Is this the new “Honey Badger Don’t Care” meme?

I mean… that depends on what metric you are going by, I suppose.

Not by personal happiness, or by health outcomes, or “freedom”, or safety, or education, or (non-military) technology, or … well the list gets rather extensive.

To be fair, the USA did used to lead the world, e.g. being first if not to space then to the moon, and we sequenced the human genome, and computers were invented here, and there’s Hollywood serving up movies and culture all over the world, etc., so I am not knocking any of the past achievements. Notably, after WWII we did get a bit of an “uneven” start compared to countries like the UK that were bombed by Germany whereas the USA emerged fairly unscathed, and yet we took that headstart and really went for it! We indeed were the most successful country in the world - unquestioned by almost anyone.

However, lately… well, “the economy” is still booming, but most average people are going to die significantly sooner than their parents generation did, possibly by a terrorist event such as a school shooting that we have nothing whatsoever to try to stop, health outcomes are abysmal, and many millennials and especially Gen-Zers strongly doubt that they will ever be able to afford a home, seeing how homes have become “investments” rather than places to live in, colleges costs have quintupled, most jobs today for younger people are “temporary” positions in the gig economy, etc. etc. etc.

You do bring up a good point: compared to the rest of the world we still do have it pretty good, in some ways. It is just that compared to how we ourselves used to have it e.g. 50 years ago, we are doing significantly worse, relatively speaking.

Look at almost any list, e.g. the top 10 scientific discoveries, or engineering accomplishments, and America barely makes those lists anymore. Other nations with drive & heart like India or China are sacrificing so that they can outpace us. That’s fine I guess, they needed their turn:-). But at some point we should ourselves: what exactly makes us “successful”… these days?

You might think that I am one of those that hates America, but I do not think of myself that way, it is just that I am questioning our place and how it has changed over the years. Though perhaps I am simply paying attention to the wrong sources, so if you want to send me something to read or watch that answers that, I would like to learn. So far though, everything that I have learned lately ends up just depressing me b/c it at least appears to be a decay, and not just morally.

What could go wrong with creating a treasure trove of data that AI miners would do anything to get their hands on?

Russia can be smart… in some ways, sometimes (while also simultaneously dumb in others, as aren’t we all?:-P). e.g. wasn’t it 2025 that Germany was scheduled to eliminate its dependence upon Russian oil (or was it rather all?) for energy. Knowing this does seem likely to have influenced the timeline of events somewhat, seeing how in that regard at least (and some others) it was the perfect time to strike - i.e. if they had waited longer it would have become far more difficult?

And let’s be blunt: if they had managed to take over what they wanted in that “three-day” timetable as initially planned, wouldn’t Europe have simply let them have it? As we consider that, let us not kid ourselves here b/c this invasion has gone on for a decade at this point - Georgia, Crimea, the area west of Crimea, etc. - each time citing “no, I swear, this was all that I wanted, I won’t do this ever again, I promise”. So if EU nations are somehow shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED, that those leopards would not one day turn and eat THEIR faces off, then I don’t know what to tell them…

However, I was pleased to note how e.g. Germany quickly turned its economy upside down and started mass-producing weapons. They tend to be a very smart and technically-minded people, so I for one have no problems believing that it at least could have been a strategic move on their part to “not have weapons”, when they were not immediately needed, yet also be ready to start producing them at a moment’s notice when the need for such became apparent - as you pointed out.

Likewise but with very different factors involved, those nations physically closest to Russia may have wanted weapons yet been afraid of enraging the bear by having them? So what I am trying, probably ineptly, to say is that it may not “purely” be due to willful ignorance on behalf of every EU nation, to lay down those older-style weapons that cost a lot yet haven’t been necessary for literally decades. A better cost-to-benefit ratio may have been to invest in something like energy independence, so long as the military factor was covered at some very minimal level.

Plus technology changes so fast… as we are seeing live in Ukraine, “tanks” were not the big thing, especially as Russia heavily misused them at first, compared to drones, right? So EU nations were “not prepared”, in the specific sense, but by investing into robotics and batteries and such, the converse does not seem quite true either i.e. we cannot say that those same nations were not entirely “unprepared” either?

