OpenStars

Another aspect: Republicans' methods may (MAY!?!?:-P) be deplorable, but they manage to actually deliver. Not governance - unless you count how they went in to sabotage it in the first place, in which case mission fucking accomplished there - but e.g. they promised ~~tax cuts on the wealthy~~ anti-abortion laws, and say what you will about that (and much should indeed be said!), but they got it done. It took decades of efforts, but they DID IT.

Meanwhile, Biden declared that the pandemic was over. The WHO disagrees, but he was so extremely over-eager to work in a "win" that he resorted to that falsehood. We expect that from a Republican, but when a Democrat does it, the base eats its own.

Republicans also manage to protect the rights of gun owners. Mind you, perhaps they shouldn't, but they do. Have Democrats protected the rights of workers even a tenth as well as Republicans protect their guns? Mind you, I can't really answer that, bc minimum wage is up enormously compared to what it was, accomplished over the course of the last decade. And unemployment is down too. And gas prices are lower. But the wealthy are even richer than they've ever been, and inflation is up, as are home prices, and medical care too. Overall it feels like a downwards move, but also upwards too - one step forward, two steps back?

And while Republicans are to blame for much of it, the old codgers in Congress can barely spell the word "internet", much less comprehend how that interrelates with home prices. Government is SLOW (AF), and corporations are running circles around it, basically doing whatever they please, and leaving the future CEO to pick up the check.

I recall sci-fi where governments might still exist, but taking a back seat to corporations that have sucked all the real power out of the world, leaving none left over for the peasants. More and more we see this lived out every day irl - e.g. who in the USA will stand up to Apple, or Google, or Facebook (yeah they have different names now and I don't even care:-D)? Yet Democrats do nothing at all about it.

Conservatives have a much easier sell - all they have to deliver is "nothing functions anymore", and they get the credit. But it's not just 10% that want that - it's like 42-49% of the nation, and due to the Electoral College system, they can win with that. Maybe Democrats backed themselves into a corner, but that's the game that needs to be played, I suppose. And it would help ever so much if those extremely old and extremely wealthy people would bother to learn stuff about their base, so as to stay in power rather than hand it over to the side that wants to burn it all to the ground.

That is so true - we lost our democracy long ago, having been replaced by a plutocracy, and now people like Elon Musk want to enshrine that even more directly.

The oddest part, in my mind, is that the founding fathers warned us about exactly this, saying that it was the greatest threat to the fledgling nation - so it is not like this took us by surprise. They said that when there are no barriers to citizenship, the masses who can be most easily swayed will get swept up by the wealthy who have the ability to buy their votes.

But we still fell into this trap regardless, having been warned, their/our eyes watching it happen the whole time, but apparently unable - or rather unwilling - to do anything about it. Just like Trump's legal troubles: the system is set up to protect people like him, so now it works to his benefit yet despite everyone seeing how broken it is, nothing can - or rather will - be done about the situation.

It would be so nice to have real choices to pick from. Conservatives deserve that, liberals deserve that, the 80% of people who are in the middle deserve that... but we will not merely be handed that, we would have to make it happen (except we cannot, or rather - once more - will not).

Omg I agree with all of that so hard, as well.

The purpose of the conspiracy theories being less "here, believe this one thing" and more "somewhere, somehow, there is corruption in the government" (uh... duh?), and then promising to go in and fix it, which I guess gets taken at face value b/c the person "looks like" the message recipient, in some manners that count?

But also, Trump never did "win", so much as Clinton "lost". And then later Biden did not "win" so much as Trump "lost". Before that, Romney lost, before that McCain, and on and on it goes. So all the conservatives have to do to make Trump palatable - that guy who "Christians" like despite how he barges into little girls dressing rooms while they are changing, and talks about grabbing women by the actual irl genitals - is to make Biden seem worse.

