I’ve been under the impression that, unlike Reddit, I can upvote posts like this, so I did.

Imo that comment was made to reinforce your message, it wasn’t written as a message to you (because you had already decided).

So they basically want to bring back the company towns from the gilded age, but more dystopian thanks to the possibilities of modern technology. Characteristics of company towns often were: “controlling and/or exploitative”.

Control: If your employer does something unethical, will you dare go against it, if it means that not only will you lose your job, but you and your family will be also be kicked out of your house, school, town, … Very few would.

Exploitative: where can the company town residents shop and find services? In the company shops of course. This constrained supply also leads to subpar service for high prices. And if company sales are down, the company will spend less on wages, but keep the company shop prices the same since the shoppers have no alternative anyhow.

Add in modern technology, and some of those towns will be like Brave New World, while others will evolve into 1984. Dystopian.

The russian assets in the White House want to portray Zelensky and Ukraine as insufficiently thankful for USA aid and as disrespectful towards the usa, and to use those supposed slights as justification for cutting off aid. To reinforce this narrative with their audience, other fellow travellers are now repeating those lies.

This goes back to the white house meeting where Trump and Vance claimed that Zelensky was disrespectful because of how he was dressed (normal) and how he didn’t thank anyone according to them (he had, profusely, there’s video of it). It was a clown show and the meeting didn’t deliver the desired images + soundbites, so now the usa republicans are working overtime in providing the necessary soundbites for fox news etc.

They might be trying to confuse search algorithms, so that when Russians look for Ukrainian meat grinder, they get some articles with babushkas instead of blogposts that are critical about how Putin’s regime conducts the war.

Edit after some more thinking about it: those critical blogposts probably get censored away, so that when Russians try looking for them, they find no relevant results. Now that these other meat grinder articles exist, the search results will be populated again and look less suspiciously devoid of relevant results.

And that man clearly does not live in such a state, nor did I (or anyone else I think) claim that his circumstances apply to the entire usa. You’re wrong in assuming that other people are not aware that different places have varying laws and tax systems.

Your whataboutism defence of regressive tax systems is also very strange to me. That other places have unfair practices in place, is no excuse to put up with an unfair system in any one place. Call them all out on their brokeness, but if you do call them out, you’ll have to be more specific in your example(s), state things that are actually verifiable instead of some vague whataboutism.

Ps, while I did not think your whataboutism defence was relevant, this “Little wonder that property ownership rates are generally so far below american ownership rates.” was easy to verify and it turned out to be false. Home ownership rates are on average slightly higher in Europe than in the usa, here’s statistics: https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-rate-in-europe/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

If you try to take too many eggs out of 1 basket, the person carrying that basket is likely to try and run away. So it’s easier and less disruptive to take a few eggs out of lots of different baskets.

Taxing accumulated capital without exceptions is also guaranteed to screw people over. The man in the OP is a good example: he’s a modest man who many years ago bought a modest house for a modest sum of money. Due to circumstances, that house has now increased in value, making him a wealthy man on paper. But he’s deriving no income from that wealth, since he can’t rent it out because he lives in it himself. So now he’s a modest man, who is rich on paper, who is expected to pay high taxes on his paper wealth, turning him into a poor man who is barely scraping by.

That has to be the most regressive tax I’ve heard of in western Europe. Absolutely excessive and I’m sorry it’s happening to you.

Belgium has a home value tax as well, based on fictional rental income + a very convoluted calculation + different % surcharges per council. I find back that it’s on average about 700 to 800 euros per Flemish adult person, but it has large variations. It causes a lot of grumbling, but for most people it’s not considered excessive.

And this is why in most civilized countries, progressive income taxes make up the majority of the government budget. Basing taxes on non income/investment related metrics screws over the poor + lower middle class. It’s a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Yep, french language class in a too large highschool class. If the class had been smaller, then the teacher would have definitely gone for more presentations by the students.

Keep up the good fight, I’m certain that many of your students appreciate what they learn from you.

Students and cheating is always going to be a thing, only the technology evolves. It’s always been an interesting cat and mouse game imo, as long as you’re not too personally affected (sorry).

I was a student when the internet started to spread and some students had internet at home, while most teachers were still oblivious. There was a french book report due and 4 kids had picked the same book because they had found a good summary online. 3 of the kids hand wrote a summary of the summary, 1 kid printed out the original summary and handed that in. 3 kids received a 0, the 4th got a warning to not let others copy his work :D

In my Eu country, and also the neighbouring countries, the general rule for a detached building is that it has to be build 3 to 5 meters (depending on the local rules) from the terrain boundary. If the builder wants to build closer, then they have to build a blind wall on the boundary with certain minimum fire + insulation requirements. If then someone else builds against that blind wall, that someone else is expected to buy “half” of the existing wall, ie: pay the first builder some money.

So we fortunately don’t get those dystopian tightly packed detached housing neighbourhoods.

The shared wall between a home and any other building is also required by law to have certain minimum acoustic insulation values. But there’s plenty of old buildings where this isn’t the case yet. Living in an apartment building without proper acoustic isolation is horrible, I’d rather live in a dystopian detached house, so maybe that’s why those houses are still popular in North America and Australia: guaranteed proper acoustic insulation.

One USA metropolitan area has as many as many people in it as many small countries. All these excuses that you’re making as to why there are no large protests because of American exceptionalism, they just sound hollow. Protesting or not comes down to people and ATM there seems to be a severe lack of high level activist pro democracy leadership.

Edit: I do appreciate your answer about it taking 2 years to prepare that march, that’s new info for me. But even then, I’d expect pro democracy protest everywhere and the Washington DC metropolitan area (or other densely populated areas) shouldn’t need to depend on further away regions to get large numbers to turn up.

So why was it possible to organize such a protest in 1963 but not in 2025?

Lack of democratic leadership is not a geographic problem. In your previous comment you claimed that it was because of distance that there were no large protests, but it’s pretty obvious that those distances are not the reason.

At the time of the COVID pandemic, so 4 or 5 years after gamergate, I saw a 4chan repost on reddit about starting a conspiracy that drinking your own piss would prevent/cure COVID. About 2 weeks later there was a mainstream news article about some dehydrated maga supporter who was pulled of the road, who had been drinking his own piss.

I thought that was pretty original and novel.

I’ve never been a 4chan user though, so I only see 4chan memes/trolling once it spreads outside and I can’t comment on the quality/quantity of their content, I just don’t think that the site’s relevance is completely gone.

The civil rights movement managed to organize a massive march on Washington in the early 1960s. It should be far easier to organize something similar or even larger with the current technology and larger population.

I specifically remember that Die Linke supported Chavez and Maduro when they were already full on authoritarian. I conflate support for authoritarian regimes with being tankies/fascists.

This was years ago, so it’s possible that I’m out of date.

Sorry, I apparently had misread the map, I thought east-berlin had mostly gone afd as well. The color of Die Linke had blended in with the color of afd, so it had seemed like it was just an island of black colored west-berlin in a sea of afd.

And yes, I’m partially color blind, which isn’t an excuse, but might explain it a little.

?

I said East-Germany went fascist. On the map CDU rules the roost in West-Germany and west-berlin, so I never said that I consider CDU to be fascist.