non-teacher, government official

Do Principals count? How about Superintendents? State legislators who pass these pledge mandates? What about the school cop who comes to get you after the teacher writes you up? Or the cop in the ISS classroom who holds you until your parents pick you up? Or the school administrator who processes your expulsion?

Oh wait, I forgot, China bad.

Our Patriotic Anthem

Their Nefarious Brainwashing

The term “forcing” implies punishment for not obeying.

Here is a breakdown of laws in 47 states that require reciting the Pledge of Allegiance

I’m aware it isn’t mandatory

Here is a breakdown of laws in 47 states that require reciting the Pledge of Allegiance

Shit like this is why the kneeling protests in the states never bothered me.

Nationalism is a fucking curse. It drives people insane. These guys don’t love our country enough. Those guys love their country TOO MUCH. Its all so miserable and awful for everyone involved.

I’m proud to live in a country with freedom of expression.

Freedom to say anything that doesn’t upset the rich and powerful. Freedom to speak anywhere that the police won’t arrest you and the corporations can’t ban you. Freedom to travel anywhere your credit card can afford to send you and the State Department hasn’t banned you from going. Freedom to express yourself in any way that some Christian Fundamentalist doesn’t think will unduly influence his little rugrats.

Unlimited, Unconditional, Unparalleled Freedom (*)

• Limits and Conditions still apply. Please consult your local boss or party apparatchik for further details.

North Korean expats are functionally stateless, so it is very difficult to leave South Korea even when they do have money.

The largest portion of the Korean diaspora live in China and Russia.

Same folks who insist they’re protecting the unborn won’t do shit about the 647,000 lead based water lines because fuck you.

Sharp rise in syphilitic pregnancies. Congenital syphilis subjects a kid to some brutal handicaps from day one. And in a state like Texas, where Medicaid is made deliberately difficult to access and health care is obscenely expensive, it can easily be a death sentence.

So, anyway, Right-To-Life hooray!

It is a big black box however since they haven’t been engaged in a conflict recently so all their troops lack experience.

They’ve been deployed to Syria since at least 2019 and assisted Hezbollah in its tunnel networks going back decades.

North Korea has had surprisingly close ties with various African states going back to the Cold War and NK mercenaries have served in Syria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Zanzibar, and South Africa in the relatively recent past.

NKers also have an active role in state-sanctioned smuggling and piracy. I think you’d be surprised how much combat experience they’ve accrued.

About 18% of North Korean defectors regret it.

Around 20% of defectors have considered returning to North Korea. But that has less to do with the appeal of the North than the poor treatment of expats in the South.

The South Korean immigration and labor laws make finding work south of the border incredibly difficult. North Korean expats are confined to menial service sector and grueling industrial work while being largely cut out of South Korean social life due to heavy stigmas against them. Its an incredibly hard life and not remotely like the glamorous existence of social elites that Americans claim drive the periodic defections.

NKers are simultaneously brainwashed morons who follow their leader with fanatical delusion and utterly naive children who can be lured to defection by a few pieces of candy and a charming smile.

The hexbears are too stupid to realize that all Koreans yearn for the unlimited freedom of their Southern neighbors and yet too wicked to believe the unvarnished truths of such media luminaries as Yeomni Park. They should all be sent to North Korea to eat grass and toil in the mines and get beaten to a pulp by Kim’s totalitarian police, then repatriated so that they can apologize for their ignorant beliefs.

So did I hear that the US is considering letting “contractors” take Ukrainian contracts?

The US has been sending “advisers” into Ukraine since the war began. And we’ve had intelligence officers in this country for decades.

Blackrock would ruin these morons!

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious, and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy. The fact is, they have no other attraction or reason for keeping the field than a trifle of stipend, which is not sufficient to make them willing to die for you.

It’s a big club but you ain’t in it

User: “Please give me the three fastest routes, with each answer weighted by different criteria”

Computer: “Okay, here you go.”

User: “Two of these are slower than the third, you stupid piece of shit, I hate you.”

EVERYONE here in good faith- is anti genocide.

Until you walk into the voting booth, sure.

you tankies are on the margins of society

It’s funny to see a police officer in an MRAP drive down my street, while a guy on the internet insists my problem is that I’m too much of a militant.

we are the ones hiding and protecting our fragile views…

Why else invoke admins and mods to protect you?

We just want to skip the second hand embarrassment

If you’re feeling shame because you hear someone assert that genocide is bad, that’s not second-hand. That’s your conscience screaming at you.

However, Bush winning in '88 despite being neck deep in an administration full of openly admitted liars doesn’t exactly bode well for your argument

Bush Sr’s claim to fame before joining the Reagan team was as the guy who cleaned up the CIA after Ford replaced Nixon. He successfully distanced himself from Reagan, while tarring Mondale with a number of Massachusetts scandals.

Nah, it’s a human one

It’s a media-based one. Mass media has been pivotal in expanding and inflating the reputations of larger-than-life individuals (real and imagined). Without mass media, “Superman” is just another pagan icon of a neighboring tribe.

Communists claim to want gay space communism but seem A-OK with some stupid asshole being basically a dictator

Its strange to see the American right champion Europeans like Macron and Merkel or literal Monarchies in the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They’ll endorse coups such Anez’s failed takeover of Bolivia or Park’s military junta in Korea or The Jakarta Method in Indonesia or Juan Guaido and Fulgencio Batista looting the Venezuelan and Cuban treasuries. They’ll shrug their shoulders at the electoral college, the corrupt SCOTUS, and the blatant disenfranchisement of any number of their states.

But when a popular President wins a landslide in a free and fair democratic election, they suddenly start to see the Tyranny of the Masses. Whether you’re a South African post-Apartheid Congress or a Mexican President who wins with over 60% of the vote, you’re constantly under the microscope, under the theory that you can’t win a legitimate election unless your population loves American more than the Americans love themselves.

But I’m not sure it has much to do with anything we’re discussing.

Go figure.

Counterpoints: the US voter base re-elected Nixon

Nixon was able to capitalize on the sharp George Wallace split in the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act. The Nixonian attack on liberals boiled down to the claim that black people were naturally inferior, and any effort at repairing the damage inflicted by Jim Crow amounted to pro-black corrupt patronage.

then re-elected Reagan (despite him openly admitting to lying to the American public and exchanging guns for hostages)

Reagan wasn’t hit by Iran Contra until '87, and it nearly sank the Bush '88 campaign for President. Prior to that, he successfully campaigned as an anti-corruption tough-on-crime President, particularly in his prosecution of ABSCAM and other sting operations aimed at liberal politicians with big business ties.

So there’s your version of superman.

The idea of a single all-power Ubermensch Superman isn’t a socialist view. Time and again, large cooperative campaigns of mutual aid provide better outcomes than the public putting all our hopes on a handful of aristocratic elites.

Socialism or Barbarism. We either hang together or we hang separately.