Call it what it is: nationalism. I’ve been weirded out by it since I stopped saying the pledge of allegiance in elementary school.

Fun fact: the pledge was created as part of a campaign to sell more flags to schools.

While this is an old saying, misogyny and disrespect like this are learned behaviors, not naturally occurring.

This kid is, what, 12? And he’s publicly talking on social media about how he thinks he’s got the charm to get in his teacher’s pants. Call it what it is: this kid has been groomed by “influencers.”

This is what happens when you try to sanitize the internet for advertisers children.

Where have I heard this before?

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute for Sexual Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology, or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was the first sexology research center in the world.

The Institute was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who since 1897 had run the world’s first homosexual organization Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance at the start of the first homosexual movement that would flourish in interwar Weimar culture. The Committee published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Hirschfeld built a unique library at the institute on gender, same-sex love and eroticism.

The institute pioneered research and treatment for various matters regarding gender and sexuality, including gay, transgender, and intersex topics. In addition, it offered various other services to the general public: this included treatment for alcoholism, gynecological examinations, marital and sex counseling, treatment for venereal diseases, and access to contraceptive treatment. It offered education on many of these matters to both health professionals and laypersons.

After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.

One estimate says that between 12,000 to 20,000 books and journals, and even larger number of images and sex subjects, were destroyed. Another estimate says that about 25,000 books were destroyed.

This included artistic works, rare medical and anthropological documents, and charts concerning cases of intersexuality which were prepared for the International Medical Congress, among other things. A collection of works about sexuality, in any one place, similar to the one stored at the institute was not compiled until the founding of the Kinsey Institute in 1947.

First past the post is also forever broken as it inevitably leads to a two-party system.

You’re absolutely on the right track. He was literally based on Trump, per the directors.

Here’s the version I have that I think is more accurate

Stop simping for Daddy Donald and fascism, he ain’t gonna let you suck his toes.

America has never addressed those issues and we’ve still regressed so much since Reagan was in office. Fuck the US and fuck the Flavor-Aid about “American Exceptionalism” they pour down our throats from the moment we first enter a school. I found the pledge of undying loyalty weird when I was in elementary school, and I don’t like it any more 30 years later with all the other things I now know they lied about or swept under the rug.

America has never been great and I have never been proud to be from this country.

One thing I will say about Obama is that he did try. Years ago, somebody put together a list of all his campaign promises and the only one he didn’t do anything about was closing Guantanamo Bay. Every other campaign promise said “blocked by Republicans” next to it. People forget that the rest of the government was controlled by a Republican party who said that even in the short time they didn’t have majority control that they’d rather burn the government to the ground than let a black man pass any laws. The Democrats capitulating at every like they always do didn’t help, of course, but it wasn’t like he didn’t try to do what he said he was going to.

All the other stuff he did, though? Yeah, that’s on him. There was plenty of “business as usual” during his terms when it came to things like drone strikes on civilians and deportation camps.

There have been numerous studies about this, and they have all shown that this doesn’t happen. Canada did a multi-year trial with one town in the 2000s (before the program was shut down and the records sealed/destroyed by the conservative administration once they gained power) that showed a drop in workers in only two groups: high-school kids and pregnant women. It also coincided with a general increase in economic activity as well as a sharp increase in both grades in school and the number of kids graduating and going on to college afterward- especially among poor households. The general theory was that the extra money created financial security in poorer households and high-school kids didn’t have to work/drop out and get a job to help put food on the table and could therefore focus more on school and have a better chance at going to college and better job prospects in the future, breaking the cycle of poverty.

Y2K is the perfect example of a crisis averted. There was a major problem that would’ve crashed computer systems all over the world, potentially bringing down power grids, financial institutions, hospital networks, etc. But the problem was identified well ahead of time and programmers and engineers spent like a full year working to ensure that the problem was fixed and wouldn’timpact anything, so it never became A Problem like the media said it was.

