From Springfield.

Yes, but what about Italian Bobby?

Because I think it’s pretty much self-explanatory that separation on purely ethnicity/looks is not constructive where people are artificially treated as if they were different even though they’re not. I think the damage clearly outweighs here.

Justifying racism by saying ‘this is what we always did and it worked like that’ is not the right way forward imo as we can’t be stuck in the past and make the same mistakes that could be successfully improved.

What I’m trying to get at is that while appearance is not any kind of enlightened reason for distinct communities to have arisen, through accidents of history and genetics they did, and they are still relevant and appreciated by the people who are part of them. The color terminology is shorthand that acknowledges history. It’s not “justifying racism” to accept that in many places your ethnic background, especially if visible, means that certain experiences will have been more or less common for you. You can engage in this, even light heartedly, in good faith and as a way to understand your neighbors better, and indeed to think of them as your friends and neighbors instead of “Other.” People who are trying to do right by their fellow Americans are not using it to “separate,” but acknowledging that separation gave rise to proud, distinct communities and there’s no value in snuffing that out. The dialogue can be a way to unite us.

I believe we can agree that using visible “racial” markers to treat someone as less valuable than someone else is disturbing and evil, and still sadly common. I’m just saying that it’s not the mere use of the terms, or creating media that acknowledges them that results in the continuation of racism. Hell, in some ways, refusing to acknowledge differences gives a person with bad intent the license to settle on a single definition of what it means to be a “proper” American and to decide that anyone who doesn’t act the right way is less valuable: “I didn’t refuse to hire him because he’s black, but because he dresses and speaks differently. All he has to do is be exactly like me and I’d be more than happy to hire him!” (coughJDVancecoughcough)

!fountainpens@lemmy.world

Pretty slow, but there are some of us here.

So, good for you, but the particular dynamics of being a colonial country that had a massive portion of its economy based on race-based slavery has resulted in an approach to diversity that has much deeper roots and has been wrestling with hard issues for much longer than Germany has, and Germany’s own record with dealing with identifiable minorities in the last hundred years has, shall we say, not always been great.

Many European countries are only now hitting levels of diversity America had fifty years ago, and America has been made of statistically significant communities with distinctive origins for hundreds of years, and this in a colonizing country where there is no historically continuous monoculture. Historically, people tend to become dicks to the “Other” among them when faced with hardship, and much of American history reflects that sort of thing, but also its aftermath and attempts to heal.

Diverse and defiantly distinctive communities formed and persisted because that was how people got by and found support and could make their way, admittedly often because opportunities to assimilate, into whatever soup of dimly remembered pan-European customs that passes for a privileged culture here, were intentionally blocked. Yet even if the reasons for them are shameful, they are real and important, and the American dialogue on race simply cannot be color-blind even when well-meaning. Instead, it has to be a dance, where people of goodwill celebrate both differences and similarities and do not set groups above one another but also do not pretend they don’t exist.

I wish more Americans would understand that our approach rarely translates well, and for fuck’s sake I wish we had fewer people who were stuck in the bad old days where reconciliation and healing were very much not priorities. That said, I also wish that people from countries with a very different cultural and historical experience would not assume that their countries have shit figured out, when a lot of it simply boils down to “we don’t have many people with darker skin shades here.”

Aerocart from Worx looks a little gimmicky, but might be closer to your needs.

If budget is no object, then maybe a Polymule at USD1000+.

Inbetween, there’s something like a “Foldit Cart”.

Try searches for folding wheelbarrow, folding garden cart, or folding “vermont” cart. Your options get better if you can live without it being collapsible.

Everybody here is kinda right, but there are other factors to consider, and the net result is that it’s usually not a case worth bringing.

The “Impossibility” defense says that in most cases, the “factual” impossibility of committing the crime is not a defense, but taking an action that is not a crime is a defense, and if raised must be proved by the prosecution. Even with “Factual,” the line gets muddy (the article cites a person whose appeal won after they were convicted of poaching after shooting a stuffed deer). Many jurisdictions have a “reasonable person” standard for that as well, where if the act is the sort of thing that might normally be expected to result in a crime (the most infamous case is two US military personnel who thought they were raping a passed out woman, but really she had died from a heart attack) then you get no benefit, but if no reasonable person would believe that their action would do anything, then it’s more likely to succeed. To answer one of your questions, being told the button sets off a bomb would be more problematic for our hypothetical asshole than being told it “just kills” somebody that would be a bigger problem than a Death Note notebook, but it’s not a simple yes/no.

So anyway, this then raises some questions. Was this button setup convincing? Who did the convincing? Why did they do so? Other defenses might arise out of these conditions: e.g. they were told that pushing the button would save a bunch of other people, trolley-problem style, or it was the police egging them on and telling them they needed to for XYZ good reason. Many of them will turn on the defendant’s thoughts, so in any jurisdiction where they are not obligated to testify (e.g. the United States), our very interesting defendant simply doesn’t, and their attorney argues that there’s reasonable doubt they thought the button would actually do anything.

