No, you’re thinking of a washboard, which is also used as a reference for really defined abs. So is it a compliment or not? Who knows!

The one thing that I disagree with is that most people don’t care about AI being shoved into everything. Studies are consistently showing that the vast majority of people don’t use/hate AI being shoved into everything. 80% of phones users in one study, 90% on another study for DuckDuckGo IIRC, etc.

Guns McGee, who has a bed made of 10,000 AK-47s with 20 more hidden underneath it, is a statistical outlier and should not have been counted.

The average American owns roughly 1.5 guns, with 40-50% of all households owning at least one gun. Of those households, those who own 2 or more guns account for about 89% of all guns in the US. (Fucking absurd)

Too bad the half of Americans with too many guns and not enough common sense are the ones who love fascism. Of course, if they had more common sense, they’d probably have less guns. A real catch-22 there…

Transgender rights

You mean the rights that largely don’t exist in half of the US?

As of July 2025, 40.1% or 120,400 trans youth aged 13-17 are living in the 27 states that have passed bans on gender-affirming care. This includes 2,300 youth living in the two states–Arkansas and Montana–where bans are currently on hold or blocked from enforcement through court orders.

While our map focuses solely on high school-aged youth (age 13-17), some states, such as Oklahoma, Texas, and South Carolina, have considered banning care for transgender people up to 26 years of age. Additionally, several states prohibit public funds from being used to provide transgender health care for anyone, so adults are also unable to access critical health services if they receive their healthcare through Medicaid, if they work in the public sector, or are incarcerated.

Trans people were already reporting their identifying documents like passports, birth certificates, driver’s licenses, and social security cards were being confiscated in the period after the election and before Trump got into office.

We haven’t “won” trans rights, we’ve only had them because the fascists hadn’t yet gotten around to destroying them. Violence in one form or another is a requirement for successful change, whether that violence be economic or otherwise. The oppressor isn’t going to give you justice simply because you demand it. It wasn’t until after MLK was murdered and billions of dollars in property damage were done that Civil Rights were drafted, voted on, and signed into law - one week of rioting after his death.

So it’s like the Meta-verse, but somehow even worse.

I’ve heard basically the same story before from a local incident, but with the added bonus of the other side: they used a metal bat and the kid dislocated his arm and was almost pulled right out of the car.

She has publicly stated that she considers purchasing or consuming Harry Potter stuff as support for her ideology, and she donates a portion of what she makes off of it to political organizations that include right-wing Christian extremist groups.

Don’t forget that she also has publicly said that she considers consumption of Harry Potter media as support for her political ideology. She herself literally made it a political stance.

Can they, though? How many of them actually changed, and how many simply went into hiding?

One of the biggest issues that led us to this point was the tolerance of the racist uncle, the antisemitic grandfather just because “he’s from a different time” or whatever. Many of these people never changed, we just started accepting it when it was couched in the right social rules.

It’s well known that Trump grew up around former Nazis and active white supremacists. His family’s culture growing up was steeped in it.

One of the things about cults is that followers fall into a sunk cost fallacy that means that the longer they’ve been a member and the deeper in they are, the harder they are to get out until there’s a line beyond which it becomes basically impossible. Because to admit they were wrong is to admit that their beliefs were wrong, that their actions weren’t justified, and that they’re not the good person that they think they are.

I’m pretty sure you can find videos on it on YouTube, but it essentially boils down to creating an array of copper wire in the shape of the rifling, inserting that into the barrel liner, then putting the whole thing into the bucket and hooking the wire up to electricity. This then slowly etches the rifling into the liner through electrolysis.

“My country’s history is one of manufactured suffering. I was a boy when the Tudors burned any food the rebels under O’Neal might think to eat. We starved, everyone starved. Mouths on the dead stained green from chewing nettles. You get resourceful in a famine. My parents died early. Left me and my sister catching rats. The rats ran out quick. Fed my sister on my blood. It kept her alive an extra…two weeks. I didn’t sleep for three days to protect her body from the starving till the ground thawed. I cut out her kidneys and buried her. Fat cap on them like a pea. I haven’t eaten a single meal since, my mind didn’t go to that bite. It was the last thing I ever did because I had to. I control my life now. Every bite.”

