Yes I do in fact apply this same exact logic to soldiers in WWII - just as it applies to many of the people who made up fighting forces in the past. There is a long, loooong history of using dogma, duty, brainwashing, even intoxication, to manipulate people into fighting to the death.

If you read firsthand accounts from German soldiers (or really ANY nationality) during WWII, you will quickly realize that they were heavily propagandized in a way we can only begin to understand today. Young German men during WWII had grown up under Nazi rule and had it drilled into their heads at every possible moment. And the choice was to conform or to be shunned (or more likely killed). This does not excuse any of the atrocities they committed, but gives context to their actions and shows how blaming only the soldiers misses a big part of the picture. The same goes for atrocities perpetrated upon the German people by the red army, or for atrocities carried out by IDF in Palestine, etc…

Also, I think you should reflect on the language you use in your comments. I am attempting to be polite, but your comments are outwardly rude.

Well I am talking about how I think most people who join the military are brainwashed.

More explicitly: yes they know that the military is about violent force, but I think most of them have a warped worldview pressed on them from a young age (often from an upbringing in a military family) that describes the situation very differently from how you or I would see it. They are indoctrinated to understand their participation in the military as a duty - both to their family and to an inner voice. I think most of them would say (when first joining) that the military kills “bad guys,” which obviously isn’t true but they have been conditioned to see it that way and much of history (especially concerning military atrocities) is omitted from their upbringing. So in my opinion your take that they are joining with the intention of murdering innocent people isn’t really accurate for most of them.

If you think discussion and communication are so worthless… Why keep commenting on Lemmy? We are all here to exchange ideas and I think that we can agree that ideas and how they spread can change the world in a big way.

Silence/lack of discussion is part of what has allowed this issue to become so serious.

In my opinion this is a reductive take on the issue. Realize that human beings can make mistakes and that not everyone understands the world the same way or even has the same knowledge.

I won’t excuse murdering innocent people, but I don’t think most people joining the US military go into it thinking “yippie time to murder innocents.”

I think most people who join have been indoctrinated (usually from a very early age) to think that the military is something it is not. While this does not excuse their behavior, it helps us to understand that the issue is not about an individuals misguided decision to join the military but rather the large scale manipulation/brainwashing of poor people. Blaming the soldier makes sense if they do something horrible or if they are truly aware of how bad the military’s actions are and continue to serve, but blaming ALL soldiers just for the act of joining is pointless because most of them don’t fully understand what is going on.

In my opinion there may be a better option for you (unless you have a clinically bad case of extra sweat, which obviously is another thing). Try a deodorant that aims to control the population of bacteria on your armpits. Bacteria are what actually produce the chemicals that smell bad. Since switching to a scentless bacteria controlling deodorant, I still sweat but my stink is gone. Same for my partner. And it’s much healthier for you in my opinion.

https://superdeodorant.com/

This was for real life changing for us.

I’m confused - are you trying to argue that we should not try to stop the spread of hateful propaganda? Or just that it doesn’t matter to have it in schools? Maybe you are trying to argue that exposing children to hateful rhetoric will not have an impact on their developing brains?

What you are saying does not make sense to me.

From my perspective it is worth pointing out because it shows how Kirk’s murder was NOT a good thing, and is NOT something that should be looked back upon with glee. Rather than being the end of Charlie Kirk’s vision for Turning Point, his death invigorated it and has now potentially set up an entire generation to be propagandized.

It would have been better for the world for Kirk to have kept living and continue embarrassing himself (which he did on a daily basis) and come to a more typical end for these far right influencers - jailed/disgraced. Not to mention that noone deserves to be executed, especially without a trial.

The U.S. doesn’t really make anything

Actually the U.S. makes a lot of stuff. Amongst other things the U.S. accounts for somewhere around 40% of the global food & beverage market.

https://www.nist.gov/el/applied-economics-office/manufacturing/manufacturing-economy/total-us-manufacturing

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/food-beverages-market-size-reach-133000592.html?

For which Volkswagen was fined approximately $30 million… Compared to having grossed €59.5 billion in 2024… Nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Cost of doing business, you could say.

I have been going through a very similar experience to you. The more coworkers I have over the years, the more people I realize are extremely jaded and having a tough time caring at all about the world at large.

