A lot of people in this thread are deliberately missing the point because they don’t want to hear it.

They want to live in independent suburban homes, in isolated subdivisions where you can only get to jobs or groceries or social events by car, with big yards soaked in pesticides so they don’t have bugs in their houses, etc, etc.

They want to live high consumption lifestyles. They don’t want to live in resource efficient, high density housing because they imagine it will reduce their standard of living.

So they nitpick the image and make up reasons why it’s unrealistic because they don’t want to admit the kinds of homes seen on the left are unsustainable and unrealistic in the long term.

This thread is an object lesson in why the whole world hates Americans.

Your faith in the U.S. legal system is touching.

In many parts of the United States, if any parent or child sued over mandating the Pledge of Allegiance, their family would have to flee town for their own safety, after which the local judge would throw out the case for lack of standing because the student isn’t enrolled anymore.

Laws are pieces of paper. They mean what the men with guns say they mean. And in red America, the men with guns say shut up and salute the flag.

Clearly not.

Musk’s target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about “traditional Western values” the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

Helps keep them from questioning why they serve and obey the state as adults.

the homeless are more akin to pests as far as the money is concerned.

I’d go one step further. Homelessness, and poverty in general, are necessary to capitalism. If the consequences of poverty weren’t so bad, workers wouldn’t fear losing their jobs so much. Homelessness helps maintain the authority of the boss over the worker and the corresponding hierarchy of capital over labor.

Yep. The race to the Moon was just a dick measuring contest between the US and USSR. Manned space travel is a meaningless ego trip for governments. Unmanned space travel is equally useless in practical terms - learning about other planets does nothing to help the proletariat on our own - but at least wastes less money.

Global internet connection via satellite, and GPS, on the other hand, have helped the proletariat in actual practical terms. It’s a shame it took all that billionaire ego dick waving to get there.

I sense sarcasm, but you are literally, unironically, correct.

If faster than light travel does not change the material conditions of the ordinary person, then it’s not radical or revolutionary - it’s just another toy for the rich and/or dick measuring tool for governments to boast about.

The “evidence” can point to many conclusions.

Not when reviewed objectively.

Also, from personal experience, I’m not at all convinced we are causing global warming. And I’m not even convinced the earth, on average, is warming rather than cooling.

Global average surface temperature has been rising since 1850. The ten warmest years in the historical record have all occurred in the past decade.

The earth is getting hotter. This is an objective fact. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

Remember when kids used to play “cowboys and Indians”?

That’s why the joke is funny. Because it’s literally true, but no American would other their culture that way

Project 2025 has a plan for that.

Unfortunately the plan is “build lots and lots of nuclear power plants and produce more coal, oil, and national gas domestically”. But at least it’s a plan.

Trump is the creation of the Tea Party movement of 2008-2010, when a fringe group of Republicans couldn’t stop being explicitly racist about Obama, and then found out that, hey, there were millions of Americans out there who wanted racist candidates to vote for, and mainstream Republicans had made a huge mistake by pivoting away from overt racism after civil rights, because the market for hate was huge.

And more than that, Trump is the creation of Fox News, the inevitable result of the end of the Fairness Doctrine, the American proletariat finally spitting in the eye of the mainstream Republican Party’s pretention to bipartisanship. After two generations of Two Minutes Hate, twenty-some years of indoctrination by Limbaugh and Hannity and pure raw hatred in a dozen forms, the American people finally chose a President who hated liberals and feminists and civil rights as much as they did and wasn’t afraid to say it in public.

The difference between Trump and Harris isn’t policy. Except for a few hot button social issues, both Democrats and Republicans are solidly conservative at this point. What Harris is promising is to administer, competently, the same aggressive foreign policy and domestic security state that Trump would administer incompetently. And what Trump is promising is open hatred and contempt towards immigrants, foreigners, transgender people, and unhoused people, while Harris would brutalize those groups politely, with a veneer of objectivity and pious words about respecting everyone’s common humanity.

The Democrat convention was the most aggressively warmongering, conservative, corporate friendly Dem convention in my lifetime, and I remember Kerry “reporting for duty” in 2004.

No one was allowed to speak in favor of peace - in Palestine, in Ukraine, anywhere else. Palestinian protesters were shouted down and silenced.

It had mindless chants of USA USA USA over and over again.

It had billionaires smugly congratulating themselves on their wealth - Christ, they had JB Pritzker, the billionaire Hyatt heir who bought his position from Rod Blagojevich, speaking directly after Bernie Sanders, and the next speaker was the fucking CEO of American Express, and I can’t read that as anything but a personal insult to Bernie.

It had reams and reams of copaganda in favor of the would-be cop in chief, hammering the theme of “law and order”, boasting of giving more funding to police.

It had Obama’s director of the CIA - the man whose drone warfare program killed thousands of innocent people produced acceptable levels of collateral damage - publicly masturbating over killing Bin Laden.

There were a whole bunch of literal conservatives and Republicans who hadn’t changed their conservative beliefs at all but just moved to Democrat because Trump was insane and the Democrats had moved right enough that their conservative beliefs were now mainstream in the party.

It was all law and order and aggressive policing and secure the border and sell more guns to Ukraine and sell more bombs to Israel and kill kill kill for freedom - and then Harris took the stage and boasted of having the most lethal military in the world and I tuned out and gave up.

This year’s Democrat Party convention was indistinguishable from a generic Republican convention of the 2000s. It could have been hosted by Cheney and Kissinger and nominate Bush Jr for a third term and not a single word or policy proposal would need to change.

After watching all four days of the Democrat Party convention I’d put Harris overlapping with Trump.

Thing about batteries is.

From an environmental standpoint, both mining the raw materials and producing the batteries uses a lot of energy and produces a lot of pollution.

Morally, many raw materials for batteries come from desperately poor conflict zones, so you have megacorps staffing mines with slavery and child labor, paying local warlords/dictators for permission to operate, having those warlords/dictators kill protesters and union organizers, etc.

If we can get a hydrogen economy working, and the equipment and technology don’t need conflict minerals or polluting heavy industry to manufacture, it would be a boon for the world both practically and morally.

But that’s a big if.

The point is, all the different brands you see are owned by the same handful of megacorporations So you’re not getting actual choice, just the illusion of choice. You’re like a dog who gets excited when your owner feeds you dog food from his hand instead of the bowl, because you think it’s a treat.

I thought the meme was clear about that, but the average American reads at a third grade level, so I understand reading comprehension can be difficult for you.

Anarchist types prefer consensus-based decision making processes to democracy. We want the entire community to agree on a course of action, not just let 51% order 49% around.

The American welfare system is byzantine, unfair, corrupt, and ineffective. People need this workaround on cooked food because there are irrational, pointless restrictions on what kinds of food people can buy with EBT. That’s the dystopia part.

It’s awesome that good people do good things to fix the problems caused by a dystopian system. But if the system wasn’t broken, they wouldn’t have to.