stabby_cicada

"Poor Americans don't deserve electricity because rich Americans are privileged and wasteful" is certainly one of the takes of all time.

You spent a lot of paragraphs on a "dumb" argument. Sounds like, despite your insistence it doesn't matter, it really does matter to you.

USians gonna US, I guess.

When you think about it, it's kind of offensive to call ourselves (US residents) "Americans" as if in all of North and South America we're the only country that matters.

You might look up cohousing.

In this case, the "who" is human biology. Humans evolved in tribes, not nuclear families.

There's always the "cool aunt/uncle/friend with no children who's always available to babysit" option. Communal child rearing generally starts with extended family - those without minor children pitch in to help the adults with minor children - and you don't need kids of your own to help out that way.

But you do kind of need a trusting relationship with those adults first, so they'll be willing to trust you with their kids, and it's hard to build those relationships from scratch, or rebuild them with family members if you've lost that trust already.

Done

Your faith in the U.S. legal system is touching.

In many parts of the United States, if any parent or child sued over mandating the Pledge of Allegiance, their family would have to flee town for their own safety, after which the local judge would throw out the case for lack of standing because the student isn't enrolled anymore.

Laws are pieces of paper. They mean what the men with guns say they mean. And in red America, the men with guns say shut up and salute the flag.

Clearly not.

Musk's target audience are liberal, West Coast, technocratic, white or upper caste Hindu, brogressives and techbros - men (and the occasional token woman like Elizabeth Holmes) who give lip service to equality and talk a good game about social justice, and then go home to their gentrified neighborhoods and beat their wives. The kind of people who vocally celebrate the anti-capitalist ethic of Burning Man and then spend the burn in a luxurious private compound with dozens of servants and sex workers getting high off their ass while artists perform for them like Venetian nobles patronizing Renaissance painters.

His target audience are precisely the people who would name drop the Culture when promoting their latest startup but revert to moralizing about "traditional Western values" the instant someone actually behaves like a Culture member.

Helps keep them from questioning why they serve and obey the state as adults.

the homeless are more akin to pests as far as the money is concerned.

I'd go one step further. Homelessness, and poverty in general, are necessary to capitalism. If the consequences of poverty weren't so bad, workers wouldn't fear losing their jobs so much. Homelessness helps maintain the authority of the boss over the worker and the corresponding hierarchy of capital over labor.