I didn't do an #introduction post when I moved to ibe.social, but since I shoot my mouth off on hot button issues enough, it might be a good idea to TL;DR myself and pin it, in case the reply guys actually bother to look at my profile before attempting to 'Um, Actually...' me.
Hi! I'm Amy, I am #ADHD. I'm wildly left wing — at least by US standards, maybe even by international standards, but def in the left wing weeds here in the shithole that I call my home country. I am opinionated, I will share my thoughts.
My interests include scifi such as #StarTrek (which is political, and progressive despite the efforts of certain assholes like Rick Berman), #Farscape, and #DoctorWho. I run a Star Trek collaborative writing RPG, @USSJoshuaNorton@trekkies.social. I dabble in photography and making glitch art, and if I can figure out how to manage my ADHD better, I'd love to make at least part of my income from selling my art. Check out my INPRNT shop from the link on my profile.
My spelling is atrocious, and due to my ADHD, my memory is sometimes a crap shoot. This means playing games like splitting hairs over my vocabulary choices, or nitpicking my spelling and grammar, are not going to go over well with me. These are things I've been fighting with my whole life, so if you come at me for them I will not hesitate to defend myself and tell you to fuck off. Just because my memory resembles swiss cheese sometimes doesn't mean I'm stupid, it just means that sometimes I can't pull up the noun for a concept I'm trying to explain, or I can't cite sources on sometimes I read six months ago that supports my position... but I assure you, if I feel confident enough to say something without padding it with a modifier like 'I think', or 'if I'm remembering correctly', I'm pretty certain of what I'm saying and I don't recommend coming for me unless you can cite sources to me.
I try my best to meet people where they are, but I've also been put through enough bullshit because of how ADHDers and women are treated in our society that once I decide you're not trying to meet me in good faith, my patience will drop to zero pretty damn fast. Meet me with good intentions and usually we'll get along fine.
I call my country, the UK, a shithole but I have never heard an American call their country that - I'm warming to you already!
I had had little contact with Americans until I moved to Thailand back in 2015. Over there, there are a surprising number of American retirees who moved there to try to eke out their Social Security pension.
In conversation with the Americans in Thailand, the subject of universal healthcare or the absence thereof in America often came up. Any attempt by me to suggest that American healthcare was utter shit and that just about every other civilised country in the entire world has managed to implement universal healthcare one way or another would elicit an utterly explosive response. Suggesting, as I always did during these conversations, that Bernie Sanders is right and that Medicare needs to be the default healthcare insurance system for every single resident of the USA, seemed to equate to suggesting barbecuing human babies alive for supper!
I found that saying absolutely anything that could be construed as any kind of criticism no matter how mild of the United States of America would elicit a reaction that was totally and completely over the top.
That’s the same kind of emotional response you would get in Soviet Union when proposing private trading of things (as a reminder, selling things, even carrot or potato, for profit, was the crime of “speculation”). I guess it originates from ideological bias that is being imprinted into people from early childhood, they simply can’t accept another economic model on emotional level.
And, funny enough, both Soviet people and Americans at the same time lived in a parallel reality where the former participated in a full-scale black market for goods unavailable at “official” prices, while the latter engage in illegal imports of life-saving drugs from countries with much more efficient healthcare and medical markets.
Yes, I have noticed that "the way things are in childhood", is absorbed into the deepest reaches of one's psyche as 'the right, proper and correct way for things to be' and that anyone suggesting change that threatens that harmonious state of affairs is a charlatan and a wrecker of all things good and wholesome!
What a sad fuckin species we are!
Unfortunately, that’s precisely why you now have “patriotic education” lessons in Russia where children cosplay being post-mortem war heroes. That’s their investment to ensure their model survives death of Putin and end of war.
@Paulos_the_fog And these are people who moved out! But I suppose that can go either way depending on the people and why they moved.
I think Britain and the US are in neck-and-neck competition for the title of greatest shithole in the western world and, whilst Britain briefly took the lead with the Brexit fiasco and its ramifications for ordinary Brits in the street, the US has now surged ahead again with its abandonment of the right to abortion and a great torrent of other legislation targeting all manner of minorities.
I'm sure some extreme right-wing state will pass legislation shortly making it unlawful to be anything other than a rich, CIS, white male!
@Paulos_the_fog@qoto.org Anyone who can look at a country where one party's front runner is literally on trial for treason, and was instrumental in trying to overthrow an election, where we're literally the only major country in the world that does not provide at least a minimal baseline of healthcare to everyone, and where most people can not afford to support themselves from one job, and not call it a shithole, I have to wonder if they're in some crazy levels of denial or if they're imbibing in some substance that's making them accept the fucked up situation.
And that's literally just skimming the worst of the worst off the top. We can dig into the crumbling infrastructure, the broken school systems (both primary being more of a glorified babysitter, and the higher education being entirely locked behind a paywall), the abhorrent way we treat people who aren't cishet white neurotypical rich men (and the further away from that you are, the worse your treatment is, with things getting really exciting depending on what overlaps of "undesirable" traits you have), the fact that our election system has been rules lawyered into nearly unusable, and our politicians literally don't listen to the people because we don't have a way to actually hold them accountable because one party is milktoast spineless moderates, and the other is steadily jackboot marching further and further into fascism, so replacing one of them is nearly an impossible task unless they piss off their party or someone rich.
We are a shithole.