Which both Biden, by virtue of doing things in a boring manner, and the news media, by chasing after what bleeds & therefore leads, are cooperating along with to make happen. I dunno, I really hope they can pull it together in the next several months - the clock is ticking, and this time the literal planet Earth may be on the line (not only WWIII, but also climate change seems to have suddenly jumped towards us by something like ~100 years quicker than we expected - btw I entirely made that number up, but that Arctic temperature spike of 38.9°C/70°F in a single day does lend such a "feels like" statement some credibility doesn't it!?).

Meanwhile, people are gullible as hell - but since we know that, why aren't we doing anything about it? Then again, I'm not smart enough to know what things might possibly work in that regard:-D.

Astroturfing: Maybe... but also, we don't need to ascribe to malice what is explainable with just flat, sheer stupidity. Though it could be that too.

Between the two though, the latter is far more damaging imho. That gets perfectly illustrated in every zombie movie ever where the giant horde of zombies lies outside awaiting to devour everyone inside of a safe space, and inevitably someone who is just literally that dumb tells themselves "but surely they won't eat my face off!?", and proceeds to open the door, which promptly gets everyone inside killed, often while they are literally sleeping & thus absolutely defenseless, b/c they trusted the guards to protect them and thus let down their guard to rest.

The "other", the "enemy", can only do so much to harm us. It is when the call comes from inside the house that the real danger begins. Like, if you wanted to destroy something large - a nation, a religion, a movement - the best way is not to go at it with a gun, but to join it instead, and subvert it from the inside. Look at e.g. Google that "helped" the development of Android, or how people are releasing genetically-modified mosquitos to help combat malaria. So if e.g. Russia wanted to bring down e.g. the USA, it could... oh, I dunno, let's say send over Fox News, then wait a few decades for that bomb to go off. It would be quite effective. Not only would it disable American interference in Russia's agenda - e.g. as it conquers other nations such as Ukraine but also does many other activities e.g. in the Middle East - but that process could at best even convert your former foe into an actual, full-on ally. Even on purely theoretical grounds, what could possibly be more beneficial for your side than to not merely deny resources to your enemy but to actively increase your own capabilities? There are a LOT of advantages to having a friend, perhaps second only to e.g. doubling your own power (and even that only from the perspective that people such as Putin seem to ascribe to, whereas many people who think differently would actively prefer the opposite as in the former over the latter).

Russia is known for funding the extremes on both sides of hot-button issues. By making every movement into a grotesque version of itself, they foment division, and regardless of what those particular issues are (abortion, LBGTQIA+ rights, guns, who even cares), that division is the real point. For example, although this one is just me guessing, who came up with that name to "defund the police"?!? Democrats were talking about increasing funding, and listening to the very people who know the most about the situation - the police officers themselves - who unequivocally state that they feel unprepared to go in and handle the "mental health" types of scenarios. That is by far what gets the majority of police killed - like as you turn to arrest the husband that was beating the wife & kids, suddenly the wife is stabbing you from behind to defend him, even when she was the one who made the call in the first place. That shit is traumatic AF, and those officers that survive such a scenario most often quit. So how did the liberal movement to help police suddenly get twisted into sounding & even doing the polar opposite of that? And using statistics that are the exact opposite of true - e.g. Trump gained support among police by going around telling them the "feels like" statement that >90% of murders are due to interracial crime... except the true statistic is <9% iirc (specifically white-black at the time was I believe 3-6%).

For the anti-vax scenario, and this one I'm not guessing on b/c we've literally traced this propaganda back to Russian troll farms, they similarly warped the agenda not from "the vaccine is new and relatively untested, b/c of the unprecedented speed with which it was developed" but all the way over to "the vaccine is dangerous and if you truly cared about people you should even prevent them from taking it even if they desperately want it for themselves (e.g. by violently destroying the batches)". How is that about "their" rights to not take a potentially "dangerous" substance, when they are actively preventing others from making that choice for themselves?

