I think you have a much higher opinion of French political culture than is warranted.

I’m generally curious why people get married beyond the “because I love them” when it costs so much money.

Getting married doesn’t have to cost virtually anything. Really just the application fee to get a marriage license. The specific price will vary by state, and even by county (within the US, not sure how it works outside). Where I live, you can go to a courthouse and get married for $35.

If you plan to have kids, there are a lot of legal reasons why it’s just a lot simpler to be married. The same applies without them, to a lesser degree, but with kids it’s just so much more of a hassle to not be married.

You’re right that you can achieve most (maybe even all?) legal benefits of marriage through trusts, wills, etc. But that’s a hell of a lot more work, and the lawyer fees, filing fees, and application fees are almost certainly going to cost you more than a cheap courthouse marriage. Not to mention the added work for yourself.

Beyond all that, though, the single biggest reason I wanted to get married and have a wedding with lots of friends and family was to stand up in front of everyone and profess my love for my (now) wife, let her do the same for me, then have big party with all our friends and family to celebrate it. There’s nothing wrong with spending money to throw a party for something you want to celebrate.

The idea of ‘trades’, as in construction trades like electricians, plumbers, carpenters, etc, has become pretty popular recently. The idea that you can get into a trade and make a good living without going to college has taken off as a response to the “forgive college loans” push. The right will often talk about trades as “real jobs” in contrast to people who go to college, rack up a ton of debt, and get degrees in fields that aren’t high paying or don’t directly translate into jobs right-wingers can easily understand. So talking about trades is a dig at ‘college educated liberals’. Among certain segments of the right, even just mentioning trades will illicit images of big burly men working with their hands doing manual labor raking in gobs of cash and lording their superiority over unemployed, highly-educated Democratic voters with liberal arts degrees and huge college debt. It’s become a meme they can use to quickly and easily convey that idea.

This is totally separate from the type of factory work they talk about trying to bring back to America by boosting domestic manufacturing. There’s really not a lot of construction trade work in factories. The type of factory work they’re talking about are typically unskilled jobs that pay much lower than skilled construction trades. But they also promised their voters they’d be creating high paying factory jobs. As much as they enact policies which suggest the opposite, the fascists running the government can understand simple economics. They know that an iPhone (for example) isn’t going to be built in the US by workers getting paid $30/hour. They know any factory manufacturing jobs their policies might create will be as close to minimum wage as possible with no benefits, ridiculous working conditions, and extremely high turnover. But they also know they have to promise the moon to maintain their sycophantic cult.

So they just words like “tradecraft” when talking about factory jobs because it illicits the idea of high paying skilled trades, but doesn’t actually outright say it. They want people to think electrician, plumber, carpenter, HVAC tech, etc, but also the deniability to say “I never said that.” If they came out and said “trade jobs” a bunch of industry and labor people would be like “uh… there are no electricians or plumbers working on factory floors.” Instead, if they get pushback they can just say, “I didn’t say that. I said ‘tradecraft’.”

It’s just Orwellian nonsense to obscure lies.

(Note: when I say ‘unskilled’ or ‘skilled’ here, I don’t mean to imply that factory work doesn’t require specific skills that can be honed and improved. I don’t mean to imply that any rando with no experience could do the job just as well as someone with a lot of experience. I’m using the terms to refer to the amount of formal training/licensing required to do them, and their relative pay levels. ‘Unskilled’ jobs typically require no formal training outside the workplace or licensing, and typically pay lower than ‘skilled’ jobs.)

My kid fits in just fine. She has plenty of friends.

Right? And I’m over here failing as a parent by buying books and letting her play outside. /s

Is there really fault at play here? I mean, is playing Minecraft a life skill that’s vital for a 5 year old to learn?

Maybe I’m parenting wrong, but my 5 year old has no idea what Minecraft is, let alone knows how to play it. The only video games she’s ever played is some Super Mario Bros 3 on a vacation once. She doesn’t even know how to do anything on our iPad except use the sketchpad app for drawing.

This is a pretty silly mindset. I cook every day. I like to use high quality tools for my cooking. That includes high quality kitchen knives. Those shouldn’t be dishwashered. It ruins the handles and dulls the blade.

Same with my nice cast iron pans. And wooden cutting boards.

I also have several very large pots/bowls/etc that are just too large to fit in the dishwasher.

The dishwasher is an extremely useful tool, but it’s pretty ridiculous to limit what kitchen tools you’re willing to use simply because they aren’t compatible with another kitchen tool.

Only 20 minutes?!?! I do have a dishwasher, and I still spend well over 20 minutes hunched in front of the sink cleaning dishes that can’t go in the dishwasher every day.

Also told all yall we need progressives to split from DNC and form a fresh 3rd party bruh.