-Abijah Fowler in Blue Eye Samurai

Also, later in the show:

That first line has stuck with me though since I first heard it. “My country’s history is one of manufactured suffering.” That could be about any country in the world, and it would still ring true in some form or another. The worst monsters to ever walk this planet have all been human.

Political affiliation may not be a statistical category collected by law enforcement (though I do question the veracity of that statement, but I don’t have the means or the time to dig into it), but we absolutely do have enough info on things like the political leanings of offenders and other similar data points to make confident claims about such data when talking about specific types of crime.

Not saying that I don’t absolutely want to see a source behind the claim as well, though. I don’t take any of these kinds of claims without some kind of data backing it up. Just that I do know that we can make some confident claims on the political leanings of those guilty of things like mass shootings, as mere seconds before Charlie Kirk was shot he was in the middle of arguing with a woman who was citing statistics on the number of people shot by trans people over the past decade in mass shootings compared to the number of people shot by conservative white men in mass shootings over the past decade (something like 5 to 437 if I remember correctly).

“Have you tried just not being a mutant?”

Go where? It’s not like it was when Ellis Island was running. Anybody who immigrated through there would be an illegal immigrant today. Any Americans today whose parents or grandparents went through there are anchor babies who should be deported alongside the rest of their family under the current regime’s stance on immigration.

And it’s not any easier today to immigrate elsewhere. Unless you’re rich or have a degree that makes you a valuable commodity, most countries want nothing to do with you.

Ironically, thanks to the 2A loonies we don’t really need them anymore. Can even rifle a barrel liner using a car battery and a bucket of salt water at this point.

Print, [redacted], repeat

People like you are why I’m so fed up with Europeans after the past 2 months. So angry that you can have the facts right in front of you but can’t put them together to see that 2 plus 2 is 4, only use them as fuel for 2 different sides of your argument. You point out how fucked things are here in one breath but don’t acknowledge that they’ve been fucked since before most of the people here were born and then blame us for not having the power to fix it with your next.

Do you get this angry at the Chinese, North Koreans, or Russians for not deposing Putin or the CCP? Because, newsflash, America is the most propagandized country in the world and has a militarized domestic police force. The US and Russia are far more similar than most people realize or want to admit/acknowledge.

Our children pledge their undying loyalty to the country every morning to the flag that is installed in every classroom in the country. There are only two other countries in the world with similar practices, and one of them was the Hitler’s Youth program in Nazi Germany. Military recruiters stalk the halls of our high schools and follow kids to their houses using the personal information given to them by the schools, including calling their personal cell phone numbers, to convince them to join the military. Hollywood is a massive pro US military machine. Any time you see a tank, jet, naval ship, or anything else in a superhero movie, it was bought and paid for to be in there by the US military with the stipulation that it be on the good guys side.

Any safeguards and checks and balances our system had were actively eroded starting all the way back to the reconciliation after the Civil War, from ensuring that the votes of leftists count for less than the votes of conservatives - if and when they aren’t just drowned out by cutting up the voting districts to bury them under as much red as possible - to putting people in places of import whose loyalties lie with the party first and foremost.

There isn’t a single country in the EU where a president or prime minister would have the power on their own to just decide and bomb fishermen, or abduct a leader of another country, or fuck children and get away with this.

And neither should Trump. The reason that he can get away with it is because the people who should be holding him accountable - from the justice system to the politicians to the military - are in on it. There are no legal systems that haven’t been undermined to make this very thing possible.

Hitler wasn’t elected, but he came in second and was appointed Chancellor by the incumbent president as per tradition because the Nazis were elected as the majority party in the Reichstag. Sound familiar? A minority party working their way into a leadership role that gave them full control of the country? At its height, the Nazi party made up about 15% of the German population. 15% was all it took to bring the entire world into one of the worst wars in history that left the Jewish population so decimated that they have only returned to pre-WW2 levels within the past 20 or so years. Republicans are not a majority party either and would actually never hold any major office again if votes were counted fairly. 60% of Americans are more leftist than the government at any given time - even when the Democrats hold power.

