Revelations 13: 16-17

And he causes all, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free men and the slaves, to be given a mark on their right hand or on their forehead, and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.

Don’t forget the flipping tables, beating bankers and money-lenders, and saying that rich people don’t go to Heaven.

I can’t say anything for sure since I haven’t had a real vacation in 15 years (that wasn’t just staying at the nearest major city for a 3-day holiday weekend), but the cost of flying is a very sore point even in the continental US.

There are tons of beautiful and fun places to visit in the US, but especially if you’re driving, time becomes a limiting factor. I know people who drive from Massachusetts to Florida pretty much every year to go to Disney, and it takes 2 or 3 days of travel to get down there. The stats say that we have less vacation time than similar countries (Europe, Canada, etc.), and the average American will never leave their home state and will die within 25 miles of where they were born.

The average American has less than $300 in their bank account. There is no county in the US where somebody making the median salary can afford the average cost of a house for that county.

Vacationing in Europe and going on wine tours would sound like a once-in-a-lifetime trip for the majority of Americans.

Every one of your complaints stem from Americans not marching in the past.

This is largely my point, but the more accurate description is that Americans were convinced that those things are bad and should be protested against rather than protested for.

You can’t come in here and disparage more than 3 million people (now corrected in the final tally to 13 million people) in an organized protest across a country the size of Europe with that background of stomping down people’s ability to protest because a country the size of a single one of our states organized 150,000 people to protest in one city in a country without all those barriers. It would be like me coming in here and saying that the UK doesn’t care about the genocide because they had 0 people protesting in London during this protest, or complaining that Russians and the Chinese aren’t protesting hard enough.

Historically, most major protest movements in the US since WW2 have come from college students, as they have the financial security to spend the time and energy of being activists while also being the youngest group usually to be politically active, but this is yet another area where the US has cracked down on protesting. Since the Vietnam War protests, the cost of college has risen something like 1,000x (not percent - one thousand times the cost) as a direct retaliation to the protests. Colleges across the US have been protesting the genocide in Palestine since it began and have seen massive police crackdowns including arrests, students being kicked out of college, police stealing or destroying students’ property, and students in custody being denied access to life-saving medication.

The last time major change resulted from social upheaval in the US was when MLK was murdered and billions of dollars was burned to the ground in riots that shut down entire cities for a week, and the government has spent the 50+ years since convincing the population how that change was the result of very peaceful and polite protests that didn’t inconvenience anyone. The Million Man March was a threat and a display of force that left white people all over the country shaking in fear in their suburbs, and today people think it was a jolly jaunt through the city like a Pride parade.

Let’s make a comparison: the city of Boston, Massachusetts had an estimated 2 million protesters on Saturday. Massachusetts is just about half the size of the Netherlands, with a population of about 6.5 million people (compared to the roughly 18 million who live in the Netherlands). That’s a protest roughly 1/3rd the size of the entire population of the state. Obviously, people were coming from all over the place (other states included, Boston is one of the major cities in the region), but that doesn’t count all the protests that happened in small towns across the state and region as well. We know for a fact that these protests were larger than just about any other time in US history.

Absolute numbers absolutely do matter, because it becomes harder and harder to coordinate and handle the logistics involved the more people you have and the larger the area that you are coordinating across.

An estimated 2 million showed up in the city of Boston alone on Saturday, and these protests were coordinated across thousands of miles by ordinary people using social media and cellphones, not some sophisticated form of logistics network or something. Europeans don’t understand the sheer scale of the US. Americans are standing up for immigrants at home and thousands of miles away being kidnapped. There were protests in small towns all across the country where they’ve never had more than a deputy sheriff drive through. It’s closer to setting up simultaneous protests in London, Paris, Berlin, Venice, and the Hague than it is to setting up a protest in one city in a country that you can drive across in a single day. These protests made the top 5 of the largest protests in US history.

