Based

Sort of a joke that these planes can’t fly in anything but the most ideal conditions

Duh. That’s how extortion works.

You think the mob ever delivered anything on time and under budget?

If this was all they were doing, I’d agree

Reagan Republicans in 2005?

I guess Bush Republicans would be a better turn of phrase. But they all came out of the same White Flight that Reagan kicked off in the 1980s. The big Republican landslides of 1994, 2002, and 2010 either flipped or purged a bunch of the Kennedy Democrats from the Gulf Coast states and turned them into GOP strongholds.

The gerrymandering of the first Bush term also gave birth to a bunch of flipped House seats and state legislatures, ultimately paying off big in 2004 (and again in 2010 and 2014 and 2016 and 2022).

It was a vastly better situation than a lot of wandering tribes had it back then.

No it wasn’t. Life expectancy was shorter. They had higher instances of domestic violence and stunted growth from disease and malnutrition. The process of sustaining an agricultural economy is grueling, the labor monotonous, and the results of months of labor can be as fickle as the wind. And grain-based diets are fucking horrible for your health - particularly with respect to your teeth and your weight.

Wandering tribes had it significantly better. That’s why migrant civilizations - from the Hittites to the Persians to the Mongols to the Apache - were such a terror for agricultural communities. They were more fit, often more intelligent (or at least more educated), and because they were more mobile they could outrun regional catastrophes and pounce upon underdeveloped unprepared sedentary populations hundreds of miles away.

Large agricultural societies were good at one thing and that was getting large numbers of people in a dense community to fuck out kids at a rapid rate. And eventually these large populations developed the industries capable of winning wars of attrition against migrant raiders.

But this process took millennia. It was iterative and routinely prone to failure. And absent membership in the rarefied elite - the planter class, the aristocracy, the theocracy - you were much better off as a nomad than a serf until perhaps 80-150 years ago, depending on where you were living.

Depending on how you want to view the world, nomadic peoples are still at the forefront of human civilization. We’ve congealed this cohort of people into institutions we call corporations and militaries. But you better believe the overseas contractor driving a truck or piloting a drone in Iraq is doing way better than the fertile crescent farmers who have been tilling the soil for the last 10,000 years.

They were built by farmers during downtime, they were treated well.

The Pharaoh’s government would take a tithe of the farmer’s crops during the growing season and hold it in reserve. Farmers then got a share of their deposits back in exchange for doing this backbreaking work in pursuit of the vanity projects of the wealthiest merchant and priest families (of which the Pharaoh’s was the pinnacle).

Idk what “treated well” is supposed to mean in this context. They were treated about as well as any other laboring people. But the average life expectancy of an Egyptian laborer was late-30s to early-40s. They worked until their bodies gave out and then their kids took over.

I wouldn’t call any kind of Bronze Age agricultural society benevolent to its working class.

I’ve lived my entire life in fear of being called uncivil.

Free at last, free at last.

You guys are not even allowed to discuss anything further than a useless peaceful protest, or you get banned or shut down and silenced.

Everyone who isn’t actively complicit is terrified of standing up and therefore standing out. It’s a rational response and one we’ve been struggling with since the era of modern policing.

Even regular folk who mod on Lemmy are tripping over themselves to stop us from actually doing anything

I see a lot of empty gestures towards “someone should do something”. I see books like “How to Blow Up A Pipeline” and movies like “One Battle After Another” exemplify and valorize domestic insurrection. It isn’t as though there’s some total censorship. And we have plenty of nominal organs of resistance - from charity groups to gun clubs to local political caucuses - that could “do something” if they knew what exactly it was they were trying to do.

But relatively few people want to risk their lives and livelihoods to take a turn at being Revolutionaries. We don’t have a revolutionary movement. We have a random collection of martyrs piling up in the street - people who did not wake up that morning and declare they were going to die for their cause, but were just swept up in the violence for the most token forms of resistance.

Lemmy mods don’t have to try particularly hard to squelch something that isn’t emergent.

It takes an enormous amount of ultra pure water to make a micro chip

Israel has some of the most advanced desalination facilities in the world

Yeah, that’s the problem with this picture.

He looks like he’s bending over to get railed.

Not unlike his predecessors from the 1860s

A progressive that’s pro 2A would absolutely kill it in any election right now.

That’s insane. “Pro-2A” isn’t a real position. The idea of a black man owning a gun is what’s at issue.

If voters just wanted a progressive with NRA friendly gun views, those were a dime a dozen twenty years ago. They all got swept out by Reagan Republicans

This strike action can’t be good for them either

Weird thing is this is the “government takeover” the 2nd amendment nuts have been screaming about for generations.

No no no. You’re thinking of the Civil Rights Act. That’s what they were complaining about.

Imagine trusting this bitch at face value

Love “not a cop” flair

Although, we are getting dangerously close to “Was Chaz good?” discourse