This is a pretty complicated issue. I think that means you need a sort of patchwork of paradigms to apply to the issue at the right moment.

Sometimes you need to give yourself a break and let yourself live your life - you only get one, and joy is an essential part of a functioning human, and you must continue to function if you are to continue impacting your world.

Other times you must keep in mind that it is literally completely illogical to say that your actions have no impact, obviously each individual action on it’s own is small but the actions humanity makes are made up of individuals. Change happens one person at a time, and individuals are difference-makers.

Consider professional sports teams where the stars elevate the team to the next level - they cannot do their work by themselves, every member of the team is needed and makes an impact, but the impacts are not all the same. You will see the same dynamic play out in the typical workplace - a relatively small portion of people really make things happen at most workplaces in my experience, but they still need the team to help them get it done. So you should continue to think of your actions as being important/having meaning in my opinion, and you should keep striving to make the world a better place.

Sometimes when there is a situation that frustrates me but that I know I cannot change (or cannot change immediately or in full), it helps to quiet that thing in my head that worries by practicing mindfulness techniques. Personally I find “box breathing” (a style of controlling breathing to regulate heart rate and perhaps lower cortisol) to be most effective. Maybe this or some other method could help to quel your feelings when you know that it is a situation to let go of.

Even with a car payment being $750/month, that’s a pretty fancy car from my perspective - and represents the average car payment for a new car.

I think that these folks could keep up with expenses much more easily if a few minor compromises were made (namely, a cheaper car).

Given that the legs move a little bit, I would suggest adding at least a small amount of bracing in addition to whatever you choose to do to fix the center of gravity problem.

Also, bracing helps to stiffen the structure by resisting forces that would make the wooden rectangle into a parallelogram. Here is an illustration:

This does not convince me that we should redirect all effort away from environmental legislation. In my view human rights are very much intertwined with environmental stewardship.

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Even if you feel that the white house should stop being used as an active part of the USA government, it doesn’t make sense to tear it down.

Take Auschwitz for example - a horrible place, but worth preserving so that future generations can see history in person and learn from the past. At the very least, the whitehouse is worth preserving for its historical value, if nothing else.

If that is common practice it would seem to indicate that “cart abandonment rate” is actually a very important metric, since users often abandon carts and so a restaurant needs something about the menu/presentation that makes people abandon them less and “wins” a larger share of the market of users on the platform.

I would say that food scarcity in preindustrial countries is not “manufactured” per se, because there isn’t an excess of food lying around in those places. You are right that people there starve in part because it isn’t profitable to get food to them, but there are other reasons too such as lack of adequate infrastructure to store and transport food and perhaps even lack of trained personnel to distribute it etc.

So really I think for preindustrial countries it’s a complex picture that basically boils down to the oppositional philosophy generally held when considering international relations. So in a situation like that I think it isn’t accurate to say that scarcity was manufactured in order to justify the existence of capitalism.

Also your statement that it isn’t profitable to industrialize other nations and so we don’t seems contrary to what I understand, which is that it is often profitable and that is why developed nations are often trying to invest in industrialization efforts (of course taking their unfair piece of the action in doing so). I feel that this principal of investing in industrialization has largely guided the international efforts of China, the USA, and others.

I think there is a big difference between “tough love” and unkindness. I don’t think being unkind is ever the best way to encourage someone to improve. Instead be “blunt” in communication/upfront with constructive criticism - which I see as a kindness.

It was not a relief, however, to learn that the sun will expand to be so large as to fully encompass the earth’s orbit long before it does eventually explode… In only 5 billion years… Which apparently was a few billion less than 6 year old me planned on living for!

I see how this meme is clearly targeting capitalism and not farmers, and I understand and agree with the point that money is the primary incentive for growing food under capitalism.

But in my opinion the part about letting people starve in order to manufacture scarcity misses the mark. As far as I can tell, the primary reason that so much food goes to waste is liability. No one wants to sell food that could reasonably be constrained as having caused an illness for fear of a lawsuit - if not for that fact, much more food “waste” would actually go to use. Even in the hypothetical absence of liability no overall food scarcity needs to be manufactured because there remains a scarcity of “premium” food.