That is why it is so amazing that Ukraine is holding off Russia, essentially acting as the shield for the entire fucking world, making Russia expend all of its military might & resources upon it, which could otherwise be put to use elsewhere, into saving up and preparing for the next target, which they ofc according to Russa “we have no plans for, b/c Ukraine is all that we want, we promise”!

Ukraine really does deserve aid then - they’ve earned that. But… there are >100 Republicans who seem to believe rather that Russia has “earned” the right to take whatever they want. And that should worry us all, around the world.

There’s a lot we could unpack there - e.g. it makes me all the more glad that they passed this, since we’ve already spent it either way!?

One quick item: Biden has stated that the aid can be there this week. He was prepared to spring on this. As you already said, this package was mostly to replenish already-spent funds, not as much directly to push forward with new ones. Although with that replenished stamina, I would expect to see new pushes happen as well.

Another big item is that Ukraine is not a member of the EU or NATO. As such it is “entitled” to nothing - everything that is being offered is purely voluntary. So, compared to nothing, $60B USD is quite a lot? Hence why he is grateful, and rightly so.

Another is that the USA does not need to be the sole provider of this aid - not that I am glad for the pause, but given that it happened anyway, I was heartened to see other nations rise up and cover the slack. And now for the USA to join the right side of history - well, better late than never, and all the more so with an amount this big!:-)

As you pointed out, the biggest one is that there is a faction within the US government that looks to be wanting Ukraine to fail, or more precisely for Russia to win. If Trump “wins” the next election, one way or another (i.e. legally or… otherwise), the USA may even go so far as to join Russia against Ukraine?! But for now, even delaying that aid may hamper it enough for Russia to finish the job. Maybe. Even so, this particular aid package got passed. Come what may, this one is a success. It is as important to celebrate success as it is to call out failures - failing to do either is biased, and therefore wrong.

Speaking of, the USA may also fail one day, less due to direct Russian military intervention and more from an internal civil war. But not today, b/c again, come what may, this particular aid package got passed, whoo-hoo!:-)

While true that the timing is shit, the amount is nowhere close to “table scraps” - this seems like it will legit be helpful, maybe even enough to turn the tide in Ukraine?

Also, it’s not like Congress fed its own and then waited months to feed the dog - rather, dinner for the entire family was delayed from the start of the fiscal year 2024 in October 1 until just a few weeks ago, involving the ousting of one Speaker of the House and almost doing so to the second as well. And now, this aid package for Ukraine may likewise finish the job of getting the Speaker kicked out, bc any time the government is “functional” is considered bad by some elements.

But the timing from passing the federal budget itself to passing this aid package is actually quite short. Yes it’s half a year late, but it did eventually happen, and the amount of aid is large, so is a “success” by multiple metrics, and all the more so given the opposition. If we do end up having a civil war as people like MTG are calling for, this may well be the last aid package that the USA ever manages to pass in the final stages of its democracy.

So imho we should take the win and be happy - we may not get to celebrate Congress doing routine activities like “passing budgets” very often in the future, even six months late.

Fwiw, I agree with most of your message - blaming migrants for a disease is a cop-out, etc. - it is just that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what I wrote!:-P (one potential exception is that they knew about hygiene from whence they came, but transitioning between climates e.g. from a very warm jungle area to one with a bitterly cold winter, could introduce a barrier, plus do not underestimate how many are literal children, whose parents may have done something like literally and physically dropped their children over the fence, then turned around and went back home, or possibly rather simply died of covid or whatever, either way thereby leaving their child to face the new area “alone” i.e. at the mercy of the people in this country to take care of such literal orphans) The rest went downhill from there.

