comfy

u/comfy@lemmy.ml
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I honestly don't personally know any real-life person who acts like that - they're either just not scared of cool infrastructure, or they're the occasional 'patriot' freak who's nationalist/racist enough to consider Japan a threat too.

Leave the straw-man circlejerking to the rightoids, comrade.

Where I previously lived, I would have said 'agree', or at least it would be a serious quality-of-life determent to not drive, due to spending over an hour to make a trip that a car could in 20 minutes. It also helps that I don't want to hire drive-share or taxis constantly, but this also wasn't a reliable option.

Blackness/Whiteness is an interesting concept - it's remarkably fluid, especially with changes in time and place. Race isn't the same as ethnicity or genetics, or a direct result of it, although racists often try to claim it is - a stark example of this in Western societies like the US and Australia would be how they categorize Italian and Greek peoples, Slavic peoples, or ethnically-Jewish peoples - the idea of whether or not each of these is White has largely shifted over time, often as a group stops being the current biggest immigration demographic. The USA even had a concept of "Black Irish", which originally meant a post-Famine Irish refugee. Human races are ultimately just social classes, not a biological concept.

Another aspect, related to this thread, is hypodescent. In some societies (it's not a universal thing!), if a child has a Black parent and a White parent, is the child Black or White, or another label entirely? As mentioned in that article, some US states used to legally define someone as Black even if only 1 of their 16 great-great-grandparents were Black.

I see a lot of people on Lemmy recently claiming to be left but also trying to tell me how democracies are bad. -_-

Probably the case, although it's important not to dismiss people for criticizing liberal democracy - the system that has repeatedly put us in the mess we're in now. There are plenty of issues which are wildly popular regardless of political alignment but which liberal democracy fails to deliver, so to consider it a democracy at all, simply because most people get voting rights to pick representatives, is very debatable.

There are plenty of other forms of democracy, many which have been successfully run in communities of hundreds of thousands of people (consider Zapatistas, Cheran, and more).