY!!!

cup of tea

There’s your problem right there, bucko. In the words of the last great American… pigeon sweat.

Indeed, but the ones who do probably don't see much need to boast about it.

Yes, but that is less fun for my dad-joke purposes.

So the one in the old fable was even more of a dick than we'd been led to believe. Got it.

She's got to course-correct after having the unmitigated gall(!) to suggest women might want to consider having their finances and careers in order before getting married and having kids.

Can they do it on a cold, rainy night in Stoke?!?!?

Youngest Earth Creationist!

Maybe a little, and I personally try to reserve it for times when it means damaged to a significant degree but well under 50%, but then I also try to remember that language changes, English moreso than most, and I probably use a hundred different terms in ways that are inconsistent with past usage.

That said, I get a stronger sensation of that when people overlook the awfulness that should be inherent in the word "enormity." 😂

No true macros right now, but my DIY battlecruiser eight keys that do simple combos: Ctrl Z, Ctrl X, Ctrl C, Ctrl V, Win L, Win D, Win Shift S (Snipping/Screenshot tool), and finally Win Period because I'm a manchild who sometimes likes Emojis. I have another that does Media Play/Pause, and volume stuff is on the knob.

"Decimate" comes from "decimatio," a specific punishment in the Roman army, randomly executing 1/10 of a unit's strength, due to cowardice or some other shameful collective act.

See also "nappie," the largely British term for diapers, which of course would have exclusively been small absorbent cloths for most of their existence.

I'll borrow this from my contribution to a discussion yesterday, but Shakespeare coined fewer phrases than you'd think, and probably not very many words at all (though certainly more than the average schlub):

Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.

He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.

As a further aside, he's one of the best-researched non-noble lives of his era, and the "Authorship question" is the equivalent of History Channel Ancient Aliens "documentaries." It's titillating nonsense put out by snobs who can't fathom that their literary idol was not an elite (while still definitely privileged compared to the truly common person).

“Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from.” (Source: Pooptimist@lemmy.world)

Extremely unlikely. Always be careful of etymologies that are just a little too pat. Sometimes they hold up, but more often they're just someone "seeing Jesus in the toast" and then making up some bullshit to justify it.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sincere