So anyway, yeah, even liberal propaganda can be as bad as conservative - even if Republican politicians are acting far more dangerously than Democrat ones i.e. obstructionism. I can never find this quote anymore, but at one point around the time when the pandemic status was being officially ended in the USA (despite how the WHO says that it is still on-going), someone (I thought it was the FDA Director, or something along those lines?) said that "the greatest killer in the USA today is stupidity". Heart attacks from the way people eat, car crashes from the way we drive, soon we can perhaps add planes falling from the sky, obviously all the easily-preventable diseases where people barge into hospitals (sometimes, heart-breakingly, waving actual guns at the staff) demanding cures for despite having passed all the possibilities for such in the past by refusing to prevent it even knowing that no cure for it exists once the condition is entered into, and ofc we will soon need to start adding the effects of climate change e.g. heat exhaustion, and ofc already we can add senior abuse aka "excess deaths" during the pandemic that somehow "wasn't real".

Anyway, I kinda went off the deep end there didn't I? :-P At the end, all we can do is our best, as we try to move forward.

Oh, and yeah, I used to try to have these kinds of conversations, but long before I left Reddit I had already long ceased that. There is only so much complaining at "walls of werds" you can hear before you realize that what you are offering is not being received, thus obviously the only friendly thing to do was to stop. I too would have GREAT discussions even on Facebook - I don't know if I ever convinced anyone of anything, but even so it was wonderful to hear from e.g. a conservative who was an actual social worker and so who had the potential to inform me better than my more theoretical analysis of a subject (although my point in turn there was that stats do not lie, as in a few counter-examples do not mean that a trend in the opposite direction does not exist). Those kinds of discussions in full friendliness and mutual respect, regardless of the outcome, are part of the spice of life for me, and may I just say "fuck Reddit" once again for having spoiled them by enshittifying their platform, e.g. by turning away (and in some cases actively booting) the mods - which started to happen long before Rexit by continually ignoring the mods asks to allow even already-existing moderation tools, b/c it was not in line with their profit model:-(.

So, you can respond to any or all or none of this, in any timeframe, but in any case I do hope it was somewhat interesting:-).

B/c he knows that he does not mean it, and his base knows that he does not mean it, but it still manages to communicate something regardless - "they bad".

Humanity today is genetically identical to those in ancient Greece, and many of us have spent less time schooling ourselves about how to e.g. avoid frauds than many of them did back then. ergo, "argument by authority" still works for us, as perhaps it did for them back then as well.

Your presupposition seems to be that humanity should somehow get better over time? At least it seems to relate to a common humanist theme, but if we want to get better, it is going to require effort on our part to make that happen. (apparently, having access to the entire repository of human knowledge at our fingertips is not sufficient, for those who cannot be bothered to learn from it - either by reading or just sitting passively as videos with pwetty graphics do all the work of spelling it all out for us, yet still that is less fun & engaging to people who would rather watch shiny motor vehicles with ads on them drive round & round in circles)

Your words were all spelled correctly. Try again? :-P

POV: your project manager went in an "cleaned" it all up by removing them - your (sic) welcome! 😜

To anyone wondering, that is 69.3 degrees Fahrenheit (°F). So if it started from freezing it would make it "very hot", while if it were to start from lets say a perfect 70°F it would rise to ~140°F. And if it happened in the summertime when it was already 100, it would rise to 170°F - and how many people would even survive that? Maybe, if we had advanced warning and it were to only last a few hours - but what about things like crops & wildlife?

According to a recent poll, the number of Americans who outright deny climate change is down to just 15% of the population, but whether they "believe" in it or not may be indistinguishable from not believing - e.g. as this article discusses - since just like how they are "Pro-Life", the walk does not quite seem to match the talk.