So why didn’t the Germans fight back against the Nazi party as things got bad? Trick question. They did. With guns, too. Except the Nazis had a quasi military force already deployed in order to put down any opposition. Sounds familiar? Because the US had that long before ICE and the DHS (who are both governmental bodies beholden to no-one) were formed following 9/11. Our police are a bunch of schoolyard bullies with surplus military hardware donated by the army or bought from the government and military industrial complex, taught to shoot first and ask never. Did you know that it’s a war crime to use tear gas? It’s considered chemical warfare. Except when you use it against your own citizens, then it’s okay. And they were born with itchy trigger fingers. Especially against anybody with skin a shade darker than pasteurized milk. Deporting people for looking too Mexican? We did that in the 50s, under Eisenhower. It was called Operation Wetback. We rounded up US citizens using military tactics and tossed them over the border into Mexico.

The government and corporations destroyed our unions and social support systems in order to erode worker’s rights and ensure loyalty through dependence. People often talk about how much money Americans make, but don’t see that the CoL is so much higher here that we’re worse off than any European country in terms of quality of life. The average lifespan of the average American has decreased for several years consecutively and is now equivalent to that of the average lifespan of the worst area of the UK. Americans are the most likely to die from preventable dieseases because we can’t afford preventative care. If you take the average cost of a house in any county in the country and compare it to the average salary in that same area, you’ll find that there is not a single place in the US where the average salary can buy a house. We are a 3rd world nation in a Prada belt.

So don’t blame the people working with sticks and stones for not having stemmed the tide, blame the people trying to smash down the shitty dam with hammers and the people who set the course of the river.

As a trans woman, I’d rather take my chances charging ICE agents with a knife than trust you lot to have my back in any way, shape, or form. I’ve seen what you think of us who are trapped here. Over and over.

Sorry if I’d like ANY response to the attacks on trans people across Europe, the UK, Canada, and plenty of other places.

I want people out there like the Black Panthers, too. I want Europe to divest themselves from the American military industrial complex. I want to watch American companies who support and enable these fascists see their profits shrivel up as the economy collapses. I want to watch Google and Facebook and Twitter burn.

But all I hear from Europeans on here is how all Americans are fascists for not being in open war with the regime while fascism tightens its grip on your own right-wing parties, and I’m sick of it. If you’re not proactive, you’ll be in the same boat as us. Italy had fascist gangs attacking people in the streets a few years back. We used to say “it could never happen here” when reading about Nazi Germany and wondering just how they could let it happen. And then it did happen here. Now you’re the ones saying it.

I am hating on Europeans. Because Europeans have been hating on me and mine for almost a year now, regardless of what people do here.

Fascist gangs were roaming the streets of Italy a few years ago. Your fascist parties have been waging war against trans people like me for over a decade. Where is your resistance to them? Your solidarity with the weakest amongst you?

European hate is misplaced. All we want is justice and a good society, but we have to fight against 70 years of work to destroy our ability to fight as well as the ignorant and hateful minority of the populace who support these fuckers, and they’re the ones the most willing to commit acts of terrorism. The people protesting are the average person who balks at the thought of fist-fighting in the street.

The protests last year were some of the largest in US history. There have been smaller protests popping up constantly since the first few months of the regime.

The protests last year were some of the largest in US history, up there with and possibly larger than during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights Movement.

But go ahead and ignore those. Keep proving my original post right.

It took a decade for the Civil Rights protests to get any real change to happen, and that was only after the murder of MLK caused the black community to burn down entire city districts and cause billions of dollars worth of property damage. Your average person - even in Europe - won’t go that far unless pushed.

Europeans were perfectly fine with Nazi fascism right up until it was knocking down their door. They’ve been perfectly fine with allowing their right-wing parties to fall further and further into fascism right alongside the US. Italy had fascist gangs roaming the streets attacking people a few years back. You’ve been perfectly content to watch as European politicians target people like me almost as badly as Republicans have. Where are your protests in support of trans people? I guess it doesn’t affect you, so you don’t care.

So go ahead and keep acting like you’re so much better than Americans. All of you are just proving my point and showing the exact reason that I’ve had enough of Europe and Canada. Pot, meet kettle.

I’ve been in full support of anything Europe and Canada are doing to hurt America and fix their own issues, but the constant vitriol against the people who actually want to fight the fight has made me sick of the armchair generals all over Lemmy.

“But why don’t Americans protest? All they do is sit back and take it up the ass!” I hear every European crying as they ignore this right alongside all the other protests.