Weird to go into a website based in the States, with a large audience of Americans, all speaking in the American dialect of English primarily about events in US news and politics, and then get mad because it’s America-centric.

Terrible news, guy who just started posting on the Internet

Speed traps are just a tool to further monetize and rent seek car culture in the absence of public transit.

You can, in fact, hate both cars and infrastructure that exists solely to make using a car more expensive.

the most viable alternative to traffic stops

I have never heard of a town that reduced the size of its police force after installing a speed trap.

But the works and practice in mobilizing the workforce in the new deal played a big part in the US having industrial capability prior to WWII.

Hard to power the 1940s industrial economy without coal. And hard to generate coal without an electrification of the Tennessee Valley. Without a doubt.

Hell if there’s a miuntain range in your state you’re almost certainly getting some of your power from a hydro plant made in the 30’s.

Given his attitude towards public works, it’s very funny that Hoover has the nation’s largest dam named after him.

In fairness, if you get under the hood of the New Deal benefits, they relieved a lot of immediate suffering and mobilized a workforce that had been functionally abandoned by the private sector.

But they didn’t “grow the economy” in the same way as the enormous investment in the Military Industrial Complex achieved. The Citizens Conservation Corps and the Social Security Administration didn’t create the kind of high paying engineering and manufacturing jobs that state demand for thousands of new tanks and ships achieved.

WW2 full mobilization of the economy wasn’t just taking in the slack of a depressed market. It was a command economy in all but name, dictating every aspect of the industrial chain, from extraction to expenditure to recovery and recycling.

The tragedy of WW2 is that we could only permit this kind of logistical achievement for the purpose of joining a bloodbath in Europe, North Africa, and East Asia. As soon as Roosevelt passed, Truman began reprivatizing the economy as quickly as possible.

American Economics Professor: “We pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression by entering WW2”

American Economics Student: “I can’t afford my car payment and my rent just doubled. When can we re-invade the South Pacific?”

This period of peace in Western Europe

France: “We haven’t gone to war with Germany in decades!”

Me: “What about Libya?”

France: …

Me: “Algeria? Argentina? Rwanda? The Ivory Coast? Somalia? Chad? Basque Country? Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia?”

France: sound of FAMAS F1 cocking

there’s also the phenomena of older folks generally being more against change and clinging in the past more,

That’s more a consequence of the moment. Older people like stable material conditions. And with programs like pensions, public health care, and a safe suburban neighborhood with good amenities, they see the status quo as worth defending.

But swing through North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring (anyone remember that?) or pop over to the UK in the wake of the last election cycle or visit an impoverished neighborhood in Haiti or a bombed neighborhood in Lebanon and you’ll find plenty of elderly revolutionaries.

you look towards the past and become nostalgic about it

People may be nostalgic for their youth, but they are rarely nostalgic for being treated like a child.

And you’re going to find it hard to locate a South African native nostalgic for Apartheid or a Pole or Romanian who misses occupation or a Chinese national who pines for the Century of Humiliation.

Westerners coming out of their post war pre-Reagan Golden Era just have more to be nostalgic for.

Makes me think of the old Samuel Clemmens quote

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak;

whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

~ Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

It’s so easy to pretend the mob that turned on French nobility in the 1800s or the Qing Dynasts and Russian Tsars in the 1900s or the Arabs who lashed out at European occupation in the 2000s were simply seized by mania or some animal impulse.

It’s so easy to pretend they had no grievance, they suffered no generational atrocities, they had no motivation for their violent uprising, save the insidious Mind Virus of Leftist Agitation.

It’s romantic to see the aristocracy and the colonial governments of these nations as martyrs of a golden era. They were cruelly deposed by savages for the crime of living the gentile and sophisticated life. They were the Eloi, dragged into the dirt by vicious Morlocks who envied their perfect beauty.

But it’s all bullshit.

The aristocracy were monsters. They maintained their grips on the people through generation after generation of terror, torture, and enforced ignorance. They were cult leaders and warlords who claimed turf through centuries of conquest, inquisition, and cultural indoctrination.

