I hate to say it, but once again, Trump wins. All of my MAGA family is talking about what's going on in Minneapolis, with pretty predictable reactions. But guess what they're not talking about: Jeffrey Epstein - that's old news, time to move on, Dems are the only ones bringing it up, etc.
It's always been strange to me that Americans are allowed to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights...until they get killed by police. Then they should've known not to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights.
You might as well imagine no religion while you're at it. It's easy if you try... but it's not going to happen.
So we might as well stop arguing that the government should have a monopoly on tools of violence. These people should be afraid of us, and not the other way around.
The group of Americans who are the loudest at cheering for the 2nd Amendment rights are cheering for ICE these days. To them, "the security of a free State" means that it has a caste system with the "good guys" at the top, and when ICE goons execute Minnesotans, they see brave armed citizens fighting back against the tyranny of wokeness.
Everything makes much more sense when you realize that the conservative project is not about universal application of rights. It is a system of hierarchies. They have rights. We do not. They can carry firearms. We are violent maniacs trying to massacre cops (according to Bovino) and deserve what's coming.
The 2nd amendment was more about suppressing slave revolts than liberating slaves.
What I've observed is that Americans like to put themselves higher than other cultures due to their second amendment rights (and first, but that's neither here nor there), but when push comes to shove there's actually no real positive outcomes that come from having a country with it's citizens armed to the extent that Americans are.
And we've seen what allowing people to promote hate speech with no restraint does to a nation.
When it's over, and it will be, Americans need to start from scratch, iterate and write a new constitution, create new institutions and build a new system.
We've also seen what very rigid hate speech policing does to a nation in Germany... and AfD seems to be doing pretty well.
It's almost as if those laws are mostly just performative bullshit that doesn't actually prevent the spread of violent ideologies when the environment is conductive to them.
Fair, but we need to account for the influence of the 1st-amendment-propelled far right discourse in the US on German politics to know how (in)effective German speech laws are.
> As affordability became Americans' top concern, big brands began to worry about shoppers switching to store-label competitors or skipping some purchases altogether.
I think, at least in the last year-or-so, big brands also became worried about getting flamed by the president for raising prices.
I'm of two minds on this. As you say, renaming from War to Defense was a lie to tell Americans a more palatable story. However, renaming from Defense to War is actually the same thing in the current political context but for populace with different values. It is honest in a way but that was not the intention, nor is it the effective result. It's just a different lie.
it's not just newspeak though. names matter. an advanced civilization, which USA being the richest country on Earth is, should not strive to get into offensive wars...
Quite an interesting phenomena though, how affiliations color some unarguable facts. Many clearly believe that ICE agents are doing the right thing, they got what they voted for.
It seems many products (PCs, TVs, cars, kitchen appliances, etc.) have transitioned from "solve for the customer" to "solve for ourselves (product manufacturers) and tell the customer it's for them, even though it's 99% value to us and 1% value to them".
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