• Alice@beehaw.org
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    2 days ago

    George W. Bush’s presidency. I don’t know what the kids are smoking when they say current republicans make him look “classy” or that Trump’s first term was worse than his. He bred a constant state of paranoia and xenophobia and used it to justify killing countless people in the middle east. The damage done to that part of the world is staggering and everyone just treats it like background noise.

    Also that decade post-SpongeBob where every kid’s cartoon was about a loud, annoying, dumb guy.

    • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      GWB definitely had a scarier presidency than Trumps first term for sure. but this second term is unlike anything I’ve ever seen

      • Alice@beehaw.org
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        18 hours ago

        Absolutely, that’s why I specified the first term! Even during Biden I kept seeing people say GWB was better than Trump, when they didn’t have this current nightmare fresh affecting their judgment. The kids just really want to redeem Bush for some reason.

    • DankOfAmerica@reddthat.com
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      3 hours ago

      Imagine being 6 years old and your mother hugging you while crying. You have no electricity. It’s night time. Artillery shell explosions followed by the crumbling buildings and injured crying in pain are the only break you get from your mother’s sounds of sobbing. They’re destroying your entire block, but what you feel is terror. You can look out a window and see flashes. You don’t even know what politics or weapons of mass destruction. You’re just there scared until you die. You wonder what you did for this to happen. Now imagine hundreds of that same experience per night.

      That never makes it into the news. I would love to see people’s responses. Show the child and mother live. Then, people are randomly asked, “Push button to kill this person immediately or you will be put in jail and shamed for life.” Let’s see how they react to that guilt for eternity.

      There’s a quote from Game of Thrones that I think of often. The setting is that 3 brutal high-class leaders have to decide which one of them will die as punishment. They start getting nervous, so Tyrion says:

      It always seems a bit abstract, doesn’t it, other people dying?

      I find it validating.