Europeans also don’t truly understand the conditions of the US. The government has spent every day since the death of MLK making these kinds of protests as difficult to pull off as possible. People are desperate but not so desperate that they have nothing left to lose, making them more desperate to hold onto what they do have. The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck without access to medical care that won’t put them in massive debt or bankrupt them, or any other form of support network that Europeans take for granted. We’re dependent on our employers for all of those things. We aren’t even guaranteed the 2 weeks of vacation time that is considered the norm here. The average lifespan for an American has fallen for several years in a row now and is equal to the average lifespan of the worst county in the UK. An ambulance ride with no medical care expenses added on can cost you $600 after insurance. The average American has $300 or less in their bank account. Wealth disparity in the US today is higher than it was in France at the time of the French Revolution. We’re a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt. A coat of shiny paint over a society and culture built to keep the masses in check.

You might as well criticize the Arab Spring protests for not drawing big enough crowds.

More people showed up for TACO’s birthday bash on Saturday than at the Hague. By your logic, that means the Dutch care less about the genocide in Palestine than Americans care about celebrating Trump’s birthday, and Americans basically don’t care about that at all based on the numbers.

So what principles do the Dutch have again?

Edit: Important addendum I just saw in another post:

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/27600754

“Quiet quitting” would be 37 or even 38 in your example. Basically doing what’s in your job description, but nothing more. Setting clear work/life boundaries where you aren’t accessible to do work for your boss/manager outside of working hours (even if they just want you to answer some emails while you’re on vacation or whatever), and not doing stuff that you aren’t qualified for/isn’t in your job description and that you aren’t getting paid extra to do.

People have started refusing to let companies expect more than they’re paying for, and it’s pissed them off, so they’re calling it “quiet quitting.”

I was gonna say, this looks stock photo as hell. Not a single bit of individualism at each desk in an industry filled with artists and companies that have Weta Workshops make statues for their entryways. Plus, laptops? I can’t imagine rendering and compiling being done on laptops, nor is there the room for hardware like Wacom touchscreens.

Feels very “give me a photo of an office with computers.”

Why would Krasnov end the tariff war that’s proving so effective against his master’s enemies?

I’m Back by Dope.

To quote a chopped up recording of JFK from a song: “Trusting in the sanity and restraint of the United States is not an option. Go home and die.”

Plenty of red outside the cities, though, and if they figure out why they’re suddenly paying more for electricity, it may change a few minds about Republicans.

Of course, they’re more likely to just blame Democrats for it, but one can hope.

But they’ll also toe the party line, no matter what that line is or who’s drawing it. I’ve known enough “I’m a Republican. I vote for the nominee” conservatives in my life to know that.

I’m in Massachusetts and can report much the same here. Outside the cities, there’s plenty of MAGA maniacs. You could see “Trump 2020” flags still up all throughout Biden’s term in spots.

Half of the people who voted*

Trump got about the same number of votes this time as he did in the previous election (marginally less, I believe).

It makes little difference to point out, but it’s good to remember that the Dems are a bunch of feckless corporate shills who lost the support of their voters, and about a third to half the country simply doesn’t vote.

Trump is a symptom and the end result of deeply systemic and cultural issues here, and as an American, I hope you guys make it hurt. Maybe then we’ll wake up to the problems here. I doubt it, but at least the economic collapse here will hopefully spare the rest of the world from a dementia patient with daddy Putin’s leash on his collar swinging the biggest military budget in the world around like he’s got something to compensate for.

Yeah, why shouldn’t we send all Republicans to another country? Or how about those criminals guilty of being Jewish, or black, or gay? Or how about the crime of “looking too Mexican,” like the US did to US citizens during Operations Wetback 1 & 2.

Also, love how you even say “some of them are criminals,” not all of them. Meaning that you’re okay with gathering up some amount of innocent people and sending them to a different country with nothing more than the clothes on their backs.

To remove any residual feces or salmonella that might still be on the shell.

Huh, TIL. I’d always heard that you need to wash eggs before using them.

There are pre-rinsed eggs in the US? I know our rice comes pre-washed, but I’ve never heard of pre-washed eggs.