So, I’m queer. I live in California.
I saw young people moving in downstairs and left a care package of shit you always forget the first few times you move in by their front door, and a bunch of granola bars, a loaf of fresh bread, so they didn’t strictly need to go out for the first few days after they moved in while they were unpacking most intensely. Basic courtesy shit. Regretting that now.
Theres like a metal girder or something in the wall, conducts sound up and down like crazy. If I put my ear to it, I can just about guess the position of anyone walking and hear every conversation within like two floors on this half of the building. Its also where the network cable comes in to my apartment. Natural spot for my computer shit.
Turns out theyre christofascists. They think people like me are monsters who need to be exterminated. I’m not really down for that. Not my first run in with this shit. Considering leaving, definitely being stompy.
Oh and the care package wasn’t ‘our neighbors are nice’ or ‘people can be good’ but ‘god provides, this is one of our little rewards’. They kept talking about the fucking bread.
yeah those are just shitty people. that sucks.
definitely don’t feel bad about treating them like shit, though.
Christianity’s a pretty good indicator for being a piece of shit stuffed into a human skin suit. Exceptions mostly for older African americans. I’ve been abused and persecuted by these bastards since before my parents threw me away.
Point is we cannot all get along, because some of us want to exterminate others of us.
Yeah, this unfortunately. These “Christians” nationalists are too far gone
Stop using quotes unless you use them for the fucking pope too. They are Christians. This is what that word means.
Yeah but one side of the aisle really, really doesn’t like it when people are living their lives differently than how they see fit.
Kind of hard to live in harmony when one side is at the table and the other is polishing their guns and elevating pedophiles.
I really dislike this dumbass meme and it just gets worse the longer it’s been around. Letting rednecks have guns creates a lot of our problems. Letting Christians be Christians creates a lot of our problems. America is about freedom? Tell that to Black people. Tell that to immigrants. Shit, tell that to people who aren’t immigrants but who are having their citizenship challenged because they’re the wrong shade. Tell that to women and trans people who need healthcare. America is about freedom for some and not for others, and this meme is for the some.
I think the meme’s not so much about how it actually is in reality, but more like how we think it should be like/if it was the “ideal” situation. That’s at least how I interpreted it.
Moi aussi
America used concentration camps to move natives off their land. What Germany did with the Jewish people during the Holocaust is EXACTLY what America did with its native population, albeit with less advanced technology. The only difference is Germany did their genocide after the invention of photography and radio.
People didn’t move to America for the freedom to practice any religion, they moved here for the freedom to practice what they believe was _the correct religion. Early Americans puritians had no expectation of practicing whatever religion they wanted. They were called puritans because the King’s reformed Christianity wasn’t Christian enough.
The reality is that the things in this meme are propaganda. What America is doing now is more inline with its history than anything in this meme.
The worst part is, this isn’t even the first society to do something like this. Caesar’s Rome enacted genocide in Gual, and the British empire is often likened to “slow nazis” for all of the genocide they caused. There’s the Armenian genocide, and the various genocides associated with the expansion and contraction of the USSR. Hell, the primary ethnic group targeted during the Holocaust are enacting genocide against Palestinians now. This brutality and authoritarianism is, like it or not, a part of humanity.
Until we are willing to confront that, the cycle will continue unabated. The good news is, we seem to be getting a little bit closer to ending the cycle after every iteration. At least, I hope so.
Also, I know I’m generalizing a bit, and not every civilization is as brutal as the next.
People didn’t move to America for the freedom to practice any religion, they moved here for the freedom to practice what they believe was _the correct religion.
Well…
Article 3. [Freedom in religion; right and duty of religious worship]
That all persons have a natural and unalienable right, to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of their own consciences and understandings, as in their opinion shall be regulated by the word of God; and that no person ought to, or of right can be compelled to attend any religious worship, or erect or support any place of worship, or maintain any minister, contrary to the dictates of conscience, nor can any person be justly deprived or abridged of any civil right as a citizen, on account of religious sentiments, or peculia[r] mode of religious worship; and that no authority can, or ought to be vested in, or assumed by, any power whatever, that shall in any case interfere with, or in any manner control the rights of conscience, in the free exercise of religious worship. Nevertheless, every sect or denomination of christians ought to observe the sabbath or Lord’s day, and keep up some sort of religious worship, which to them shall seem most agreeable to the revealed will of God.
State of Vermont Constitution, 1793.
I really wish we could have got that “attend, erect, or support” clause in the US Constitution!
Rednecks hanging black people from trees is as American as apple pie! Every one ought to have a little bit of freedom (may vary according to location).
Yeah, for a minute I thought I was in lemmyshitpost and I was confused as I got to the end without catching the punchline…
Why the focus on Christians in particular? There are a lot more religions in the US than just Christianity.
