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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I tend to think of and describe myself as a conservative, but don’t align myself with the Republican party at all (I am registered to vote Republican to try to weed out the worst of their lunatics in the primaries, but it’s gonna be a cold day in hell before I vote for one in a general election with the way things are going)

    In my view, which absolutely isn’t the view of the Republicans or conservatives as a whole, the point of conservatism is to just pump the breaks and slow things down to make sure all the "I"s are dotted and "t"s crossed to make sure things are actually going to work as intended.

    Liberals/leftists/progressives should basically be the “idea guys” coming up with big general plans for what they want to happen

    Then the conservatives would be sort of the bean-counters/logistics/nuts-and-bolts sort of guys. They shouldn’t be there to outright oppose the liberal ideas, they’re there to point out the problems with their plans and make sure they’re addressed before we commit to some half-assed plan.


  • Could also just be the rim being kind of dirty and corroded and needs to be cleaned up a bit of bead sealant.

    I’ve had it happen to me a couple times, tires just always lost air sort slowly, I never cared enough to bring it in just for that, not a big deal to stop by the air pump once a week or so when I was getting gas anyway.

    I’m sure if you brought your car in just for that they’d probably slap some token $10-50 price on it.

    But if you bring it in for another service I feel like a lot of places will just do it. I know I brought my car in to pep boys one time for an oil change or something and asked them to look at it and they just did it, no extra charge.

    I feel like it’s one of those little things that no one is quite sure how to write it up in the system, and figuring it out is more of a pain in the ass than just not mentioning it to the boss, not like he’s gonna notice they used an extra scrap of sandpaper and blob of sealant anyway.


  • I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

    But a couple things jumping out at me

    The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

    They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

    And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

    So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

    It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

    Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

    Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

    Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

    *fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.






  • Fondots@lemmy.worldtoMusic@lemmy.worldTear The Facists Down
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    11 days ago

    My buddy works security at a bar. Last night he sends me a picture of a guy sitting there with some SS lightning bolts on his shirt. Bar manager wouldn’t let my friend kick him out because he wasn’t otherwise causing a problem.

    I hatch a plan, I pull up the jukebox app on my phone, turns out you don’t actually have to be at the bar to queue up music there (I’m pretty sure that used to be the case, I’m pretty sure at one point a decade ago I had to spoof my location on a rooted phone to pull this kind of thing)

    And I start queuing up as many anti-fascist songs as I could think of. Cost me a few bucks but I considered it money well-spent.

    This and a few other woody Guthrie songs were of course some of the first things I thought of but sadly were not available on the jukebox.

    But I managed to find a good handful.

    According to my friend, he got visibly frustrated when the Billy Bragg & Wilco cover of All You Fascists came on and left the bar to have a cigarette.

    And when he came back in he was greeted with Youth Against Fascism my Sonic Youth

    Only took about an hour of that before he packed up and left.

    Apparently someone also left a review online complaining about Nazi boy, and after the owner saw it my friend now has more authority to take out the trash.




  • It’s really all over the place depending on the student, the parents, the homeschooling program they’re using, etc.

    I once worked with a guy who homeschooled his kids because their housing situation was a little unstable. It probably provided them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise since they probably would have had to change schools a lot with all of the moving around.

    Other kids may benefit from it if they’re not doing well in a regular school environment, have disabilities, are gifted, etc.

    In other cases it can be very isolating and they miss out on a lot of socialization with other kids their age

    And some parents use it to control what their kids are learning to force political or religious agendas on them.


  • I’m all for splitting hairs over semantics, and I’ll agree with you that “fascist” probably isn’t the best label for Iran

    But if you take a step back and look at the big picture, it does look a hell of a lot like fascism.

    Extreme right wing, militaristic government, social and economic regimentation, charismatic, authoritarian dictators, focusing a whole lot of hatred and blame on people in the nation who don’t conform and towards external enemies, etc.

    I don’t know that they’re exactly nationalistic, but they do have religion filling pretty much that same role, and let’s be real, the line’s pretty damn blurry between religion and government there.

    And they don’t exactly make racial/ethnic superiority a centerpiece of their identity, but they’re certainly not exactly sitting around singing “Kumbaya” with their minorities either, and again we have religion filling a pretty similar role in other ways.

    You can get into the weeds about the specific philosophies at play here and about the history that led them to their current situation, and there’s certainly merit in doing that, but as far as the casual observer is concerned, they do look and quack a hell of a lot like fascists, and while it’s not the best label for what they have going on it’s certainly not the worst either. I’d maybe prefer to slap a qualifier on it- something like pseudo-fascist, islamo-fascist, maybe something like “Farscism” if we want to get a little cutesy with the wordplay to separate it from “classic” fascism.

    And similarly I’d probably want to slap a few qualifiers onto the term “theocracy” as well before applying it to Iran, I don’t think that just that one word really points the whole picture.

    And now that I’m looking at it, “fascist theocracy” might be a contender for how I’d label them.



  • If we want to get a little nitpicky, the Moroccans kind of have it right

    Sure there’s advent leading up to Christmas

    But “christmastide” really begins on Christmas day and continues on into January (January 5th for Epiphany, or slightly longer if your Catholic because they technically count the feast of the baptism of the lord as part of christmastime.) When you talk about the “twelve days of Christmas” the first day is Christmas.

    The lyrics to “Good King Wenceslas” (otherwise known as “that Christmas carol whose tune you recognize, but have no idea what the lyrics are if you even know that it has lyrics”) starts with the titular king looking out his window “on the feast of Stephen” which is the day after Christmas.

    Different branches of Christianity, countries, cultures, etc. of course do things in all kinds of different ways, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know much about Moroccan Christians, nor much about Islamic attitudes towards Christmas there (though since they were doing Christmas events, I think it’s fair to assume that these weren’t exactly hard-liners who believe that no Muslim should ever have anything to do with Christmas) so I can’t really say why they do their Christmas stuff the way they do there, but it could be they just never got the memo that how we celebrate Christmas has changed a bit over the last few centuries.



  • “locker room talk”

    Most of my friends and I are pretty traditionally “manly” men. The kinds of guys you turn to if you need to build something, fix something, need to cut down a tree, want to drink beer and smoke cigars, shoot guns (not after drinking the beer,) go fishing (beer is ok for that,) etc.

    I have basically no clue what’s going on in any of their sex lives. We never really comment on women’s appearances, and when we do it’s kept to just a very quick observation, “man, she’s hot” kind of thing.

    Damn near any time some sort of sex talk comes up it’s our female friends stoking the fires.

    I’m pretty sure my wife and her friends talk more about sex in an afternoon than I have in my whole lifetime.

    Maybe it’s because we very rarely find ourselves in a locker room, most of aren’t exactly the gym or team sports type.