In my experience, it’s mostly a vet/military thing. Rednecks fly the actual confederate battle flag. It could be cop, but they typically fly the thin blue line flag. Subdued/monochrome flags are pretty popular accesories in military and military adjacent communities. If you check out “Grunt Style” you’ll probably see dozens. And enlisted (grunts in particular) tend to skew less educated and are more entrenched in toxic ideals of masculinity, so it’s no surprise to see them acting like fools on the road.

It’s a national team, therefore they’re representing their countries in an official capacity, regardless of their personal stances. It’s more akin to Nazi Germany sending a team to the Olympic games and the controversy that surrounded that. That’s the unfortunate nature of flags and sports, but it’s how it is.

Edit: It appears the Russian fencer was participating as a neutral participant and not as a member of a Russian sponsored team. That makes it objectively unsporting on the Ukranian fencer’s behalf, however subjectively I at least understand the problem. Just because the Russian fencer isn’t participating as part of their national team (because their team was not allowed to participate) doesn’t mean they aren’t otherwise that team’s fencer and are still, unofficially, representing their country.

I have just a simple Maggard synthetic brush and I don’t think it’s even the slightest bit scratchy. But I don’t have a newer synthetic brush to compare it to so it’s possible that if what you say is true then I just haven’t realized changing slightly over the years.

Don’t forget “Lemmy feels higher quality than reddit” followed by several hot posts that are compressed and re-reposted memes with pixel densities low enough to count.

And the “I’m glad Lemmy doesn’t have the reddit hivemind” followed by posts with whole threads of comments straight out of reddit “AmericaBad” thought train.

Pretty much, all of these things can be summed up by “suddenly acting better than reddit while acting identically”, I guess.

Odd that someone who has performed CPR on infants, to doing their best to save someone from multiple gunshot wounds, to scraping motorists off of asphalt is “just telling me what I want to hear” when he doesn’t make out like his job is any more or less important than his teammates on the ambulance. He loves and respects those dudes because they’re his teammates and they work together. But yeah, must be that you just hear what they want you to hear, so let’s go ahead and leave it like that, as you said.

My father is a long-time firefighter in a major city and this comment reads like you have no idea what firefighters actually do if you think they “do nothing compared to paramedics and the ambulance crew”. They’re two sides of the same coin and both of them are vital to rescue operations, but firefighters aren’t just some dudes who roll up and pour a bucket of water on a campfire and drive away. They’re EMTs, too, and often participate in casualty care when paramedics are busy or otherwise not on scene. Do nothing, my ass.