Also, a lot fewer people would have something against Christians if Christians quit trying to infringe on everyone else’s rights. Gay marriage, abortion, and unnumerable other things are only an issue because Christians make it one.
Before anyone says it, yes, I know that’s not all Christians, but it is the “Christians” controlling the government right now. The kind of Christian who doesn’t understand or care about the teachings of Jesus.
i wish we could leave religion behind as a species. believing in made up bullshit has held us back for thousands of years, regardless of what flavor of made up bullshit people happen to believe in at the moment. anything positive about religion can be had without the made up bullshit.
Imagine.
I wonder if you can
I fear though that leaving behind religion just means people will find other things to religiously latch onto. Look at techbros with technology, cults who kiss the feet of the regular vanilla human who leads them, analysts with market systems.
The need to believe in something bigger and more powerful than us that can save and guide us seems to be built into a lot of humans on a fundamental level, sadly.
It’s not even sad if you approach it right. We are each an expression of our species. Our species is an expression of life on this planet, which is an expression of the sun, which is an expression of the galaxy, which is an expression of the universe.
We are part of something bigger. Will that something bigger swoop in with a giant hand and save us from our mistakes and tragedies? Probably not. But faith in something bigger can help the background subroutines in the brain run better, and that could actually provide useful guidance.
A good religion is probably the best thing to latch onto like that, since the main focus is living a harmonious and moral life. Better than worshipping the machine god at the end of time. Granted, bad religions can twist that devotion into tribalism, and cast off the moral and harmonious focus. That’s definitely a problem. But I think that problem casts all religion in that light, which the older I get seems unfair and short-sighted.
Why the focus on Christians in particular?
I’m guessing the ubiquity.
To me it reads as a right-wing attempt at being inclusive while still saying that Christians and gun owners are being persecuted just as much as the rest of these groups.
those are appeals… the right cares about christians and guns so you put them in to help them agree with the premise
I can see that, but i didn’t read it that way.
There are a lot of Christians, but until the twenty-first century (specifically the 9/11 attacks) they were all separate churches and the first to say so. All the mainline and fundamentalist churches insisted they were the one true faith and extra ecclesiam nulla salus, no salvation outside the Church.
Then the attacks happened, and all the faiths learned that Islam was a greater threat than each other. Also, soon after, the New Atheism movement surfaced, organized through the nascent internet, and so the fundamentalist pastors, when they spoke of conservative values and politics (which was still naughty at the time), they would pretend to speak for all of Christendom, even when the mainline faiths did not concur (and the liberal faiths, in their dwindling numbers, staunchly disagreed.)
Nowadays in the US, fundamentalist Christianity is so loud, it has drowned out all others, and white Christian nationalism (which is a subset that includes some of multiple denominations) is the loudest and most arrogant, to the point of hubris, with major figures even challenging the authority of the Holy See.
Here in the south, it is all christians.
Not all Christians, but always Christians
This is some closeted Republican shit.
The Revolutionary War was about expansionism, land grabbing (stealing) and money. Freedom was last thing in the minds of the people who controlled the colonial war effort.
If that was genuinely true, Washington wouldn’t’ve stepped down from office.
And tell a libertarian that they’re stupid, and definitely punch a Nazi.
You can save some time by punching the libertarian
You DON’T have the right to YOUR life, YOUR liberty and YOUR pursuit of happiness at the cost of others’ life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
You DON’T have the right to YOUR life, YOUR liberty and YOUR pursuit of happiness at the cost of others’ life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.
But they right-wingers have the right to theirs at the cost of other people’s freedoms. Their freedom is taking away the freedoms of others
It’s the “Christian” rednecks with guns that are threatening everyone else.
What about freedom from economic oppression?
Yeah, that too
So you need to limit the freedom of capitalists to hoard wealth and exploit others. That has to come first. You cannot be free until you stop letting the predators roam free. Democracy is fundamentally impossible without strong restrictions on capitalism. Greed is not good.
They’ll always spend a portion of their capital to capture the rednecks, fetishize guns as idols of toxic masculinity, turn the Christians into Christo-fascists, oppress people of color to create an exploitable underclass, and use gay and other identity politics as a shield for it all.
Freedom from economic oppression needs to be very high up in the constitution. The power belongs to the people, but it’s been completely captured by them. And today we even lack language to describe these things outside socialist circles. And they have been strangely captured and banned too with the Stalinism bullshit of tankies and defederation (banning) of marxist-leninists from most of lemmy.
Yeah, well said.
Tired of knowing the people on my life who have been killed by guns. We now lose thousands of children every year to gun violence. It is the number one killer of children in the US now.
One of these things is not like the others.
Christianity kills a shitload of people, by various means.
Yeah. Letting these children die while they’re still young enough for the ruling class to fuck is such a tragedy.
Guns equating to freedom is straight up NRA propaganda. Do we really think people in Australia, the UK, and Japan are oppressed by tyranny?
