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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2025

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  • You’re American, aren’t you?
    Politics isn’t sports ball. Especially on a local level, it usually isn’t “us vs them”, it’s a bunch of people with different opinions about how things are supposed to be done. Politics is more complicated than red vs. blue.
    Although the US “red” and “blue” parties do everything they can to convince people like you it’s that simple.


  • German here. A friend from Grundschule (grades 1-4) is the son of Turkish immigrants.
    His parents both didn’t speak German, so he struggled with the language.
    They also sent him to a Turkish language Islam school in the afternoons.
    As a classmate, I helped him with his homework, and I think I was the only German friend he had.
    When my parents bought a new PC (a 386!) I hauled our old 286 to my friend and helped him install games on it.
    Then I went to Gymnasium (the secondary school that prepares you for university) and he went to Hauptschule (the most basic secondary school that usually leads to a job involving manual labor, driving a forklift if you’re lucky, or unemployment).

    20 years later I met him again.
    I had failed to finish a university degree twice in a row and was unemployed at the time. It was still a year before I accepted reality and took up jobs washing dishes or cleaning out houses after their inhabitants had passed away.
    In the meantime, he had finished Hauptschule, switched to a school qualifying you for college, finished an MBA, founded an IT consulting company, hired 14 employees, married and had 4 children.
    He told me that with the computer my family gave him, he could do the taxes for his parents and learnt a lot about IT and business early on.




  • Delaying it might have prevented it.
    Current historians’ consensus is that at no point before the war’s outbreak was it inevitable, especially since the alliances tying the major powers together were all strictly non-binding.
    In every involved country, pro-war and pacifist groups struggled for supremacy, and in each country, unfortunately at this point in time, the pro-war groups won.
    But a few years later, the balance could have tipped.
    Both in Russia and in Germany, leftist and democratic movements were on the rise even before the war.
    If they had gained more support, a local conflict in the Balkans would not have escalated that far, keeping France out of it, and in turn, there would have been no reason for Britain and the USA to get involved at all.