This is a recipe to ensure Republicans fully sweep every election and progressives are ignored even more than they already are. American politics are so incredibly broken, but isolating yourself by breaking off into a party that has 0 chance of ever winning anything isn’t going to fix anything.

Yeah, it all built out of WW2. After WW2 pretty much all of Europe was in shambles. Most major cities had been bombed at least once, many far more than that. Infrastructure all across the continent was destroyed. The industrial capacity was destroyed. Armies had marched, pillaged, and destroyed first out of Germany across Europe, then back across Europe into Germany. The US was uniquely positioned as the only world power that didn’t suffer massive economic devastation from the war. In fact, due to stuff like the lend-lease act and massive industrial mobilization for the war effort, the US was experiencing a massive economic boom while Europe and east Asia were in a depression.

But in the aftermath of the war the Cold War set in. The USSR and Allied powers (led by the US) drew lines in the sand and established their areas of influence. The US instituted the Marshall Plan in Europe which essentially just shotgunned money at western Europe to rebuild as much as possible as quickly as possible. This had a massive positive economic impact on western Europe, but it also ensured that so much of Europe would be dependent on American products and companies. If your rebuilt power grid was made with American parts, then anything new would have to be compatible with that, ensuring your country is a long-term customer of American products. At the same time, the US and western Europe created NATO as a military pact against the Soviet Union, which further strengthened the western alliance. Again, with the US as the only major western power with a larger and more powerful army after the war than before, the US took the leading role in NATO.

Another major factor that most people tend to overlook was the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This was an effort to stabilize the global economy and monetary system after WW2. It said that the US would readopt the gold standard (we had abandoned it during the war, and would later permanently abandon it in the early 70s), then every other western-aligned country would use the US dollar as the basis for their currency. Think of it like a gold-standard, but instead of gold, they used US dollars. This gave the US enormous economic influence because everybody needed US dollars to maintain their economies, and the only way to get them was to do business with the US.

This created the conditions that the US expanded and exploited over the second half of the 20th century to cement ourselves as the dominant western world power. Through colonialism and Cold War dynamics, the US and USSR forced most of the global south to pick a side, and often forced regime change when they didn’t like the choice countries made.

Then the Soviet Union fell and the US was the only global superpower left remaining. Over the 90s and early 00s a lot of formerly Soviet-aligned countries hitched their wagons to the US since it was the only game left in town.

So, yes, much of the rest of the world put their eggs in the America basket, but it wasn’t recently, it didn’t happen all at once, and, at the time at least, there were other factors that went into those decisions.

They need to stop this 1 at a time thing. Get like 40 members of Congress, Senators and Representatives. Show up at CECOT with cameras live streaming and demand to be admitted. When they refuse, force your way in.

I don’t believe anyone in El Salvador, including Bukele and the goons staffing the prison, want to have a live stream of them assaulting/arresting a bunch of US members of Congress. And if they do, maybe that’ll help wake some Republican voters up to the fascism.

I’d argue the hate come after the “practical” reasoning. They target a group for various reasons (as a scapegoat, to create the illusion of progress, to steal resources, etc) then create an intellectual framework to justify their targeting of the group. The hatred comes out of that justification.

Nobody would be stupid enough to fall for this…

Brother, the US has been doing this for literally our entire history. We both Gulf Wars, Vietnam, and Korea were all just “police actions”, not wars (according to our government). Hell, in history we call our westward expansion the “Indian Wars”, but we never declared war on any Native American tribes ever. Those were just “internal police actions”.

Anarchists are kinda the exact opposite of authoritarians…

As an anarchist myself, I would not call libertarians or state communists fascists. All 3 are bad, but in different ways and for different reasons.

And if we’re standing against fascists, I’ll stand side-by-side with a communist or a libertarian. But I’ll never stand side-by-side with a fascists against anyone for any reason.

Sounds like a good time to be in business as a dentist!

I’m just a simple construction worker who’s not wise to the world of international geopolitics, but isn’t a military strike on a foreign country’s sovereign territory usually considered an act of war?

Since it’s clear we’re talking about the US here, the 1st Amendment clearly states (emphasis added):

Congress shall make no law respecting … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It says nothing about citizens, tourists, foreign nationals, etc. In fact, the amendment only limits what Congress can do (and the Supremacy clause extends this to the states). It doesn’t say “Citizens have the right to free speech.” It says “Congress shall pass no laws abridging the freedom of speech.”

It’s pretty clear that anyone and everyone has the right to free speech and assembly. The right wingers you’re talking about are trying to rewrite the first amendment to justify their fascism.

Honestly, as an individual there really isn’t much you can do with your purchasing power about it.

Next national day of protest in April 19. Find the largest one you are able to attend and join in.