Is it sleazy? Absolutely. Is it exploitation of a massive power imbalance? Undoubtedly. Is it illegal? Probably about as illegal as a game pre-loading 4gb of DLC I’m not going to buy as part of an automatic update. The terms of your agreement with Google for Chrome allow them to update their software as they see fit. Their gamble is that you won’t switch.

Where are the MRE rations when you need them?

Only in America do they judge people for using the 24hr clock. Most of the rest of the world uses it. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-countries-use-24-hour-time

They are still saying this when it’s convenient for them. The only consistent thing for such people is their cowardice in the face of responsibility.

“War on Terror” sounded pretty righteous too. I’m glad you noted you haven’t read much on Iran. Please do at least catch up on the last 50 years or so. It’s a fascinating tale involving western meddling, a dynamic and multifaceted people/culture, and a genuinely oppressive regime that funds many regional militant groups.

So… is it that you think the US was born male or that anyone with tiddies is trans?

Men set the craziest standards for other men, no wonder men’s mental health is in decline. Who tf can realistically achieve that look, those arms, that jaw. It’s giving me a crisis of masculinity just looking at it.

Sure, that happens and the two aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s kinda like the difference between a close family member shitting on your bed and some random tourist flying halfway around the world only to shit on your bed–it hits different.

Welcome participation in your culture is not appropriation. Appropriation happens when a tradition is taken and decontextualized from its original culture, adopted by mainstream culture, and changed to mean something else without buy-in from the originating culture.

You know your culture has been appropriated when some rando who isn’t even part of your culture explains to you how you’re wrong about your tradition because it doesn’t look like their mainstream version. For example, explaining to an Indian person that yoga is a physical exercise program where you continuously shift between isometric stretches.

Funnily enough, this is also the framework for those reality TV shows. It’s the move fast and break things approach that seems to be entertaining in a morbid way… So clearly the solution is to monetize your project (mis)management as entertainment!

It’s sad only because the tone is dismissive/condescending. Otherwise it’s just describing someone who figured out how their gf likes to receive affection. My head canon says they’ve only been dating for a couple months and they’ve had their dog for years.

People who cannot discern context or degrees of wrong are no better than ICE agents. Love you

Yes, I got the joke. And I was suggesting that Americans have always been on about other Americans not assimilating into their American culture. I also just find jokes about fascists being hypocritical or contradictory are no longer funny when the assumption that it’s an indication of foolish lack of self-awareness no longer holds because double-think is the active goal.

The USA is not a monolith. The lines and features have probably shifted, but the idea of Colin Woodward’s “American Nations” rings quite true today.

I think we have a misunderstanding. I was trying to deacribe a system/social environment that people are born into, not the character of those people. What did you think I was saying they’re like?

Jesus, someone replace Jensen with an AI already. The bots could generate much more nuanced and empathetic responses. /SARCASM

He doesn’t get a pass on his past, but if it moves the needle on his followers, good. Better this than even more bootlicking. It’s a crisis/war right now. Accounting can happen after.

Typically, reference to whiteness is a reference to white privilege, which is the product of a social power structure that benefits white people through the systematic oppression of non-white people, i.e. a racist power structure. So referring to someone as benefiting from a racist power structure is not racist.

It’s somewhat, though not entirely, like how people born into generational wealth have privileges over people born into poverty. In this situation, it is indeed rather classist to refer to impoverished people as “the poors”, but not classist to refer to the most wealthy as “the 1%”… Because the term calls out the priveleged group in the oppressive system.

You bet there were. There were many that also just said shot/shooting. Many non-US western outlets are using killed/killing in the headline. US outlets use a mixture of language even within the same outlet, or won’t have it in the outline but will have it in the text. Here’s a title from CBS https://youtu.be/HSKaceREFlQ

I’m not saying there isn’t an overall bias towards distancing law enforcement from killings from words that carry negative connotations–there is. I was adding context to how “murder” is used in media and now I’m suggesting that some major outlets see what’s going on and are calling it what it is directly within the bounds of good journalism.

We say murder and it’s understood as people talking about what happened. When a news outlet says murder it’s considered reporting a legal conviction. There are good reasons why these conventions exist. And it’s the same as why headlines weren’t saying Luigi Mangionr murdered Brian Thompson.