The 2nd is the only “right” that the lowest government official can execute you for exercising. That’s what passes for freedom in America?
Guns alone wont provide freedom unless you organize
What, into some kind of, what, a militia?
I mean, I guess so, but what about regulations? Would they be well?
You gotta disguise it as a union or some other organization
They are fairly useless without first building a large community to back you up.
Militias don’t last long here in the IS, because the moment they get organized and large enough to actually do something the government raids them and incarcerates them.
That’s one of the reasons Palantir is being contracted for law enforcement and national security at the Federal level. The whole point is to detect early when a community is organizing, then paint the key figures as Antifa and incarcerate them permanently.
It’s part of Peter Thiel’s vision of using technology to bypass democracy and create a techno-feudal corporate state.
It’s absolutely not going to go as well as he believes, but a lot of people are going to suffer in the meantime.
This is one of those things where there is a workable middle ground.
There isn’t anything inherently wrong with gun ownership, but it should be heavily regulated and require a license which to acquire, requires that you prove you have a fundamental level of safety.
Do we really think people in Australia, the UK, and Japan are oppressed by tyranny?
Yes obviously because they are states, and they impose capitalist economies on their subjects 
The 2nd is the only “right” that the lowest government official can execute you for exercising.
Nah, the lowest government official might execute you for exercising any right or none at all, especially if you’re Black or Indigenous.
Tyranny of the majority, and of the crown for those 3.
The UK and Australia are certainly experiencing some authoritarian tyranny. They’re not dealing with the decay that the US currently is, but it’s clear that wealth and power are consolidating there.
I’d blame years of softening up with neoliberal policies. That may not be the only factor, but a lot of economists are saying it is a factor.
As for freedom in the US, we lost a great amount of it during the George W. Bush administration, quietly, as SCOTUS carved to pieces the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Slowly but surely, poor whites were getting the same treatment that blacks and browns had been getting through the twentieth century, though Karens often don’t know they’ve lost those rights until confronted by law enforcement. The US saw the true nature of police in the US during the Ferguson unrest in 2014 after the killing of Michael Brown, which was streamed to the public via social media, rather than filtered through mainstream television news.
Since then we learned that Blacks couldn’t own guns or would risk summary execution by law enforcement, and that policy has been extended to anyone caught in opposition to a state agent. Meanwhile right-wing civilians bearing arms and aligned with the police are given leniency when they kill someone.
In fact, we Americans have not had liberty for a long, long time.
The only freedom that is truly sacred in America is the freedom to exploit the working class for profit.
The problem with guns is that there’s too much ambient stress and so we have a lot of guys running amok.
In the Malay Peninsula men would sometimes lose their mind and indiscriminately start killing their fellow villagers, and there was nothing for it but for a response group to overwhelm him, hold him down and kill him. They called it meng-âmuk from which we get the expression to run amok.
Here in the states we have the same problem. People – mostly men with right-wing-leaning tendencies – keep running amok. But the problem is exacerbated because our population is big, so more of them pop off. And we have an awful lot of guns, which make the situation much worse.
Hence on October 1, 2017 Stephen Paddock opened fire from the Mandalay Bay Hotel onto the Route 91 Harvest music festival, killing sixty and injuring ~867, using multiple AR-15 style firearms with bump stocks to make them automatic. It is the worst shooting incident in the US to date. Meanwhile we have small shooting incidents every effing day.
Few people who own and shoot guns actually use them irresponsibly, though the numbers of shooting incidents grow with each year, especially as tension increases between social factions and far-right movements are emboldened. (As with suicides, law-enforcement-involved homicides, and hate crimes, shooting incident rates are also statistically magnified by the presence of Trump as a political figure. It’s like his campaign in 2015-2016 gave all of America permission to go batshit crazy.)
So, before we can safely allow guns to be freely obtained and traded, as a nation we need to tone it down a bit, and get our nation back to regularity. Sadly, we re-elected Trump in 2024, and in 2025 he immediately started dismantling the US as a cohesive state, both internally and internationally. This has done a lot to assure the chaos and tension is going to be bad for a long time. And sadly, we’re regulating guns less with each year as SCOTUS vetos any regulation, so we Americans are less safe, and more at risk to gun deaths. (But we make up for it with SUVs, which put us at risk of death by vehicle collision.)
All that said, with the rise of the 3D printer and availability of ghost guns, we may make owning legal guns more difficult, but determined shooters will still find ways to acquire them, with Luigi Mangione serving as proof of concept. I think the ultimate path forward is in promoting behavioral health and work-life balance for the entire society, so that fewer people are inclined to use their guns for actual violence. In a better world, we can get back to Atticus Finch using a rifle to put down a rabid dog at range, and then putting it back on the mantle, and that’s the incident of the year.
That’s unlikely to happen in my lifetime.
Yeah, well said. The immature cannot and should not have access to guns
This is some white people shit.