Political Memes

Probably not about being explicit, but more about not getting your accounts banned from everywhere.

Apparently they do it because it drives up engagement

Solution: downvote or ignore

True, but no state cares about dead civilians. Not one.

Iran was killing its civilians wholesale for protesting before the US invaded and covering up the reporting of it so numbers couldn't be tabulated.

Or if they cared about a convicted felon pedophile.

No one gave a shit until it came down to the price of gas. And they wonder in amazement when the world hates them.

Pedophile is a filtered word on a lot of social media. They are just making it so their meme can meme the most.

I have no idea why people keep trying to compare gas between countries. It's such a small part of things.

Heck, I'd pay $10/gal happily for no college tuition costs, national healthcare, and kids not having to do school shooter drills. (Yes yes Germany technically has University fees, but they're like $80 and is more a parking pass than anything)

Literally been paying almost $7/gallon since the pandemic. America is just now feeling a fraction of European/Scandinavian prices since years back and freaking out. 😅

So happy to have switched to electric a year back. Paying between a dime and a quarter per kWh right now and living my life.

Americans are whining because they've allowed car companies to put out massive trucks that get... 6 kilometers per liter of petrol? And haven't invested in public transit. And have been allowing for the construction of massive datacenters that, despite burning fossil fuels for most of their power, and also still drianing the power grids and making EV charging more expensive (not that any of these people have enough saved to buy an EV anyway). And the complainers are all a minority of "rural" voters who don't live in cities, and can't easily get to a grocery store, a pharmacy, or work without driving 30km there and 30km back. At least.

So yeah, when a daily commute is 10 liters, and most americans who have had a cold in the past 5 years are in medical debt now, going from 50€ per paycheck to 100€ per paycheck every 2 weeks on petrol spend is hefty, especially given how the US federal minimum wage is a little over 6€/hour, and that's if the person still has a job at all, given the layoffs all over the place. Even if people are making 10€/hour on their commute job, gas price increases have just eatten an additional 5 hours of their labor every 2 weeks. If they go up any more, the Iran War's ramifications will approach a 10% pay cut for the "average" American. (And this doean't even account for the tax money being spent on the war, nor on whatever the outcome of the US debt exceeding its GDP will be, probably for the next generation).

Would those Americans have been better off buying fuel efficient cars, finding remote work to not have to drive so much, living closer to cities to benefit from public transit? Probably. But it's a lot late to try to make those shifts for these people.

When american politics claims that no one has been listening to "middle America," this is who they mean: the voters who are gullible enough to be oversold on "American Dream" and end up living paycheck to paycheck with no safety net.

The problem is that there is no helping them, so no one really tries. And the far right loves this, because it's easy to give those people false hope, underdeliver, and then blame it on the left.

So alas, no, it isn't any consolation that other countries are feeling this pain--that makes the situation feel more hopeless, rather than less.

In czech we have 50% of german salary, and our gas is 1.77€/l :)

"Appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak" - Sun Tzu

Both Russia and the US were thought to have very powerful military capability. Both made a strategic mistake when they decided to show everyone their hands.

I wouldn't say either nation is weak, but the power of deterrence was actually bigger than either one's true military power. Deterrence can be even better at protecting your people than actual military power. But you don't win offensive wars with deterrence.

Now, nobody's going to attack Russia or the US, so they can afford the loss in deterrence... But at least for the US, the middle eastern allies are now vulnerable to attack (particularly from Iran) and if China's willing to show their true hand, they might try Taiwan now. Though I imagine that perhaps China's leadership is wiser and won't repeat Putin's and Trump's mistakes. After all, their military might also be less powerful than we all think. Because it's very beneficial to have everyone think you can't be fucked with.

At the end of the day, it's hard to make efficient use of a large military. And the people protecting their own homeland have an advantage in morale. Invading a moderately weaker country is pretty stupid. Invading a moderately weaker country halfway across the world is even more stupid. To have an "easy" time conquering another nation, the power balance needs to be HEAVILY in your favor because of all the disadvantages of being the invading party.

TL;DR: Trump and Putin are idiots who gave away a huge advantage their countries had by showing how they are weaker than previously thought.

BUT DANCING WITH THE STARS IS ON LATER AND I DON'T WANT TO MISS IT!!!!!!

But surely we should shun the free energy we get from the sky

~$10.40/gal in the Nordics (diesel). So that's roughly $0.25 per mile in my case.