Just passing through.

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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 24th, 2024

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  • There’s a genocide going on with what appears to be more or less the full support of the countries that make up the defence union my country is a part of.

    There’s war in Europe.

    I find those topics worthy of discussion, and any social media where this is not actively discussed seems to me to be a smokescreen more than anything.

    Of course tragic realities like the genocide we are complacent in, climate change, war in Europe, Russian propaganda and the rise of the far right is going to be actively discussed. It concerns more or less everyone who uses this platform, and they are the most important issues of our time. It’s not about negativity, it’s about coming to terms with reality and seeking to understand it.

    That said, the communities I follow are largely apolitical stuff that interests me. Woodworking, knitting, gardening, owls, art, and the Fediverse. With the exception of !europe@feddit.de and !energy@slrpnk.net, I let the political stuff come through the cracks rather than actively following it.

    I also have a Piefed account on which I follow news communities but actively filter out Trump and Musk. I can see how Amercians still feel the need to talk about these men, but at the end of the day they’re just fascist attention whores.


  • It varies everywhere, even from state to state in the US.

    The US system is kind of broken - they ask you to vote for way too many things. Where I’m from I just vote for a party - I basically say “yeah, the green party are cool”, and then the party decides who to put in which position should they get enough votes. I can give a +1 to candidates I like personally, but I don’t have to.

    In the US you might be asked to vote for school boards, a sheriff, and a bunch of weird positions. There’s no realistic chance you’ll make an informed decision for all of them.

    Sadly, it’s very important you still vote, because the republicans are using this broken system to fill these positions with far-right lunatics. So basically seek out information as much as you can, but at the end of the day just vote for whichever Democrat is on the ballot whenever in doubt. They’re not guaranteed to be good - in fact they’re likely to be pretty bad - but they’re pretty much guaranteed to be the lesser of two evils.

    Still might vary though - local politics are weird, and there are no rules set in stones. Some places you still have decent republicans on the local level (or so I’ve heard).






  • Well, imagine you meet a guy travelling through the US. He’s wearing lederhosen, has a freaking feather in his hat, and speaks with a heavy German accent. You ask where he’s from, and he says he’s American/Italian, as his maternal grandfather was born in the US and his grandmother on his father’s side is Italian. However, this is his first time outside of Germany, and he speaks no Italian and hardly any English.

    This is what Americans tend to look like to Europeans.





  • Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia is a solid philosophical foundation for a lot of right wing thought. If you want to engage further you can follow up with Michael Otsuka’s critique in Self-Ownership and Equality: A Lockean Reconciliation.

    Nozick provides an underpinning for what many think of as traditional conservative American values, without basing it in Christianity.

    Then of course there’s the Chicago school of economics (Friedman et al), which is just a somewhat naive and more it less completely discredited take on how the economy works. It’s fundamental for understanding American politics the previous half century, but their ideas are not really worth interacting with unless you’re particularly interested in economics. It’s not like the idiot politicians who push it in front of them understand the theories either.

    Thsee theories is not far right; there’s no salvaging the far right, and their ideological basis is mostly just bigotry. You could read Ayn Rand to try to understand which hole these idiots crawled from. Or better, don’t waste your time.