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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I’d like to add some nuance to your observation.

    We Americans, most of us anyway, went to public school. And in our history classes, we teach what has been called the “Standard American History Myth” by YouTube channel Knowing Better in their video on American Neo-slavery.

    In short, America is founded on many ideals (freedom, liberty, etc), and we generally write our histories as if we have always believed in and acted according to those beliefs (with slavery being a “failure to live up to those ideals”). That’s the simple history we teach our kids here, it’s what we grow up believing, and the only people who ever really learn anything different had nontraditional learning opportunities (e.g. local experts in black history, American Indian history, etc), studied history at a university, or nowadays maybe learned from social media (like the above Knowing Better channel).

    Manifest Destiny is a big example. We teach that America believed in their divinely inspired right to the American continent, from sea to shining sea. We do mention the Trail of Tears, but it’s taught as a brute fact at best, and as punishment for standing against America at worst. There’s no emotional processing that we did a bad thing and that we shouldn’t do that thing anymore. Most Americans would do it all again given the opportunity.

    And that’s the big thing. We just… simply don’t have any sort of national level conscience. If we did something bad to someone, no we didn’t, and if we did, they deserved it.

    I only really came to grips with America’s dark side in grad school by reading, listening, and watching interviews with black people who protested Jim Crowe and Asian Americans who told their experiences living in concentration camps (euphemistically “internment camps”) during WW2.

    That, I think, is the biggest problem in the American psyche. Not only have we “never done anything wrong, really” but we’re also pumped up on religious symbolism (we’re a beacon on a hill, a light into the world, etc).

    “Divinely inspired” crybully, basically. There’s a reason Trump resonates so strongly here. He’s the embodiment of “I am the best, I never did anything wrong, and fuck you for trying to insinuate otherwise, you ungrateful traitor.”


  • What’s really weird about all this is Vance is married to an ethnically Indian woman. But he does the Christian nationalist white supremacist schtick.

    I have to imagine that the Silicon Valley style tech bro culture that Vance was inculcated into is so full of high skill Indian and Asian people that he has something of a blind spot to what his political rhetoric will do to those people, too. I honestly don’t know how he squares any of his beliefs. Or if he even bothers to try to have a consistent set of beliefs in the first place.



  • It does, but not everyone sets up their 2fa, or uses the least secure forms. Then passwords get hacked, and those lists get shared so when the next hack comes along, they have that many more tools to try and break the encryption (assuming there is any) on a bigger site, compromising even more people.

    It’s a whole systemic shit bag. Passkeys were meant to solve a lot of these problems, and they would, but Big Tech is botching the execution in favor of yet another thing locking you into their ecosystem.