They've been raised on the idea that taxes are bad, and never put more thought into it than that. They view things like the fire department as good, so they can't really be funded by those bad taxes, right? ...Right?

They're better than the OLD alternative, which was total boycotting at best, and torches and pitchforks at worst. The NEW alternative is complaining about it for a week or two, then continuing on without making any changes at all. They don't mind the new alternative.

To be fair, if we did raise minimum wage, they'd use it as an excuse to raise prices again. We still need to get higher minimum wage of course, but we also need get much tighter restrictions on corporations, or any financial ground we gain will be lost shortly thereafter under a million excuses to bleed the extra money out of us.

For me it was when I was around 8 or 9 and met someone from Kenya. They could speak perfect English, wore normal clothes, and talked about having electricity. I'd literally never been told that those things existed in Africa - every reference to that continent only talked about tribes and jungles, save for Egypt which only talked about ruins and deserts. I asked around and found that most of the rest of the world has the same stuff we have, and most countries have a functioning government. I was so confused - why were we the country of freedom when everyone else has the same thing?

At the time I just assumed that there was something I was missing, or maybe the rest of the world just caught up to our idea, but eventually I came to the conclusion that they tell us we're the country of freedom - and keep our studies of other countries to a minimum when we're young - so that we can internalize the rhetoric that our country is the best before we find out that most other countries about the same, and often better in certain ways.

I remember when the first wave of stimulus checks went out and a bunch of car dealerships suddenly raised the price on their cars by $1000. UBI would be great, but if we don't reign in the corporate-apologist economy first, every product will suddenly be more expensive so they can bleed people of that extra money.

It's the year 1.7×10^106^. The heat death of the universe is imminent. Still listening to this banger. Modern music sucks - I was born in the wrong generation. Like if you agree.

I honestly can't tell if sending this to my wife would go over very well or very poorly.

Best I can do is whooping cough.

The issue is that they don't believe the US government is legitimate. From what I've gathered, they think that the real US is theirs by right, and that the entity that we know of as the government is essentially a parasitic corporation that has convinced everyone it's the real governing body so that we fund it with our taxes. Though, even if you had a logical explanation within the confines of their worldview as to why they can't drive without a license, they'd still pretend they had some excuse not to listen to it.

The conservative voters I know all stand for one thing: stubbornness. They make a decision to do something, they do it until they die, and they take great pride in doing so.

It's essentially vikings if, instead of needing to die in battle to get to Valhalla, you needed to die of an easily-preventable disease because you never got that weird lump checked out, because if you'd admitted you had a problem you'd be weak, which is worse than death.

Where were you on January 6th?

I had this issue with my last address, so when I moved to my current house and started seeing mail for the previous owner as well as what I assume to be the owner before him, I immediately wrote 'No longer at this address, return to sender" on all mail that wasn't for me - even spam mail - and made a support ticket on the USPS website. I felt like it was a bit overkill, but I did stop seeing mail for other people pretty quickly.

Dunno how quick Royal Mail would be comparatively, but maybe they'd be just as effective as USPS was for me.