To anyone feeling overwhelmed by all this: please don't be - there's only so much that any one person can do. Do what you can, and try to remain "aware", but this is bigger than all of us, and we will need to face it together, so you are not alone.:-)

I would actually prefer to be exposed to multiple POVs wherever possible, if it were delivered in a respectful manner. Likewise I enjoy learning more about various religions, and cultures, and all manner of things. However, I must draw the line against trolling behaviors. So for me, it is not just that they contain "content that I may not agree with", but that they outright encourage behaviors that have driven me and so many others away.

I got my start on Kbin.social, before it repeatedly kept going down for a week at a stretch, multiple times, and they had already defederated from those places, so fortunately I got to be exposed to the friendlier side of the Fediverse first, so I knew what was possible. But then after switching to try a couple of Lemmy instances, I gave serious thought to leaving the Fediverse entirely. There is so much else that I could do with my time, you know!? Read books, watch videos (like Hank & John Greene's Crash Course series on YouTube), go outside and touch grass - I don't need to be arguing with the emotional equivalent of toddlers online, acting as the recipient for their emo-venting aka vomiting all over me rather than having true conversations aka "communication".

That said, I might understand what you mean about the memes - if they violate the community rules then they are being disrespectful to the recipients who would have to spend time reading them, rather than enjoyable content. And if there is enough spamming of such, it inches closer to "trolling" behaviors, as in the same kind even if not quite degree. Though oftentimes people from that server also engage in actual trolling as well, in the form of responses that do not care about how the recipient would like to receive.

Anyway, I left Reddit over that shit, and I would leave the Fediverse too if it came down to it, though fortunately it works to just block those 2-3 places and the rest becomes a MUCH better place to play around in!:-)

For many people - in the USA most conservatives seem to be adopting this mindset, see e.g. Elon Musk's vision for "X" - such forms of argumentation is not a negative, it is the point.

Just like talking with toddlers (b/c it relates to both a capacity, and in a sense also their past choices as to how they want to live their lives, and yet at some point those choices become instantiated into their day-to-day activities to the point where the choice no longer presents itself, much like an addiction where you once chose it, but now it chooses you), your only choice is to put up with it or leave. You cannot have a "human" conversation with people who are not humane (either b/c they cannot or will not be thus, the difference arguably becomes moot when there is no functional distinction b/t them).

How much of that is due to it being one of the larger servers though? As well as one of the oldest. I don't know that much about it - there's the origin story but unlike searching for info about e.g. lemmy.world, I cannot readily find things about lemmy.ml like where it is located geographically. The closest description I've seen is here that only says "Server looks to be located in France". But who knows if that is true?

Anyway, you get to know the servers on Lemmy after awhile - like I've rarely if ever had an issue with anyone at all from mander.xyz, but then lemmy.world is a mixed bag (that one b/c it's so big), and lemmy.ml is decidedly lopsided. But it is not the only place that has trolls. Perhaps I will block it one day, but I did not want to take that extreme step without giving them as much of a chance as I could.

Which I did for both lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net as well - and ultimately decided that it was better for the sake of my sanity to block them than to leave Lemmy altogether (fortunately v.0.19 came out just then and made it possible and easy:-).

So now I want to tell people that they can DRAMATICALLY improve their experience on the Fediverse, just by blocking those 2-3 servers, in case it helps salvage their experience of it as well.

I doubt you can simply listen to someone online - maybe, but there's no accountability here and that seems like a hindrance. So maybe try to find an actual irl counselor? If you are part of any clubs like a religion then that often offers streamlined access.

I will offer one piece of direct advice though, not from myself as a good source but from someone who I have come to trust: maybe pause the dating scene. So many people try to rush into that, but if you haven't gotten yourself put together, then how are you going to offer to share your life with someone else? Depending on the circumstances ofc, like if someone was super awesome then they could help you, but it's a lot to put onto someone else, and isn't that a bit unfair to them? It seems kinder to both yourself to narrow your focus to getting your own life put together, and to others as well. If you are currently dating someone, note that I am not saying that you should immediately break up with them, it's just something to consider and make your own determination about what to do.