• 0 Posts
  • 23 Comments
Joined 27 days ago
cake
Cake day: June 6th, 2024

help-circle

  • I think I initially read that on a Vox article, but I looked again today and it looks like I must have read that somewhere else. They’re also saying that’s not the case and that there were false reports going around about that. I guess the rumor mill got me this time. Which is good, because no one deserves to be fired for talking openly about sex.





  • Sure, and they still managed to pass the alien and sedition acts. Saying they weren’t a monolith is a way of dismissing the mountain of evidence that suggests that, for most of them, participation in the democratic process of an inchoate American republic was intended only for a small segment of the population - literate (i.e. wealthy) white men. I’d suggest A People’s History of the United States if you want a better perspective on that.


  • As much of a Berniebro that I was, I’ve come to realize that the Democratic party is horrifically balkanized. There’s this expectation that the progressive wing of the party is supposed to hold its nose every year and vote for the neoliberal candidate. The problem is that this is not a two way street. Your hardliner party supporters that wanted a Clinton presidency wouldn’t have voted for Bernie. I knew some of them in real life. The DNC actively and aggressively poisoned that particular well early on. Bernie wasn’t a “potential candidate” - he was an enemy of Clinton. Plain and simple. They all said that if Bernie had gotten the nomination, they would have stayed home on election day.






  • So you’re solution is to give Republican’s majority? Sounds to me like you’re on the wrong side, mate.

    First of all, it’s “your solution,” not “you’re solution.” Learn to spell. Second of all, I am not telling anyone to “not vote” for Democrats. I’m saying that the argument that if Democrats are given control over both the legislative and executive branches of government that it’ll result in positive legislation getting passed is simply untrue. The only real reason you can give for electing Democrats is to prevent Republicans from getting elected, because Republicans will actively pass legislation. Horrible, comically evil legislation. As such, presenting the choice as between “good” and “bad” political forces is simply wrong. The choice can only be honestly presented as between “neutral, fundamentally ineffectual” and “absolutely heinous” political forces. Optimism in the Democrats is ludicrous and comes across as disingenuous at best and deluded at worst. If you want to court leftist voters, the only real talking point you have is that it’s not a vote for the Democrats, but one against Republicans. Because that’s at least nominally true. Both parties want to preserve the political status quo of the country. Republicans just want to do it while hurting minorities, and Democrats don’t care as much about that. Minor distinction, but that’s the most we can get.





  • We can call their bluff or we can just take the beating without trying to fix anything.

    The end result is the same, though, because, in this particular matter, both sides are similar enough in their collective hatred of the poor that a law like this won’t get passed. It doesn’t matter if you get rid of Manchin and Sinema. It only got 40 D votes. Manchin and Sinema might bump that up to 42. Or the people who replace them might vote the same way they did on this, because there is a core ideological opposition that exists across party lines to actually helping the working class.





  • I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It’s lemmy. There’s a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn’t be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I’ve been on .ml for a while, and while I don’t comment in political threads, generally, I’ve seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they’ve seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems…normal…banal even? There’s a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying “well, their political communities are terrible” is all well and good if that’s your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

    Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that’s up to them. And that’s what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I’ve seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

    I suppose it’s probably a natural course of events that you’ll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It’ll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

    But part of what’s great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.