Belgium
Of course, when I went it was part of an school exchange trip when I was 17. I was almost always with a large group of American teenagers with only a few teachers as chaperones. It’s 100% understandable why people wouldn’t want to be particularly friendly to us.
The egg is the only possible correct answer to this.
Modern chickens didn’t exist until something like 10,000 years ago. The egg was a key development in allowing animals to live on land, and first came about somewhere around 300 million years ago.
But if you want to narrow it down to just chicken eggs, then you have it right. The immediate predecessor to the first thing that can be called a ‘chicken’ laid a chicken egg from which hatched a chicken.
The egg absolutely came first.
I’m not debating the the Democratic Party has moved to the right over the past decade. However, (a) I wouldn’t call the Democrats Progressive, and they never really have been. There is a fringe of the party that is progressive, but they’ve never been the majority or leadership. And (b) both progressives and the Democratic Party are still to the left of George W Bush on most issues. He campaigned on a same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. He was a climate denier. He fabricated evidence of WMDs in Iraq in order to start his second of what would become decades-long wars. He opened Gitmo. He institutionalized a torture program as policy. None of that is anywhere close to what progressives are pushing for now.
I guess my main question to you is this: who are you defining as ‘progressives’?
All the President’s Men is my favorite political movie.
Friendliest country I’ve ever been to was Cuba. Everyone was incredibly nice and helpful with anything we could want. Malaysia was a close second.
Least friendliest was Belgium, but I went as part of a school exchange trip, so I was pretty much always in a large group of mostly teenage Americans with a few teachers. Understandable why people might not have been as friendly.
Or just say you want the comfy pillow.
It’s marketed as being a product for new parents. There’s no law that says is must be used that way.
a) No, nobody will judge you
b) If they do, fuck 'em
My thought is no. I have kids, but mine are much younger (3 & 5). Right now, I’d prefer to wait as long as possible before I get them smartphones. My niece and nephew didn’t get one until they were 15, and I feel like that’s too young, too.
My big concern is social media. If I could ensure they weren’t on social media at all, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem. But I don’t think it’s safe or healthy for kids to be on social media that young. Hell, I’m almost 40 and I don’t think it’s safe or healthy for me to be on social media (yet here I am…).
History is written by the victors
I have a BIG nitpick with this framing. While it is correct in many instances, it’s imprecise, and sometimes just flat out wrong.
A better framing is “History is written by the historians”. In other words, the historical narrative is set by those who put forth the effort to do so. In many cases, those historians are writing from the perspective of the victors, but not always.
I’ll give you a few examples:
The Mongol Empire was one of (if not the) largest contiguous land empires in world history. They conquered everything from China to eastern Europe and Mesopotamia. By any interpretation of the word, the Mongols were the victors in virtually every conflict they had. Yet they also didn’t really write histories. There’s only 1 real Mongolian historical text we have: The Secret History of the Mongols. It was an account of the life and conquests of Genghis Kahn written shortly after his death. Yet, as the title alludes to, it wasn’t a public document. It was written for the ruling dynasty. The earliest copy we know of is a copy from ~200 years after the original was written, and it didn’t become widely read until another 300 years after that. For the first half-millennia after the Mongol conquests, the historical narrative was entirely based on the accounts people who were conquered by the Mongols. In other words, the history of the Mongol conquests and their subsequent empire were almost entirely written not by the victors, but by the conquered. This heavily influences our popular conception of the Mongols as barbaric war mongers who committed horrific acts of violence. We don’t think much about any other contributions the Mongols had in the realms of culture, economics, political administration, philosophy, diplomacy, etc because the people who wrote about the Mongols (and set the historical narrative) had no interest in portraying them in a positive light. Compare that to someone like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, etc. All of them were similarly successful conquerors and warlords, yet the historical narrative about them is FAR more complex and positive than that of Genghis Kahn. Because the history of Genghis Kahn was not written by the victors.
Another example which is probably more accessible to a lot of people: The American Civil War. For most of the 150 years after the war ended up until just the past couple of decades, the prevailing popular narrative portrayed in pop culture and taught in schools was the Lost Cause narrative. The war was about States’ Rights. Slavery was not a part of the war at the beginning and the Union only brought it in later to justify their aggression towards the South. It was called the War of Northern Aggression by many. The South was primarily fighting to preserve a pastoral and romanticized way of life, etc, etc. This is the narrative portrayed in fiction such as Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. Of course, we know this to be bullshit. It was a war over slavery and the South was fighting to maintain the most brutal and oppressive form of slavery the world has ever seen. Yet for over a century that wasn’t the broadly accepted historical narrative because after the war ended people in the South put a lot of effort into creating and disseminating the Lost Cause narrative while the victors (the Union) didn’t put any effort into crafting an historical narrative. The North was more concerned with reuniting the nation and rebuilding, so much so that they completely gave up on Reconstruction and let the same people who had led the Confederacy run the South as an apartheid state for the next century.
These are just 2 examples, but they aren’t the only ones by a long shot. History is not always written by the victors. It’s written by the people who put forth the effort to write it, and the historical narrative ends up reflecting this down to the modern day.
The very first time Trump’s name was in a major newspaper was in the 1970s when The New York Times reported on the Nixon administration suing Trump and his father for racist housing policies in the apartment buildings they owned in NYC.
Then in the 80s he was the model for Biff Tannen, the villain in the Back to the Future movies. He was parodied by everyone from The Simpsons to MAD Magazine to SNL as the epitome of the sleazy 80s business guy.
No, he was never cool except to a very small slice of people who the sleazy 80s business guy aesthetic appeals to, and nobody thinks those guys are cool.
“I don’t hate you because you’re a POC, a woman, or queer. I hate you because you’re poor.”
Microsoft has the ability to do this if they really wanted to. It would completely destroy their business if they did, though, so they won’t. I mean, who would keep using Microsoft products if the company was willing to just take it away from you at a moment’s notice?
The US government cannot do it so easily. They’d have to order Microsoft to do so. Microsoft would resist and take it to court. The US Court system makes a LOT of really fucked up rulings, but the one thing they do reliably is side with big business. I’m inclined to think that in this hypothetical showdown, the courts would side with Microsoft.
I’m generally not particularly picky when I’m listening to music. I don’t often want just one specific song or artist. Usually I’m looking for a genre/vibe and that’s it.
With that in mind, I prefer Pandora. I’ve been using it for ~20 years now and have a lot of VERY well curated stations. I also don’t mind the ads so much, and, therefore, have never had to pay for it. On the rare occasions I want a very specific song, I can just pull it up on YouTube.
My wife and I recently sprung for a Spotify account. We have a 3 yo and 5 yo and, like most children, they want to listen to a few specific albums on repeat. We had Amazon Music for a bit, but really disliked it. So we switched to Spotify. I mostly only use it to play music for my kids.
Right now, it would likely harm other countries at least as much as the US. We’re just too interconnected into every aspect of the global economy. Cutting off the US cuts off a lot of services that other countries rely on.
But, Trump’s current foreign policy is driving countries away from the US fast. Give it a few years for countries to disentangled themselves from the US and it would likely be more effective without harming themselves in the process.
So, given that you don’t live near DC, what are you doing?
As an ACAB myself, I think we’ll appreciate the sign very much.
Whichever you put more alcohol into.
Typically, the only difference between a frozen margarita and one on the rocks is that the frozen has been blended. But they still have the same amount of tequila and triple sec (usually 1 shot of tequila and 2/3 shot of triple sec).