It’s the political extremism ouroboros - any political ideology that is based upon hate inevitably ends up eating itself as they need to keep inventing things to hate and eventually turn inwards. I love to see it.
Instigate
You guys can use €0.50 coins?! Over here in Australia it’s either a $1 or $2 coin. I wish I could chuck a 50¢ piece in the trolley.
It’s really sad to me that Americans get put in the awful position of choosing between tipping, which supports the low wages, and taking responsibility for ensuring another human being has a living wage. It’s just such a terrible position for a consumer to be placed in, having to make ethical and moral choices about how much money to pay for goods and services.
They’ve been doing that for a long time - ever heard of Apple Pay?
With enough time
A week is enough time? Nah.
it’s gonna turn green and start pitting
Neither of those have happened - it’s tarnished brown and chipped but not green nor pitted.
It’s called bronze rot.
This isn’t bronze rot. This is poor quality plating that’s being stripped by bodily oils in less than a week. I’ve bought bronze-plated cheap Chinese jewellery that’s lasted for years under strenuous conditions before greening or pitting.
Honestly, most conservatives are just directing their rage toward whatever conservative politicians and talking heads tell them to direct it at. Conservatism lives and thrives on hate, requiring in-groups and out-groups that must be pitted against one another. The new fad is to care about a person’s genitals.
You see, conservatives don’t believe in gender equality, so someone who isn’t a cis woman will always perform better than cis women, because they believe that women are inherently weak and men are inherently strong, failing to believe that any other form of gender identity even exists.
We got a small taste of that during the Obama years… just imagine what happens when you multiply African-American with South Asian and female! I think we’ll see those whose masks have been slowly cracking through the ‘45’ years go absolutely balls-to-the-wall mask off. It will be an interesting four years to say the least!
Honestly, a part of me wants the Dump to be completely disqualified from running; Biden to step aside; and Nikki Haley to come back from the grave so that there’s a contest between two South Asian women for president. The voting public’s mind would EXPLODE.
Straight men can, and should, touch each other more often (CONSENSUALLY. I can’t stress that enough). Hugging, holding hands, playing with one another’s hair, giving a gentle backrub etc. between straight men should absolutely be more normalised. We’ve been conditioned that any physical affection between men is a sign of sexual attraction, when history (and many extant cultures) show us that men can physically love one another without any sexual attraction whatsoever. The only reason we’re touch starved is we’re too afraid to be vulnerable with other men.
We have four Major Parties - Labor, the Liberals, the Nationals, and the Greens. If you understand their relative power based on our system of government, you’ll see that we’re somewhere in between the US and the EU with regards to representational democracy. It’s not great, but in the Anglospheric context we do pretty well because the others don’t have our combination of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Proportional Representative Voting (PRV) and Mandatory Voting.
As someone who lives in a jurisdiction where every single vote I can engage in is RCV (Australia; NSW) I can honestly say that it’s so much better than FPTP. I don’t know what the perfect voting system is (frankly a subjective topic as it currently stands; please feel free to correct me with statistically valid alternatives) but RCV at the very least means that I can (and personally have) never vote for a major party as #1 and I can know for sure that my vote has never been exhausted, because I’ve never left a blank box. We also have mandatory voting, which helps to keep things sane.
In Australia, government election funding is only ever allocated to the parties based on #1 votes, so I can also confidently say I’ve never contributed to a major party’s election coffers as I’ve also never donated to any major party. I obviously support one major party over the others, as based on my preferences, but I’ll always give the election funding to a smaller party or Independent.
RCV is a wonderful step to take from FPTP. I understand that it may not be democratically perfect, and frankly no representative voting system may ever be, but it’s a far cry better than FPTP. It’s a known concept that here in Australia politicians vie to represent the ‘middle’ rather than the extremes, because the vast majority of voters aren’t overly-enthused political lunatics. We still have our issues to be sure, but I’d rather that the political class fight over the centrist majority rather than court the political extremes in order to convince people to actually vote thanks to mandatory voting.
I challenged a licence suspension in Australia when I was 19 years old. I gladly paid the $560 fine but I would’ve lost my licence for three months because I was driving 7km/h over the limit on a ‘double-demerits’ weekend. The magistrate sent me to a fortnightly driver’s course for 12 weeks, all the while I kept my licence, and after the course was over I fronted court again and successfully argued my three month suspension down to four weeks.
I’m pretty sure that going to court over traffic violations is a thing in any country that allows going to court over traffic violations.
FYI in most Australian jurisdictions, you can’t demand that the individual police officer who fined you attend court to defend themselves. That part is most likely a US thing.
We were taught a similar trick in physics - point your right-hand thumb in the direction that current (or electrons, same same) is travelling and the curling of your fingers shows the direction of the resultant magnetic field that the current creates.