If the men are also covering their hair (which is true of some middle eastern societies like the Berber people, traditional Qatari clothing, traditional Saudi clothing, etc, and Sikhs), then it’s not specifically ostracizing women in a society. But that is not true of traditional Muslim face coverings for women. And while I agree that there are plenty of sexist practices in Western society meant to hold women in their place, that hardly excuses the sexism practiced in much (not all) of modern Islam. Two things can be wrong.

Embrace of a belief system that teaches that women should have less rights and less agency is anti-feminist, even if that embrace is of a feminist’s choosing.

To be clear, I think the homes being made fun of in the original picture were supposed to be Western homes. They certainly look like many subdivisions in the US.

I haven’t actually seen propaganda about Soviet housing. The pictures you posted just look like the poorer areas of any western city. We stayed in La Mina (on accident) when we visited Barcelona. Your pictures look better than La Mina!

I don’t know about Tokyo or what the options really are for raising kids in Japan. But I think (I’ll join you here with spewing opinion/ conjecture everywhere) in the US a lot of people intentionally leave cities once they decide to have kids. When you are a young professional in your 20s, it’s still very popular to live in dense urban centers, but then as you get married and start having kids, the vast majority of people move out to the suburbs or more rural areas. Now, obviously this is a privileged class of people, and maybe there are different trends in socioeconomic classes above and below them. And perhaps they move out of the city for other reasons (the price of housing, the quality of schools, etc), but I think access to nature also plays a part. But I say this as a girl scout troop leader, so I’m definitely biased.

On the one hand, I guess it’s a more efficient packing of people into urban areas than having large green spaces. On the other hand, it’s fucking depressing, and I think kids miss something in childhood without psuedo wild spaces to go explore alone.

I graduated high school the year you were born. I agree with everything you said. I feel like this was written by an older millennial still self-deluding themselves about being in the olds now.

But how much can you really trust Spanish Leonardo DiCaprio?

I tried to reference my husband’s penis as “our penis” to him, and he was all “Absolutely not.”

I was like, “We only have the one between us! We have to share!”

He was unmoved.

If Fox News reported on it, they would switch news providers. And if there were no news providers castigating the Iranian people, then they would revert to their “liberal media lies to us” belief system. The ignorance is willful.

My MAGA relatives called for the extermination of all the Somalians in Minnesota at Easter. I don’t think benefit of the doubt that people just don’t KNOW about the suffering of the Iranians is really justified. If they don’t know, it’s because they don’t care or don’t want to care.

Fair enough. Just the other day I was off the same mind as you, relieved that the Tesla Cybertruck owners in my area were plastering themselves with a giant sign of their assholery.

Honestly? Take it with you. Stop the spread.

Can there be legal consequences after Trump lackey Ailene Cannon dismissed the charges?

Don’t worry, there are literally startups, and Elon Musk, working right now to block sunlight from you and sell it back to you.

I want to believe you, but I’m going to need sources for those claims about swing state vs non-swing state voters with straight ticket voting save for the presidency.

You place way too much faith in the assholes at the top being the ones holding everything together.

Yea my retirement account has lost however much. And every single morning I still wake up and will the market to drop like lead.

Unfortunately, it’s being manipulated from the top at this point, and it won’t drop until they’ve all safeguarded their money.

Republicans have no idea how the system works (worked). Of course they don’t realize what we’re doing will cause collapse.

Fear is a strong word for it though. I feared it for the last 6 or 7 years. Now I know it’s the only way. The only way out is through it. If any amount of suffering enables us to quit bombing small children, then bring it.

Am I worried about me and my children surviving? Yes, but I’m worried the rich will eat us either way. I hope we do it smart, and organize, and move en masse while the oligarchs are weakened.

Agree that the problems predate social media. Also agree with your assessment of the courts and insider palm greasing. To the dumbing down of the populace: there has always been an undercurrent of conservative white people trying to maintain the county’s wealth and power for themselves.

But this:

widespread ridiculous amounts of Nationalism >switching of people’s critical thinking about their >country and the purposeful stupidification of the >populace

Was made infinitely worse by the media environment post-9/11. Since at least 2005, it has been apparent that there was an intentional effort to sell conflicting versions of events to the people so that they could not discern what was true. Yes, all of the American media at the time contributed to the garbage decision to go into Iraq. Initially though, the worst of the confusion of facts was largely driven by Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News. All of the Internet has greatly exacerbated this since then, and it has been asymptotic post-2020.

Yes, American culture has (always?) been narcissistic and obnoxiously self-aggrandizing. But America had been a gigantic population of wealthy consumers for decades. So it draws all the avaristic psychopaths from around the world like moths to a flame. Are the local people to blame for the machinations of Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk? Saudi Arabian and Russian wealth underwrote Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, even if you count him as one of “the local people”. To the headless beast that is social media now, you have Russia contributing millions of dollars via Tenet Media in the 2024 campaign.

Obviously there are plenty of American bad actors in this stew of billionaire-owned manipulative media, but most of them act with an agenda that does not involve ripping the country apart.

The US has had centuries of the conservative white majority consistently trying to suppress the vote of minorities and the youth. Hundreds of thousands of voters were purged from the voter rolls shortly before the 2024 elections, with a majority of those purged being minorities. Sauce: https://sdvoice.info/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-here-are-the-numbers/

Many conservative states put fewer polling locations in poor communities. They block measures to make voting easier like same day registration and vote by mail.

Stop demonizing people that have been systematically disempowered. The Republicans in the Senate are about to shut down all other business in an attempt to strip married women of the right to vote.