TheSanSabaSongbird

Not to mention that we already know that Iran has been backing Hamas for decades, and Iran and Russia are allies.

No, that's not a thing in hard news. Maybe in opinion pieces or columns, but it's definitely not in the AP Style Guide, which in the US is still the industry standard.

Doesn't credit card debt go away after 7 years? If I'm doing the math right, your wife must be pretty young if it's still an issue.

Sure, if by "each subsequent generation" you mean millennials. Historically the trend in the US has always been the opposite; most people could count on being better off than their parents.

There are at least 50 different systems for getting a driver's license in the US since each state issues its own license. Some states are far more rigorous than others. My home state has a system similar to what you describe only it includes an additional 40 hours driving with another licensed adult, in addition to the hours spent driving with a certified instructor and the classroom hours.

The state I live in now? Not so much. They basically just give out licenses to anyone who shows up, pays the fee and can show that they know what the different pedals do. Unfortunately this produces terrible drivers, as you would expect.

You were made to sing that song? Gross!

That's very definitely not what they mean at all. American conservatives, the kind of people referenced here, are anti-government except for the military.

This is only true if you look at the country as a whole. Break it down by state or even region and you'll see that entire parts of the country are more like Canada in terms of international travel, while others are unusually provincial for citizens of an industrialized democracy.

If you live in a middle class neighborhood in a big west coast city, for example, chances are good that you and all of your neighbors have traveled overseas extensively. It's also very much a class and educational division and of course that plays out in a variety of other ways as well.

To conservative Americans the word "freedom" doesn't mean the same thing that it means to you and I. That's the simple short explanation for your confusion. It would require a much longer discussion to really unpack why that is and how it intersects with ideology.

But that's not really a rebuttal either. How about we have both? Why not all the benefits of progress together with less work?

I miss the niche content. Lemmy isn't big enough yet to have sorted into big "stupid" subs vs smaller niche subs that tend to attract smarter and more well-informed users. The result is that the signal-to-noise ratio on Lemmy still kind of sucks and any comment thread is likely to consist of three quarters banal gibberish and condescending idiocy and maybe one quarter actually intelligent, thoughtful and informed opinion.

I rarely make a comment on Lemmy without pissing off people on all sides of any given issue, which tells me that Lemmy's users aren't really good at nuance or complexity.

No, we can condemn both sides without calling it all terrorism. That's just plain stupid. Terrorism is a specific tactic and just because you don't like what a conventional military is doing doesn't make it terrorism. It's worthwhile to maintain our definitions.