And fwiw, you basically were telling me the opposite of what you yourself seemed to be doing: I am supposed to think hard about how my messages will be received, and adjust my words accordingly, so as to get a better response - and in particular to avoid even the tiniest spectre of a potential misunderstanding? Okay, true but… pot calling the kettle black there? Also, all those pejoratives sprinkled in there - that I made a “mistake”, that I was putting forth a “cop-out” argument, that my idea is “racist”, that my thoughts are “frivolous”, etc. Except you did not even bother to verify that I even meant any of that in the first place - you basically triggered yourself, then reacted to that phantom in your head, the whole conversation having little to no involvement with my actual words, and then when that fact was revealed, rather than apologize you doubled down further and harder, as if the prior message did not exist, except also extending it further to say that was somehow still my fault that you went off like that.

Meh, it happens though:-). The important thing is to learn from it, if you want your words to be something worth paying attention to. And yes, btw, I do acknowledge that I could have done better in my initial, one-sentence comment, regardless. It was very off-the-cuff, not deeply thought out about how others might perceive it (as the article we should have more rights presuming should have done, seeing as how it was an actual article). We both would do well to pause for a moment prior to speaking, to let our words mull over in our heads before blurting them out:-). In my case I could added simply something like “not that I blame them or anything, just coming at this from a diagnostic perspective”, or perhaps more along the lines of my later comments where I clarified that if I was to blame someone it would sooner be predatory landlords and the like. Although it is worth mentioning that there is zero possibility of avoiding ALL potential misunderstandings, especially on a topic such as this that generates such strong emotions in the readers of this article. Still, one more sentence (fragment) would definitely have helped.

Whereas in turn you could do well to listen to your own message about how easily words can be misconstrued. You basically read the article and high on those emotions, used me as a dumping ground, for a topic that I would have agreed with and actively upvoted if you had made it clear that the target was not what I had said, but instead tangentially launching off of that to some other topic entirely, e.g. about the clickbait media’s inaccurate portrayal (except they never mentioned migrants iirc?). i.e. we could have been together on this rather than on opposing sides. It is something to think about, at any rate.

As for why I brought up the topic at all, it is literally the chief and often sole job of anyone at all who works in any of the STEM fields to first diagnose an issue, prior to fixing it. e.g. if the majority of the new disease victims were children, then the response would take a different form than if they were adults. Similarly for whether they speak English well or not, or like… have access to a phone - e.g. if the “solution” is some kind of hotline that people can call to report rat infestations, then would children who don’t speak English and don’t have easy access to a phone be able to take advantage of that, to avoid the horrible conseuences of this phenomena? But anyway, you chose not to care about the reasons why I said what I said, and skipping the investigation stage entirely just jumped into your diatribe of why what I really meant (except that I didn’t mean that at all!) was bad. So perhaps I should modify what I said earlier: we both would do well to pause before speaking, but you also could add in a step to pause and listen. Well, you will do whatever you want, ofc, and I would not dream of trying to change you (b/c that’s impossible), but since you asked, that is my thought:-).

Also, you are right to seriously question yourself, particularly if there is any way that you thought what you wrote was in any universe “non-confrontational”? Instead, I see that you have decided to now triple down on how this is all my fault, for failing to consider how you might interpret what I said inside your own head. Do you see…? Well, anyway, it’s something to consider. You know, I actually do get that - heck, I have been that - but also, I moved on, and I am much happier now as a result. You’ll find your way too, if you keep going (but since you asked, no, tripling down even harder even while making mouth-noises that you are apologetic does not come across as genuine, even if you actually were attempting to be thus).

Also, you are doing it again - e.g. when you say “it is… partly your responsibility to understand how your speech is interpreted by others”, that is an obviously 100% statement, that once again has only the tiniest sliver of relevance to what we were actually discussing. I said ONE SENTENCE, obviously I did not put 20 minutes into composing an entire message about the topic. The context is completely different, b/t my comment about the article, vs. your reply to my too-brief comment.

If you truly get any of what I am saying, you will not reply again and instead spend DAYS thinking about it - I don’t need to hear the entire back-and-forth of what goes on inside your head, it is not what I came to this article nor to the Fediverse for. It is probably too much for me to hope for, but I did at least offer a fully fleshed-out response to your questions, so my conscience is clear.

