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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Seems overly cautious, or lemmy.world is trying to find excuses to cut off content they don’t like. Legal trouble for allowing access to those communities, which aren’t even based on lemmy.world, would be so much of an overstep, they’d probably be able to get free legal counsel from the EFF or a similar organization.

    Anyways, this will be my last post on this server. Even though I don’t use any of those communities, I don’t want to have to constantly monitor what has been banned to see what I may miss out on.

    Apparently, lemmy.world also removed c/shrooms, which I didn’t even know about. And again, risk of legal trouble for that would be extremely low.



  • I don’t think DeSantis is charismatic or likable enough to beat Biden. His poll numbers go down as the public gets more exposure to him. He’s starting to shift his messaging from anti-woke to (neo-fascist) populist rhetoric, which may change things. IDK, there’s so many things that could happen between now and the election. I think Trump could beat DeSantis in the primary from prison. A major crisis like a recession would hand the election to the Reps. The Reps could intentionally cause a crisis, by forcing an extended government shutdown or something.



  • Rep voters =/= Rep politicians. I would say the ~27% of people that identify as Republican support fascist-like policies, even if they don’t think of them as fascist. The Rep party itself is definitely neo-fascist. They even use the same rhetoric as the Nazis and white nationalists (focusing on degeneracy, cultural marxism, great replacement theory, etc). Just this time, LBGT people and hispanic immigrants are the first scapegoats. The current 2nd favored Republican presidential candidate, behind Trump, is most definitely a neo-fascist by just looking at the policies he’s been implementing in Florida; not to mention his campaign sharing a video ad featuring DeSantis in the middle of a sonnegrad.


  • Yeah, mastodon definitely needs a better algorithm. Algorithms can be designed to promote whatever the maker wants. It doesn’t have to be designed to maximize engagement or the specific kind of engagement that tends to promote crazy conspiracy theories or fascist rhetoric. The algorithm could just be simple collaborative filtering with some randomness thrown in to pop “information bubbles,” which would be much better than what they have now.


  • Most leftists in the U.S. are democratic socialists, social democrats, are some flavor of anarchists; not authoritarian socialists… Most do not think violence is necessary, except for protection against the increasingly fascist right-wing. Many believe it’s possible to move closer to a socialist-like society by building mutual-aid networks and communities, and promoting candidates for government positions that align with their values; not through a violent revolution.

    And yes, I would prefer systems closer to Scandinavian countries, which the right-wing here calls socialism. Ideally, I would like to see some kind of real socialism where the workers own the means of production (factories, stores, farms, etc) and controls it through democratic processes, not the investor-shareholders or the government. I think the term is anarcho-syndicalism, but I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.


  • I cannot imagine a system that would lead to more freedom, better education or innovation.

    LOL.

    Even though I acknowledge that other systems have been tried in the past, I also believe that all of them, except capitalism with a few social tweaks, have failed.

    Capitalism fails every ~8 years requiring the use of vast amounts of public funds to keep afloat. I’d also say if fails daily if you look at all the needless suffering occuring in the world today, especially in the most “free market” countries and the countries these exploit. We have “socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else,” as Jon Stewart would say.


  • I’ve spent years working at a fossil-fuel-adjacent company, and I’ve noticed that even some intelligent people (consciously or unconsciously) avoid any information that that might make them think they may not being living a perfectly moral life, or information where the obvious solution goes against their “values” (pro-business, free market). They also grasp for any information that affirms their values and lifestyle, no matter how easily discredited the source.

    It’s kinda worrying that it always seems to result in Nazi-like conspiracy theories like “the Agenda,” “Elites,” “groomers,” “cultural marxism,” etc.


  • That’s an unhelpful way to think about criminal justice. If the number 1 priority is to reduce crime and increase safety, the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation instead of just throwing them in shitty gang-run prisons for revenge or whatever. That helps nobody and destabilizes society.


  • Many of my family and some of my um, not quite friends, are conservative, and all are varying degrees of racist, sexist, or transphobic. Granted, that’s just anecdotal, but have a hard time believing people who vote for bigots aren’t somewhat bigoted themselves if they’re willing to throw vulnerable populations under the bus for 0.5% lower taxes or whatever.