Post 9/11 Public School. Watching people just slide right into authoritarianism felt like I was seeing them replaced with pod people.
Post 9/11 turned me leftist/progressive.
I was raised in rural in a deeply conservative environment. But I can pinpoint the exact moments everything started to crumble.
I was right there waving flags at troops and was completely caught up in the “OOH-RAH” feeling of righteous anger. I had people connected to me who died in the attacks. My last memories of American warfare was the Gulf War where the USA basically went on a murder-vacation across Kuwait and all the way to Bagdad. It was surreal and removed from reality, it was winning. I wished I was going, I deeply wanted to go over there and be a part of this winning-machine, but I had just started my adult life and joining the service wasn’t in my cards.
Then fast forward to me watching FOX news in my first apartment, eating dinner and watching coverage of the invasion of Iraq. There was a clip they played from the perspective of a hummer entering a city, and a box truck was passing on the opposite side of the road, obviously fleeing the city. The hummer opens up with its automatic grenade launcher, and I distinctly remember the simultaneous mixture of awe seeing the box truck get chewed to molten shards of sparkling metal instantly, and a sick punch to my gut understanding that was probably just a family trying to leave with their possessions. The segment cut to the host, festooned with American flags, smiling at US might.
That image haunted me for weeks, and then they found no WMD’s, the war raged and raged. Atrocities caused by our troops kept coming out, the question of why we were there was getting asked louder and louder.
The disillusionment was pretty much complete at this point and I had already sworn off FOX news for the rest of my life, and then a few years pass and people I cared about started coming home maimed, or were not coming home, or came home unable to go on and took their own lives. More people than I thought I would know. There was no satisfying ending, no victory, nothing to be proud of.
Realizing I live in the homeland of the villains of the story radicalized me.
bullshit questions.
This thread makes it sound like if you’re not fully on board with a hyper-exploitative oligarchy, you’re the radical one.
Being raised catholic and only really paying attention to the Jesus parts
Republicans masturbate to the idea of elderly people being denied the basic necessities in life because they were unable to earn enough for a retirement due to the uncontrollable greed of the ultra wealthy.
My parents are 80 years old and their car died in April, so I had to loan them mine, basically permanently, because the alternative is that they have no income at all.
The country that the Democrats and Republicans have built would be a-okay with letting them starve to death.
The world that neoliberalism has built.
In which country is it illegal to let your neighbor use your water?
It’s also illegal to give water to people in line to vote. it’s also illegal to have a water break for workers working outside in the heat.
It’s also illegal to have a water break for workers working outside in the heat.
It’s simultaneously more and less evil than that. The ruling was that the state cannot compell employers to provide water breaks for employees working in the heat. So those people who can’t take a water break while working 13 hrs a day in direct sun are forced to do so by their employers greed, and not because of some legal obligation.
They mention dollars and social security, so I’m assuming they’re from the USA. I can believe it would be illegal in some states to give out water. Georgia for instance made it illegal to handout water bottles.
Yeah, that has to do with not allowing people to try to sway votes as people are going to vote, I think. I can’t find anywhere that even claims anyone in a US state is not allowed to give their neighbor water.
Okay, so I’m going to leave my two cents here.
I’m European, from a left leaning, liberal (in the sense we actively recognize individual rights and liberties but one individual freedom can not tramble the next), and this exact same legal disposition exists.
Allow me to share the explanation I was given.
Fresh water is not easy to manage, sanitize transport and distribute. The operation is insanely complex and expensive, with huge expenses for quality control, infrastructure and machinery.
Water is a public service here; it is a guaranteed right. You need to reach extreme lengths to have your water service shut off, like having several months of delinquent bills.
however, all of this infrastructure needs to be paid for and it is paid through a serious of added charges, some percentually calculated based off the amount of water you use, others are fixed values charged as service fees (like sanitation and garbage collection).
This implies that if all the water consumed in an entire building was being paid by a single person, the water itself would be paid, but related costs would only be charged once, meaning the portion of money collected to cover the entire maintenance of the services would be severely reduced.
By enforcing that for each home there must be a separate service, the overall cost is diluted and the value service is maintained as cheap as humanly possible and the basic services are maintained as public services, out of the reach of private sector interest.
And, please take my word for, you do not want water, sewage or garbage collection controlled by private companies.
These are sectors where there is a limit for how much expense you can cut. It requires constant investment in machinery and infrastructure to just maintain operations. Improving efficiency requires even higher investment that is only recoupable after several years, if ever.
Privates work for profit. These entities work to just break even, although some can be highly profitable, but profit is always destined to reinvest.
That’s a a lot of words to say you enjoy the taste of boot…