Yes, it is true - and extremely sad - that people on social media often immediately jump to the exact & opposite conclusion as is warranted from what I said, intentionally choosing to first misunderstand me and second to act upon that misunderstanding. But that is not fully on me, especially when I said one single sentence, that could have easily meant several possible things, and is thus at worst ambiguous and therefore neutral. You yourself did this, when you said that “your idea is not realy plausible” - i.e., not “if I understand you correctly, then I think that…”, but your idea, singular, as in one, single, interpretation, with none other possible. This is, if I am not mistaken, known as the “fallacy of extremes” where if X is true then surely there is no possible way that Y could not also be true, where Y is the absolute most extreme version of X, e.g. I dislike X, therefore X is like unto Hitler.

And this is why conservatives dominate the internet. With liberals choosing to eat their own, we have to watch out for attacks from both sides, rather than merely the opposition.

But if you truly were curious what I meant… you could have simply asked? Instead, you told, and despite being wrong, doubled down on it again, shifting the topic ever so slightly so as to maintain a righteous-sounding tone. Well, congrats I suppose, b/c your response did get the same number of upvotes with fewer downvotes (btw I never downvoted you) so… I guess you “won”? But let’s face facts shall we? We both lost here, by allowing the conversation to devolve to this level. I mean that somehow what is - or rather, at least might be - happening to immigrants has been entirely lost from our back-and-forth exchange.

Kudos for at least caring about their plight though, that much I do applaud. I hope you think about this exchange and how you can improve your end, and I will promise to do the same.

I never said anything at all about “blaming” them, even if they did happen to be found at the center of this horrible situation. There are a lot of people who while sitting in the comfort of their mansions are very free to make a lot of choices - e.g. the Texas governor who sent them there under false pretenses - but recent immigrants, especially those fleeing persecution at home, are typically those least free and capable to avoid e.g. scams from a scummy landlord who may receive rent money in return for substandard housing where rats might be found.

Also the article talked about a change after 2020, and the influx of immigrants who were promised to go one place but then somehow ended up in a city not of their choosing seems to fit that criteria of something different than the two decades prior to that where infection rates were low.

Just like all the other Americans, right? (meme reference)

(but more seriously) The migrants are not used to that environment, and especially may fall into such traps more than people who know the area.

I wonder how many are the migrants bussed there from Texas.

Edit: the article mentions that it is at least partly due to climate change as well.

I heard that your mother is smaller than Egypt!

B/c he knows that he does not mean it, and his base knows that he does not mean it, but it still manages to communicate something regardless - “they bad”.

Humanity today is genetically identical to those in ancient Greece, and many of us have spent less time schooling ourselves about how to e.g. avoid frauds than many of them did back then. ergo, “argument by authority” still works for us, as perhaps it did for them back then as well.

Your presupposition seems to be that humanity should somehow get better over time? At least it seems to relate to a common humanist theme, but if we want to get better, it is going to require effort on our part to make that happen. (apparently, having access to the entire repository of human knowledge at our fingertips is not sufficient, for those who cannot be bothered to learn from it - either by reading or just sitting passively as videos with pwetty graphics do all the work of spelling it all out for us, yet still that is less fun & engaging to people who would rather watch shiny motor vehicles with ads on them drive round & round in circles)

Your words were all spelled correctly. Try again? :-P

As you should be:-). It is possible for both sides of a conflict to be in the wrong:-P.

Bc corruption, one presumes, getting the government to get involved with people’s rights to choose. Yeah it’s weird for me too:-P.

Total deregulation=anarchy, but not all regulations are good either. This is the kind of stuff that made people choose capitalism in the first place, to try to get away from it (not that it worked, obviously).

no one is going to save us. We have to do it ourselves.

Abso-FUCKING-lutely!

