b3nsn0w

i think we could have something really special here through international trade

yeah, let’s just put all the important tools in the hardest to reach spot on the screen

top makes sense on desktop, but on phones bottom is just logical. took way too long to get to it already because of the exact notion you expressed

yeah, that’s why left/right is super reductive imo. whenever dealing with tankies i tend to refer to the two-axis political compass because tankies are authleft, while the US far-left is libleft, which is a huge distinction. but political opinion is not a scalar, and neither is it a two-element vector, it’s a very complex thing, the left/right distinction only works as long as you’re discussing a singular country and sometimes not even then. (for example, a lot of european countries have a lot more than two parties in their political spectrum, it’s not as simple as a democrat/republican alignment here)

tankies actively prop up anything anti-west, and since the west is leading the charge in embracing the queer community, they tend to attack that too. doesn’t help that the two regimes they like to prop up the most, russia and china, also have extremely anti-queer policies

my repertoire right there /s

(okay, half /s, i do play the l*ndon… and maybe the botez gambit sometimes)

it’s mainly the overwhelming presence of guns prior to the proposed ban on them, and the culture built around them.

besides, how many mass shootings happened on the balkans which are also flush with leftover guns from the yugoslav wars? how many happen in the czech republic where you can legally own and carry firearms similarly to the american system? i’m not even gonna compare it to switzerland because while they have tons of guns, they heavily regulate ammo. something is just deeply broken with the united states and simply banning guns wouldn’t fix it.

the real question imo is what drives a person to essentially end their life by shooting up some place? because whether you end up shot to death on sight, paralyzed, or simply stuck behind bars, that’s the end of the road. a society that pushes people to do something this drastic will not stop being problematic if you just take the drastic tool away from people. they’ll just stop taking roughly one other innocent person with them when they snap (which is the average if you consider a mass shooting as anything that injures 4+ people, which is the criterion by which the often cited “one mass shooting per day” works), which is, yes, an improvement, but it only masks the underlying problem.

i know “it’s a mental health issue” is a right wing dogwhistle but that’s because the statement is stupid, because it falls for the standard conservative bullshit of positing there are no systemic issues, just bad people. this is absolutely systemic. if predestined “bad people” in this sense existed there is no reason they’d be born at a vastly higher frequency in the united states than elsewhere.

the answer is likely deeply rooted in economic inequality and the total lack of a social safety net. which is probably why anti-gun rhetoric is pushed by rich organizations, and is therefore allowed to permeate mainstream culture and isn’t stuck on the sidelines like right to repair or privacy legislations. not because it is actually a good solution but because it is cheaper than addressing the root cause. which would be ensuring people always have something to lose, like they have in all the other countries where we see different effects.

they can refuse to hire you for being too smart

wait what? like, this is completely on brand, but who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

yeah, makes sense, but exactly like you said, credibility is important. being anti-imperialist in general with a focus on us imperialism is very different from being against only american imperialism while actively supporting the imperialism of other countries such as russia or china

top one is an american flag. a bit cliche and redundant but nothing wrong with that one. or at least, would be nothing wrong, had you just flown that by itself.

the second one is a heinous crime against the very concept of vexillology. beyond F-. a toddler could redraw the flag of wisconsin using mismatched leftover crayons from the MRE of your cousin at the marines and it would look official than this bullshit. do not ever desecrate a flagpole again with that crap. what the fuck do you think this is, a linustechtips video with sponsor spots?

the third one outright violates the US flag code. i don’t know what the hell your goal was but unless it was to make a mockery of the country, this ain’t it. there is no blue line in the american flag there and there is no black anywhere in it – are you a pirate? is that what you’re trying to say? are you trying to establish the united states as an estonian colony? are you dividing what the original flag declares as indivisible? do you just hate delaware? this is the flag equivalent of a one hour business presentation by middle management: technically coherent and rich in vocabulary but completely devoid of any meaning. i guess it’s better than the billboard above but you managed to underperform the average minecraft banner. D for not breaking the basic rules and nothing else.

the fourth one is outright treason, especially with the american flag on top, and the pretendo-american above. i mean why the fuck are you flying the flags of two nations that were at war the last time both of them existed? are you just an edgelord who likes to play both sides? or are you serious about staging a coup, which is what your flags communicate? pick a side already, you’re not switzerland.

and the fifth one is a cheap knockoff. it’s extremely disrespectful to take the no step on snek flag and change the motto on it. plus your font choice suggests you made that in MS word. what the hell. this was a fun, albeit at best C+ tier flag that you managed to shove down to D- category through seriousposting some moronic crap.

overall, this flag pole conveys nothing but ignorance. are you an enemy of the united states, mocking its flag (#3) and flying the flag of its enemies (#4), or are you an american patriot (#1)? what the actual fuck is that ad break in #2? and pay up for the og flags, don’t be cheap.

Yes, Russia is being extremely anti-imperialist in Ukraine, and it’s also China’s anti-imperialism that’s threatening Taiwan. Tankies just hate the west, they don’t have principles.

found the bard

you can actually edit images and titles on lemmy, we are not bound by reddit’s limitations

The horseshoe theory is bullshit not because tankies and nazis don’t behave similarly, but because they’re not the two logical extremes of the same spectrum. You can be far left without being a tankie by just not being a bootlicker, and you can be far right without being a nazi by (you guessed it) also not being a bootlicker. Even with how many boots you lick the left/right division of the political spectrum is still horribly reductive, but it’s super important to split the axis of authoritarianism vs liberalism out of it when addressing tankies, because they have a lot of colloquially left beliefs with the authoritarianism and anti-progressivism commonly associated with the right wing.

Your bias is showing, lol.

Tankies are generally anti-west authies that root for self-proclaimed “communist” systems like China (which is state capitalist) or Russia (which is an oligopoly, the exact thing late stage capitalism devolves into). They generally spew the exact authoritarian and bigoted bullshit as the alt-right but do it under a different flag that historically opposed nazis, which is why they constantly claim that they’re somehow completely different and even more, “opposite” to nazis. Lemmy unfortunately has an infestation of them because the developers are tankies, which often shows on lemmy.ml (the instance said devs run).

Like most reactionaries, tankies have no principles either, just a group they hate and they will twist their ideology as much as it takes to get you that end result. For tankies, that group is “the west”. They will coat their bullshit in opposition of the ultra-rich (which most of us can agree on) but make no mistake, as long as you live in a western nation they want you gone, or at best subjugated. This is currently the most apparent in their support of Russia’s genocidal war against Ukraine, because it props up a power that they perceive as “friendly” to them, but you might also catch them supporting the Uighur genocide and respond with extreme amounts of whataboutism every time such a take is brought up, essentially detracting from any problem in world powers they align with with counter-accusations of “the west”.

london, vienna, and botez gambit?

technically, they’re called the fire brigade, not necessarily the fire prevention brigade

i’m fairly sure ncd is on this picture, all of those pics describe military datalinks

i’m fairly sure that spirit is rather unholy

i don’t doubt that racism is a component to this, but there’s also the part where breaking up the monotone suburban hellscape would make it “unsafe for kids”. people move to suburbs with the specific purpose of having kids, so the place is designed to be inescapable without a car but with no clear signs of confinement, just an endless continuation of the same sanitized space. then when said kids are old enough to trust they can learn to drive in the same environment and only then released from the tutorial world they’re safely stuck into whenever they come “home”

but yes, also, god forbid your children have to meet minorities or poor people, and since small shops don’t pay well and have the audacity to employ non-white people, the only way is to cut them out. you can pick your shit up at the gas station, if you’re an adult.