Meanwhile, Trump does whatever the last person he spoke to tricked him into doing.

In the past few decades in England, I’ve seen the use of the bird finger increase relative to use of the backward V-sign. I’m sure the xenophobes regard this as another sign of national decline.

If you’re not white, you will experience racism in Europe especially outside of the major cities with large historic immigrant populations and you’ll less likely have bystanders come to your defense compared to like in the US, Canada, Australia

A close friend of mine is African-American. He’s lived in Spain for a very long time and is a highly visible person because he’s also big and tall (6’5"). He says there’s some anti-foreigner sentiment (people will call him a guiri until they realize his Castilian and Catalan are fluent), but he says the racism is far less, and less dangerous, than in the US.

Another close friend is American of Jamaican origin. He lived in London for several years and also found it less dangerous than the US. The risk during cop encounters is far lower.

My sons look Middle Eastern (their mother’s Arab and they have beards-- hipster rather than Islamist, but idiots can’t distinguish) and have travelled extensively all over Europe, as well as North Africa and the US. In Europe, the worst hassle they’ve gotten has been in some of the Slavic countries (rural Czechia was bad, as were non-urban parts of Hungary and Bulgaria), but it hasn’t been that severe. A bit of shit talk, no violence. Compare that to a physical assault in Texas and incidents of police harassment in California and Washington state.

My wife’s experience, having lived in both the US and UK for extended periods, is similar: there’s prejudice in both places, but only in the US have people gotten openly aggressive with her. Well, once in London, a skinhead started shouting at me because I was with her (I had a shaved head and was very fit back then, so I think he assumed I was another skin), but it didn’t escalate.

Regarding the Texas incident: accusing someone of being an Islamic fundamentalist while they’re drinking an IPA in a bar and flirting with a local woman requires a degree of stupidity that’s hard to find outside the US. Especially when the response is “Da fuck’s wrong with you?” Tattoos are also not common on Muslim fundies. Anyway, after the guy threw a punch, my son trapped his arm and held him like that until a bouncer could be stirred from his lethargy. The IPA was not spilled, but he had no luck with the woman.

Yeah, I know, anecdata. But overall, despite the recent rise of the hard right in Europe, I’d say it’s still not as bad as in most of tthe US.

Pump’n’Dump Trump has a certain ring to it. But I’d rather not think about his sex life.

Unless it’s his resignation speech, it’s not good enough.

Weak-mindedness and hard power don’t really work together.

He doesn’t understand what a mafioso does, either. He saw a couple gangster movies but didn’t understand the subtext.

Eisenhower was very strongly anti-imperialist and was pressuring Britain and France to relinquish their colonies, which they eventually did, though France tried hard to hang onto Algeria until they were driven out. And both Britain and France still hang onto places here and there (part of Polynesia, Martinique, Diego Garcia, Gibraltar, Northern Ireland,).

And of course, Eisenhower cared about not being a hypocrite. Trump will say or do anything, regardless of consistency, like postal voting while trying to ban postal voting. For him, it’s a flex.

That puppet is way too skinny.

“Paper tiger.”

What’s next? “Running dog curs”?

What Pootie wants, Pootie gets.

Well, they would, wouldn’t they? It’s not like it’s their lives and fortunes on the line.

Mmm, tacos.

So that’s an urban density test, with added cartwheel fun.

When selecting a place to live last time I moved, I set up a balanced scorecard (as one does). One of the highly-weighted criteria was “how many places can I sit down and have a beer within a 20-minute walk of my house?” The answer for the place I moved to was 34. Other places I considered scored even higher than that, but lost out on other criteria. For the previous place I’d lived: 3, though if you expanded to 30 minutes, it was 8. Still not bad if you have a bicycle. English (and many other European) cities are far more concentrated than those in the US. In the US, the closest you’d get are San Francisco, New York, Boston and a few other eastern cities.

The ironic thing is that I quit drinking beer a couple years ago. Luckily, other services like cafes, restaurants and coffee houses follow a similar pattern.

Henry George’s heart was in the right place, but land value tax is arbitrary and easily gamed.

Also abolish requirements for developers to build parking spaces along with housing. Let the market decide.

you cannot complain about other countries using indiscriminate terror weapons like cluster munitions on you when you are guilty of doing the same thin

Sure you can. All it takes is to be a hypocrite.

But white phosphorus is OK, right? And attacking civilian infrastructure? And committing genocide against a captive population? And blockading that same population? And deliberately taregeting journalists and NGO workers? And launching wars of aggression?

The US is pathetic. Israel’s leadership is cynical and sinister.

Well, let’s not forget that the US was also fighting against Japan for much of that time. And the invasion of occupied France and of Italy was not on easy mode either.

And the collapse of the Wehrmacht on the eastern front had as much to do with the Russian winter, failing supply chains due to non-USSR allied bombing of German factories and railways, and Hitler’s interference in military decisions as it did the accomplishments of the glorious Red Army, which for the first year or more of the invasion, was under-equipped and incompetently led. They learned and adapted, but Stalin’s misguided micromanagement and paranoia cost the USSR hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ and civilian lives.