Two additional thoughts:

One is that a lot of the evil being done “by America” is actually being done more by evil people who hide behind it like a shield. Even if all of America were to fall, these illuminati types would go on, reduced/diminished but still viable. Like a witch controlling a zombie or a japanese manga type person sitting inside of a robot, the USA may be a good tool for the true master’s purpose (e.g., Haliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc.), but they can surely find other tools besides just the one. It is just that the USA prostates itself before them so well that they like this one.

I think it is important to make that distinction, b/c e.g. if someone attacks you and you merely knock the gun out of their hand, the problem is not “solved”, especially if in their other hand they still hold a knife. You imply that we should “wake up” - and I agree, and this is part of that, to disambiguate the various factors involved. America shares an enormous portion of this blame, by virtue of stupidly signing our body away to serve the desires of some other mind than our own - fulfilling its purposes instead of the one that that “we” all want to be done, i.e. for people to be able to live in their own spaces and have a chance at happiness.

Which leads me to the second thing: this video is not necessarily “cynical”, though I understand why you say that. It is truly one of the more unbiased depictions of this matter that I have ever seen or heard or read, and by virtue of it refusing to tell us how to “feel” about the matter, it does come across in our cultures that are traditionally so amped-up in the latter regard that it seems wooden by comparison. I liken it to when astronaughts wanted to make rockets to go into space, and someone gives a dissertation on “gravity”. Knowing about how gravity works is how you get into space - it is not that it cannot be done, it is just a Truism about the world that becomes relevant when talking about leaving the planet. So while talking about gravity may sound “cynical” to someone who wants to talk rather about flying through space, it is in fact a necessary first step.

So rather than cynical, I see it as neutral. Other videos provide plenty of motivational calls to action, but that is not the purpose of this particular one, which is solely to inform - and I actually appreciate that so much about it! e.g. conservatives and liberals alike can watch it and become better informed, without hampering the spread of that information by mixing it along with political rhetoric that allows only a single interpretation of it. I am not saying that *I* am neutral, but I am saying that I like it when information is, b/c imho that is the best way to further the cause of understanding, from which people can be helped better (than by e.g. misinformation and lack of understanding).

People did answer the question. Re-read the top two comments, sorted by Top. The question was “Why don’t we hear more about…?”.

It is emotionally difficult to accept, but it is the reality that we live in. The richer people have bodyguards and send their kids to better-protected schools, maybe bring in private tutors that are each more expensive than a cheap college education. They deal with this shit in their own way, leaving everyone else to the “freedom” to do as they please - subject to the whims of other lords who e.g. buy up all the media outlets, or buy up all the houses, etc. People do not wish to understand that this is what “absolute freedom” looks like, aka anarchy.

And quite frankly, random gun violence isn’t even the top threat in America, bc climate change seems much more likely to kill us all, or else an actual civil war, or perhaps Russia or China will shut down our entire power grid, if our own home-grown terrorist extremists don’t beat them to it.

iirc, most people here die of heart disease and cancer, and other things that mere exercise may provide a partial solution for. So we don’t care about the deaths of kids or strangers for the sake reason we continue to eat burgers every single day: bc they are tasty and we DGAF about anything else.

Except they can jam up - otherwise as you said it would be better to reload one than to switch?

I mean… America is influencial, therefore what evil is there gets spread more readily. Also it has historically been more transparent, so what evil is there is easier to see.

But e.g. Communist China has evil too, though it is usually better at hiding the details, and yet it cannot cover everything and what little does come out is rather chilling.

And India, well I can’t start listing every country on earth, but let’s just say that if I did, much evil would be listed out.

Smaller nations with less ability to create evil on a larger scale ofc may demonstrate less evil, but if those nations were to suddenly discover I dunno let’s say vibranium, they would likely become just as evil as the USA. What nation doesn’t have a sordid backstory of murder and espionage and assassination and so on? (Unless it is brand new I guess?) Though America does enjoy it to excess and even puts it on display, so yeah I agree with that part at least.

Check out that video I linked for more.

More to the point, I would hope for something to be DONE about the whole fiasco. Simply calling it “evil” is not enough - of course it’s evil, and it also does good too, ironically, but now what? Commit violence against it? :-P