Did the Cold War ever really end? I feel like the names of the players may have changed, but the board is still there and the pieces are still moving.

Most of us have a roof over our heads and steady food in our bellies which is not historically how things have been.

I don’t have the outright stats to say so definitively, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true for the smallest percent of the US population since the Great Depression. The average American has less than $300 in their bank account. Credit card debt is increasing as fast as it ever has, and people are defaulting on that debt at the highest rates of all time. Most people are living paycheck to paycheck (at least 60% of the population), and there is not a single county in the country where a person making the median wage in that county can afford the median cost of a home in that same county. We lost more money during the 2008 recession than during the Great Depression, and most people never recovered even though the economy recovered that money in about a year - 90% of it went to the wealthy, who had also lost the least. The homelessness crisis has become so bad that it’s called the homelessness epidemic, and the homeless population is also increasing at the fastest rate that it ever has. Wealth disparity is worse in the US today than during the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread hit an all-time high of a day’s wage for the average worker.

The average American is one medical emergency away from going bankrupt, and diseases that we had thought were on the verge of eradication are making a comeback while we continue to ignore the ongoing COVID pandemic that we still don’t know how it truly affects us. COVID has been found in everything from the brain to the testicles and is linked to infertility and a million other issues that will cripple the size of the workforce in the years to come due to Long COVID symptoms preventing people from working.

These are hard times made by weak, greedy men who refuse to hand over the reins and want to make things even worse.

Things have always been worse if you weren’t a straight, white, able-bodied man, but I think it’s been a long time since it was this bad for such a large swath of the population on the basic metrics of food, shelter, and financial security - at least in the US.

Considering Biff was based on Trump in the 80s…

Yeah, the short of it is that it used to be used clinically to describe developmental disorders but fell out of use around the mid-90s because, like so many other words, it was used maliciously to the point where it lost its original meaning and context.

If you were a 90s kid, retard and gay were as close as you could get to actually swearing without getting in trouble and basically carried the same cultural weight as outright slurs. The stigma around being gay was so bad that in the 2000s they made up a sexuality to describe men who were straight but liked to shower and dress in nice clothing so that they wouldn’t lose their jobs. And the stigma around mental needs little explanation, I think. It wasn’t that long ago that they were electrocuting people and cutting out parts of their brains for being sad or having a stutter.

The US used to be a lot like this too. Food service workers smoking cigarettes while they carve meat and then throwing the butts in the drain. Smoking sections in restaurants being most of the restaurant while the non-smoking section was a corner of the restaurant where they just sat you between all the smokers like the smoke was gonna hit an invisible barrier. Everybody was smoking all the time. My grandma once served my grandfather his breakfast in an ash tray because she was so sick of him putting out his ciagrettes on the plates.

It wasn’t until around the 2000s that things really shifted in the US, and now the thought of a smoking vs non-smoking section of anything other than a little room at the airport where the smokers all squash into to smoke is unheard of.

Considering that studies have shown that conservatives have smaller regions of the brain than normal in the areas that are attributed to things like empathy and compassion - yes, yes there is.

That was the implication. Somebody’s getting a blow job on my 65th birthday, and it sure as hell isn’t gonna be me.

I can’t say anything for sure since I haven’t had a real vacation in 15 years (that wasn’t just staying at the nearest major city for a 3-day holiday weekend), but the cost of flying is a very sore point even in the continental US.

There are tons of beautiful and fun places to visit in the US, but especially if you’re driving, time becomes a limiting factor. I know people who drive from Massachusetts to Florida pretty much every year to go to Disney, and it takes 2 or 3 days of travel to get down there. The stats say that we have less vacation time than similar countries (Europe, Canada, etc.), and the average American will never leave their home state and will die within 25 miles of where they were born.

I used to work with a guy who had a Tachoma that he loved and he only used it for offroading. He kept a pair of spare axles in the bed to swap out on the trail if he snapped one.