Add on top of this prosecutorial discretion. A prosecutor knows all of this, and knows this is a loser of a case, so apart from truly bonkers hypothetical, they will not bring it.

TL;DR: By the letter of the law, very probably yes, but no one will ever get convicted for it.

I’m a little confused about what states in US are. Are they more like their own countries united in alliance, or are they districts of one country?

They’re closer to districts, but with more constitutionally described rights. Definitely much more independent than French provinces, and even more than German states or UK constituent countries (devolution is at Parliament’s discretion, for instance), but much, much less than EU countries.

I would just say that the key part to include is that the North knew slavery needed to die on the vine and was uninterested in helping the South preserve it, specifically by opposing the addition of new slave states, or at least abandoning the notion that the two should be intentionally kept in balance.

So nominally, yeah, few with any influence were proposing emancipation, and to be clear almost every white person in the country was super racist by modern standards, but slavery was doomed over the medium- to long-term. The South could see that the writing was on the wall, so they decided it was time to shoot their shot to preserve slavery, in a form particularly at odds with the world around it by the way, for as long as possible, and secession was the only viable path for them. No other issue of the day would have driven any significant region of the country to secede, though ironically if it had, no other issue would have given the opponents the moral high-ground like slavery did.

That tension continues in the USA between recognizing and celebrating cultural differences, and becoming a melting pot of many cultures becoming one.

This is the crux. It’s a uniquely American take on how you deal with a country that has seen dozens of waves of immigration (starting with the illegal immigration of colonization) from many different places over a fairly short timeframe. American culture is kind of like a fork, with a unified base that has integrated but very distinct tines (bear with me… combining the “melting pot” and “salad bowl” tropes is HARD!). At their best, memes and jokes like that can be an invitation to genuine dialogue. At their worst… well… not that. A lot depends on who is putting them out and with what agenda in mind.

Statistically, most European countries seem to be estimated at somewhere between 80%-90% “white,” likely to mean “of exclusively European extraction beyond any sort of family memory,” and I wager the vast majority of those people are from the core borders or frontiers that might well have shifted in the last few centuries. America hasn’t had that sort of percentage for over 40 years, and even then the white population was more “assorted crackers.” Even back into that era, most areas will have had at least two and likely three to five statistically significant populations that would have been visually and culturally distinct (not that this in ANY way implies that these groups were treated equally by the power structures… OMG far, far, FAR from it). These people don’t have to give up their distinctiveness to remain American, and when considered in good faith, particularly by those who mostly live in the base of the fork, the sorts of things you’re describing can be more celebratory than divisive.

I’m not going to suggest Americans are particularly good at multiculturalism (another understatement), but we’ve been at it a long time and specific practices and trends have grown up around it. The balancing act of racial and ethnic awareness without descending into judgment is probably one of the more complicated aspects of navigating American culture, regardless of whether you were born to it or looking on from the outside. So much so, in fact, that certain small-minded people think we should just snap the tines off the fork and pretend the nub was always a spoon.

Yes, but that is less fun for my dad-joke purposes.

So the one in the old fable was even more of a dick than we’d been led to believe. Got it.

It clearly pissed him off enough that he refuses to finish the next book out of sheer principle.

Perhaps the wings are articulated ribs?

I have it on good authority that you’re not old.

You’re welcome.

The UAE in general is an interesting experience. I’ve only been once, but my wife has been several times for work.

The face they want to present has a kind of a Pan-European middlebrow banality (i.e. you want to impress many people who may or may not be all that thoughtful and who definitely speak many different languages and have different cultural touchstones… I am thinking of stuff like the old BASF “nothingburger” ads or the "anthems for Eurovision or Champions League football), combined with an American-like sense of recklessly cheerful enthusiasm for development and economic growth, but wrapped in a cloak of religiosity and always with a barely concealed underpinning of oligarchic authoritarianism.

To be perfectly honest, it felt a lot like what I expect the evil, but less mustache-twirlingly evil, hope America will be. Still open for business, and even superficially welcoming, but with true wealth only going to those selected by the entrenched power structure, with all others allowed to serve at their pleasure and under a bedrock expectation of not disturbing their preferred social order.

I’ve had chocolate made with camel milk. It was good, though being positioned as a premium thing it probably would have been just as good with cow milk.

Love After Lockup is full of extremely healthy relationships.

Yes, yes, I know, and in fact one does lost interest after a while. Still, some reality trash can be interesting in the first season or two when they’re gathering the initial crop of free-range crazy instead of raising their own herd. Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen a proper “SovCit” reality franchise.