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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • neither he nor anybody else here has called you a nazi, but if you’re so used to being called a nazi that you just assume anything you say is going to get you labeled as one, maybe you should have a think about why. if you met an asshole today, you met an asshole, but if you meet assholes all day every day, either you’re a proctologist or you’re the asshole.

    anyway, to your point, the reason parents don’t get to decide how public school educates their kids is because kids need to learn about evolution in order to understand any of biology, they need to learn about american slavery in order to understand anything about why this country is the way it is, they need to learn about objectivity vs. subjectivity and how statistics work in order to detect when they’re being lied to, by, say, fox news, and they need to learn about how their own bodies work so that they don’t get and spread stds, don’t have unwanted pregnancies and drop out of college, don’t think they’re freaks if their gender or sexuality doesn’t fit neatly into one of the standard boxes, and do know what sexual abuse is and what to do if it happens to them. and parents claiming parents’ rights on education are always and only ever doing it because they want their kids to be ignorant on all of those subjects, with all the negative consequences that follow from that. and that was also something the nazis wanted, hence why they burned down and destroyed the work of the institute for sexual research, as well as a bunch of other stuff.

    so yeah, i’m not going to call you a nazi, but i am going to say that the things you argue for align pretty closely with things the nazis argued for.


  • Very true. I was keeping my scope to just my personal experience, but if you expand how you look at the country to include things that have been done in its name, then we live in a country whose government has systematically oppressed people and aided in genocides, fascist coups, and so many other terrible things throughout the world, and all of that pushes me to be actively the opposite of proud of it. But that also raises the question of to what extent does being proud of your country entail being proud of its government, and that’s some political theory shit I don’t have the straws for right now.


  • This seems like a pretty nebulous concept with a lot of wiggle room for interpretation.

    Like, am I proud of having been born in the specific place I was and having the parents that I do? I ain’t had shit to do with that. I’m American by accident. I’m no more proud of being American than I am of being 5’10": it’s just a box I fit into, honestly somewhat uncomfortably. I’m proud of the work I do and the achievements I’ve… achieved, but nothing I’ve done would be impossible anywhere else. If anything, there are parts of the world where what I’ve achieved would have been easier to do and where my preferred lifestyle is more widely accepted (for context, this refers to that I don’t like cars, don’t own or want to own one, and choose to get around by bike and transit instead) (a friend of my dad’s recently told him that I “need a European girlfriend” because “American women don’t understand guys like him:” for the record, I’ve never met this woman).

    Anyway, pointless rambling aside, America is just one country out of hundreds in the world, and I don’t see why I should feel all nationalistic about having been born in it.