Sadly, 99% of people - wherever they live - won't really do or say anything until it affects them personally.

It's been wild reading news stories coming out the US over the last couple of weeks.

Not the stories themselves of course, but the air of shock and alarm in both the stories and in the comment sections - and its not just Lemmy, its everywhere there's a comment section - when you knew what he was going to do, he told you what he was going to do - why are you now in any way surprised or disturbed?

The main question I have is that I've been hearing from Americans for decades now how gun ownership means you have a 2nd amendment based militia ready to go to protect the constitution and yet in the face of what is completely obviously the initial stages of a coup, I see no signs of that militia. Where are you?

The only way this story could be more American was if it had been a child dolphin, in a public school.

An actual life sentence for being the victim of rape.

Capitalist governments are pro-finance, not pro-people. Totalitarian gvmts (China etc) are pro-system, not pro-people. They're just different ways of maintaining classes of people who control the power/finances.

There's always been an uber-rich elite, all the way from the first tribal chieftain or Pharaoh or whatever until now and there's always been a huge underclass of the rest of us. The first law of any hierarchy is to protect the people at the top.

What we see today (in Westernised countries) is the natural, logical progression of economics driven democracy. Economic theorists say wealthy people create wealth by purposefully distributing it via jobs etc but in reality they do everything possible to minimise the loss of what they see as their money by abusing labour laws, privatising everything, trying to kill unions, creating convoluted laws to protect their fortunes, avoiding taxes and hiking prices up to the point most of us are just about surviving with enough carrot to ignore or pretend we don't see the stick.

And we're willing participants in that system. We know this is happening but we're dazzled by lotteries holding out the chance to join the rich, promises of work making us rich and a media which lionises the elite as some kind of fabulous aspirational status to the point we have people on social media faking a rich lifestyle for internet points.

The uber rich believe they're better than us and our acquiescence with this system really means we agree with them.

Outsmarting Piers Morgan is about as difficult as obeying gravity.

I'm not American but what's happening in the US and what will happen when/if Trump gets re-elected definitely worries me. It's difficult not to sound overly dramatic or hyperbolic about the situation but it really does feel like the US is uncomfortably close right now to a christofascist state. And if you just rolled your eyes at that word, take a look at who's currently second in line to the US presidency.

If Trump does win, I really fear for American democracy. Do you really think a man who encouraged an armed insurrection to support a subversion of an election will pause to think twice about removing the few rights large sections of America currently have? And if the process prevents him, do you think he'd think twice about dismantling the process? At gun point if necessary?

1. This story is about a Channel 4 appointment, nothing to do with the BBC.
2. It's not C4 who have rejected her, they wanted her - it was the gvmt who told C4 they couldn't appoint her.
3. She's the 3rd recent veto of a non-white appt by the gvmt
4. The gvmt provided no reasons for the rejection

Today in bizzaroworld, asking for context demonstrates bias and unfounded opinion.

I'm not speaking for autistic people here, but I am speaking as parent to two children (now adults) on the spectrum.

Autistic children do not ruin your life and do not have ruined lives themselves. As with all parenting, sometimes things are very, very difficult and sometimes things are very, very easy. This isn't unique to raising a neurodiverse child, this is just parenting. The unique challenges that parenting a neurodiverse child brings are 99% of the time caused by how society thinks these children/adults are and assumptions about whats best for them without actually asking them rather than any sort of intrinsic issue caused by their autism or ADHD or any other neurological difference. For the remaining 1% of the time, you just do your best.

The narrative that neurological difference, in particular autism, ruins lives has, in its modern form, been with us since Andrew Wakefield first perpetuated his fraudulent claims of vaccine damage causing autism. It was spread by antivaxx/autism activist parent groups like Jenny McCarthy's Generation Rescue and the truly despicable people at Autism Speaks. These are the people who've ruined lives.

The code on the card is covered so Amazon might know you use Mullvad but they have no way of knowing what your account is.

Mullvad know your acct but they have no way of knowing how it is you paid other than maybe it being a scratchcard which they don't track anyway.

Using 'female' in that context does give off, at best, vibes of someone who doesn't have much contact with women. Feels like someone classifying an unfamiliar species, rather than referring to an actual person.