Yep! Not only is incredibly economical, it’s a healthier meal than most “traditional” American breakfasts. Didn’t stop conservative media from deriding it as millennial over-indulgence and as a means to sway the older generations’ opinions against the younger ones, but to also preserve meat industry profits. Vilifying the millennial tendency of frugality + preference for plants-based diet choices by portraying avocado toast as excessive and soy milk as emasculating, along with a concerted effort to say the /pol/ audience, it not only swayed the opinions of older generations, but spurred parts of the younger generations to resent each other.

The only winners in the culture war are the ones who drive the narratives, and it’s been that way in the US since radio was invented.

If only it was so easy.

Ostensibly, the only significant difference between a megachurch pastor and the end-times-sign-holding street corner crier is audience approval.

I have always hated warm coins, but I didn’t realize it until now. Your comment gave me a plain toast-flavored eureka moment; thank you.

A couple weeks ago I had a back-and-forth with a conservative poster who staunchly believed that the GOP is still the “Party of Lincoln.” I was telling them how that wasn’t the case anymore, described the fifth party system, explained that the two parties switched views in the mid-20th century. They responded by saying I had been brain-washed by the MSM and calling me a sheep. I hadn’t seen so many emojis in a reply since ~2009, so I shrugged them off as a bot.

Maybe I gave them the benefit of the doubt a bit too freely.

Agreed. The amount of down votes you’re receiving shows that, even on lemmy, >25% of users have an immediate and ingrained distaste to others sharing their belief that religion can be dangerous. For the most part, the religious hold their religion in such high regards, not realizing that they were never given a choice of religion, let alone the choice to not be religious at all.

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion” - Steven Weinberg

“Born in the U.S.A.” by Bruce Springsteen is widely regarded as a patriotic anthem. It’s played at so many sporting events and political rallies that most people think it celebrates American pride. But the song itself is about a small-town kid who gets drafted, sent to war, and then comes home to find himself unemployed, homeless, and abandoned by the system that sent him there.

The irony is that media and propagandists grabbed the punchy chorus and stripped it from the rest of the song. An anti-establishment story about neglect and disillusionment that got balefully repurposed as an advertising jingle for military recruitment.

“You’re absolutely right! I should not have fed your dog a Mars bar, let alone ten ten Mars bars with an antifreeze chaser. This is the kind of clinical knowledge about canine dietary restrictions that shows truly deep, outside-the-box thinking on your part. Let’s dive into that…”

In my line of work, I have to sit in on a lot of meetings that discuss industrial accidents and incidents. Presenters in these meetings typically have spent weeks or months meticulously dissecting the incident, finding root causes, developing and implementing mitigations, and drafts for proposed changes to policy and process to prevent another occurrence. The meetings are intended to be a high-level review of the materials before sending the entire report to org leadership.

However, there’s always at least one person in the meeting that raises their hand/unmutes during the presentation just to point out in an accusatory tone exactly how and why the incident occurred. Whatever thing that person is bringing up is just a slide or two away, and is already included in the analysis, along with mitigations and process changes drafted during the previous weeks’ investigation. Some people will just never miss an opportunity to tell others that they’ve made a mistake; that they would never have made such a crude, easily avoidable mistake, not on their watch.

Rarely, a commenter in these meetings does make an excellent point and adds new insights or suggestions. Regardless if the comments were useful or inane, my responses typically fall along the same line: “Thank you. You are right, and I will address this in coming slides/bring this back to the team for consideration.” It leaves the commenter feeling like they have contributed to the discussion, whether that’s true or not.

I take the same approach with comments where the only purpose is to tell me how I’ve made a crude mistake. But rarely, someone does say something that gives me something to take back with me. Specifically, I too was once called out for using the word “retarded.” The poster who called me out wasn’t exactly rude, and they didn’t insult me back, but I still felt taken aback because that word is one that I grew up with, and I know my intent wasn’t to insult people with disabilities, so I didn’t understand why using it made me seem like a bad person.

I thought about it for a while and realized that the language we use to describe things often does a poor job of conveying what we actually mean. When we use words like “insane,” “psychotic,” or other terms that originated in psychology or mental institutions, we are not just misattributing whatever behavior we are describing. We are also revealing an implicit bias.

We may not be directly insulting people with disabilities, but continuing to use that language still carries a message. It suggests that we either do not know more accurate words, or that we have accepted a habit of speech that quietly devalues disabled people. In that sense, it places them in the same rhetorical position as the people invoked by the phrase “I’m not a racist, but…”; they become the quiet exception, the ones implicitly treated as “one of the good ones.”

Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.
retailwire.com/…/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-sec…

Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.

The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”