When these archaic institutions failed, we like to blame the revolutionary leaders who happened to climb atop the ruins of their bloody legacy. But they were simply at the right moment in history to witness a corrupt edifice crumble under the weight of millions of their own dissatisfied subjects.

There’s a certain selection bias to the “Weak Men, Hard Times / Strong Men, Good Times” just so historical analysis. You don’t talk about all the folks that die during good times or bad times. You just point to the old people and your brain slips right past the selection bias that allowed them to live and others to die.

Trying to blame this generation or that is a fool’s errand. What do you tell a population of Gen Xers who were dragged out to the suburbs and raised in these segregated hermitages for twenty years, then plunged into the capitalist meat grinder at the tail end of the post-war boom years? “Hey, you should have all just psychically linked up and formed a socio-economic Voltron to change a century’s old system overnight”? Who can seriously believe that? The deck was stacked against you and yet we still have a litany of Gen Xers who struggled - even died - in their effort to undo the damage of prior generations.

And what do you say to all the children of WW2 refugees who washed up on America’s shores and struggled to carve out a life for themselves in the graveyards of the First Nation’s people? Or the Cold War refugees - the Korean and Vietnamese and Indonesian and Taiwanese and Venezuelan and Cuban and Spanish and Russian and North Africa and… and… and… - who came into the US as children and were promptly indoctrinated to hate their home countries by the white supremacist majordomos of the American imperial class?

Its easy to blame yourself or your neighbors or your generation. Its hard to see the bigger picture and how each of us fit into it. Its hard to know if we’re doing the right thing, or doing enough of the right thing, or who is with us and who is against us given the sheer tsunami of bullshit in our information networks.

We’re playing the game on Hard Mode. And I don’t think anyone who cares enough to question and inquire about their efforts can really be held to blame. It’s the folks who have burned the ability to care out of their souls that hold us back. And that’s not a decision unique to a region or time period.

liberals often use the nebulous, ill-defined term of “Democratic Socialism” as an AES cudgel.

I see liberals try to equate any kind of public sector combined with a national election system as Democratic Socialism. Which gets you the Nordic Model - a collection of petrostates with an egalitarian veneer and a white supremacist underbelly - labeled “Democratic Socialism” on paper.

Meanwhile, actual social democracies in Latin America, Africa, and East Asia are denounced as authoritarian every time the Neoliberal (or outright reactionary) local politician loses an election.

I am stating that AES is democratic as is Marxism in general

Marxism is Democratic in theory. Leninism is more popular than democratic, as Leninists aren’t wedded to electoralism like their liberal peers.

But the critique I see most often among liberals is that markets are democratic. And therefore every AES state that fails to sufficiently privatize the economy is definitely facto authoritarian.

That’s the real definitional divide between Marxists and Liberal Democrats.

All strains of Socialism are democratic

Glances nervously at the ultra-nationalist strains

Some are more democratic than others, certainly.

emphasize the democratic factor as opposed to our current system

It is exhausting to hear people smuggly denounce AES states as dysfunctional, by citing their trend towards nationalizarion of capital and popularization of policy. Particularly when the same folks will scream bloody murder if you don’t continue to mechanically endorse their brand of corporate liberalism.

Technically the first one (clown costume implies he’s an entertainer), but I feel like either interpretation works

Running, cycling, climbing, swimming. He’s a quadruple threat.

Persians absolutely malding right now.

Sadly, Marvel has fired all their good screenwriters and replaced them with overworked/underpaid animators based overseas.

Out of the blue, some BBC executive or execs wanted to censor the sketch because of “its’ visual depiction of menstrual urine”.

This feels like a Mitchel and Webb bit. Hell, if the censors burst into the scene carrying a big piece of blacked out cardboard to hold over the bottle, it would fit into the original Monty Python episode perfectly.

100 situps, pushups, and squats aren’t exactly easy like doing the alphabet.

laughs nervously, then scrambles to get better at his alphabet

This guy in five years.