I saw him in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) once and he legitimately was walking around with atrocious posture. Funny, in retrospect.

On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We’ve apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.

Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you’re alluding to, bad at language simply won’t show up on a platform like this that’s all text. That’s probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.

I disagree. Pick a random Republican voter from this country and you’re very likely to grab someone from a red state. Let’s say Alabama. Their vote is as insignificant as a blue voter in California. So regardless of who you or who they voted for, their impact is nil.

They vote in local elections, which are not insignificant, and have real impacts. You have like school board elections decided by a few dozen votes. The conservatives win and start banning books and doing low grade hate crimes against queer people.

You have contributed to the bottom line of a company that hires death squads to kill labor leaders (this is has been proven in court).

We all know there’s no way to be a wholly good person under capitalism. We’re both writing this on hardware that is likely metaphorically soaked in blood. That doesn’t mean that any amount of blood is equal to any other amount of blood.

No matter who you vote for; over the long term the same policies will be enacted regardless.

I don’t think this is necessarily the case. We had a new deal. Trusts were broken up. It is possible to make changes. It’s an uphill battle because of many factors, including the republicans pulling as hard as they can in the opposite direction. The republicans (or more broadly, conservatives and reactionaries. or even more broadly, the ownership class and their useful idiots) are the problem.

The first step is to get rid of this atmosphere of hostility. You blame someone for the country collapsing, they get defensive and blame you for the country collapsing. We’re in the post-truth era so it doesn’t matter what is true or what is false. People believe what they do based on vibes. This isn’t an accident but intentional.

A key difference is they are incorrect. But as you say, we’re in post-truth and facts don’t matter anymore to a lot of people.

This isn’t a serious policy summit because we’re just two dorks on lemmy. In real life you’d have to spend a lot of time massaging people’s emotions so they come a little closer to reality. In my internet-tough-guy persona I just want to shoot every red-hat in the head. I know it’s not that effective, but I’m an emotional sack of meat like everyone else.

And again, they may feel the same way and want to just shoot the queers dead, except that wouldn’t solve any problems. It’s not the queers (or the jews or the blacks) that are voting to remove child labor laws, to remove environmental protections, to keep wages low and prices high. The animosity might be similar but they are wrong.

The answer is that wealthy people thought it was in their interests. Simple as that. It’s why for example when you had the Trump inauguration the top tech CEOs all came to bend the knee and sat in the front row. The capitalist system has decided that having Trump at the helm is the most profitable outcome.

The right wing will always chose fascism and profits over anything else. Given a choice between paying a little more for labor or burning the entire country down, most of the ownership class would burn the country down. They’re not good people. I’m pretty sure that was a key factor in fascism’s rise in ww2- the wealthy class backed fascism because they didn’t want to pay more wages to unions.

I knew a guy that worked for in a smallish factory, and the owner verbatim said “I’ll burn this place down before I let you all unionize.”

Personally, I think they should have broken into that guy’s house at night and murdered him, but I understand not wanting to throw your life away on a class war skirmish that likely won’t make a difference.

I think one key thing you are missing here is that the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans in creating Trump. Bill Clinton for example amplified Reagan’s economic policies that accelerated our descent into brutal neoliberal capitalism. As we descend further down, people become increasingly insecure.

I said elsewhere that it’s like squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. All republicans are a problem, but not all democrats are a problem. Some are. That doesn’t mean they’re good. Maybe we want stars. Neither of them are stars.

People who are scared for the financial future vote for dictators. This has happened before and it will happen again. I believe fascism is like a herpes outbreak. It’ll never go away, but your immune system keeps in check most of the time. The issue is that our immune system is weakened and now it has a breakout.

It’s funny because that’s such a self destructive behavior. It’s like someone having an itchy outbreak of some kind, and then they scratch and scratch and scratch until it bleeds and it gets infected. What’s the political equivalent of cones for people’s hands so they can’t scratch?

Because you are just as guilty and complicit in maintaining the system as the Republican voter

This is false

Your life sucks? It’s Republicans.

This is actually true. The ultra wealthy that keep us in this hellscape are republicans. They have much of the blame. But the low level people who keep voting for them also have some of the blame.

Blaming the queers (for example) is a total non-sequitur. They’re just living life. The republicans are dismantling the government, ending vaccination programs, and rolling back environmental protections. They are for real doing actual harm right now. It is not the same as the imaginary harms “the jews” do. People would make up stories about nefarious evils of jews, but meanwhile the republicans are right there on TV doing evil. There was a nazi salute. There was an insurrection. These are things that happened.

The working class republicans are class traitors. They should realize that our interests align, but they don’t, and they are actively doing harm.

If you have ideas on how to instill class consciousness in the kind of people who vote against their interests, let’s hear it.

I feel like because of how much insider bullshit there is, there’s a good chance the billionaire would get rich again even if they were left with only $1mm

They’d go to their investor buddies and ask for funding for their new startup, and they’d be right back to being ownership class.

They wouldn’t suffer. I want them to suffer. I think that’s the only way they’d learn empathy.

Squares and rectangles.

All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

All republicans are fools/monsters/traitors, but not every Democrat is. Some are. But not all.

We don’t have to go door to door shooting everyone registered R. The leadership should definitely go up against the wall.

But every person that votes R is voting for climate disaster, unchecked pandemics, rolling back decades of medical science, violence against queer folks and other minorities, and other horrors.

They might not be a comically evil person who kicks puppies and steals candy from babies, but they’ve thrown what little power they have behind tremendous evil. When that stops, that’s a win.

I concede I could amend my previous statement that they don’t need to die. We can also celebrate them leaving the party and changing themselves so they’re not doing evil anymore.

Republicans should be wiped out. Fools, monsters, and traitors. They’ve done incalculable damage to the world and all those who live here.

Every Republican that dies should be cause for celebration.

poe’s law is real and i can’t tell if this is a joke

There’s nothing we could do to Musk to make up for the damage he’s done to the world.

I mean, I wouldn’t turn down “15 minutes in a room with him while he’s tied to a chair and I have a baseball bat”, but that’s still not enough

GOP isn’t dead enough. Put them up against the wall.

ICQ was a key part of my realization that most people are lazy, short-sighted, idiots.

Everyone I knew wanted to use AIM. ICQ had better features (offline messaging, style overrides, you could change your name without changing your account, file transfers worked better, etc etc). But no one cared.

It’s like how people won’t get off facebook or reddit. Sometimes you have to have a little inconvenience for the greater long term benefit.

It just takes one brave soul with a hidden weapon to pose next to him, and we can be on a better timeline.

Heh. A typo where I meant drive, but it’s funny so I’m going to leave it

Meanwhile, in the city I just get on the train. Going out and then having to drink your drunk/tired/etc self home is miserable.

As the other poster said, you can have multiple accounts. Betterment, for example, automatically puts money in several banks for you and is thus insured up to $2 million.

So if the stocks fall enough you won’t have your money anyways.

Banks are insured by the government. If they get rid of the FDIC then I don’t know, but if a bank collapses you still get your money.

I live in New York City and have no desire to move to the suburbs or countryside. It’s great here.

• I can walk to most of my needs. Several grocery stores, pharmacies, a big park, bars, restaurants. I don’t need a car.
• there’s a thriving music scene. I can go see live stuff of many genres every night if I want
• a deep dating pool. Lots of people. Lots of queer people too, if that’s your jam.
• I like there being people around. The empty streets of the suburbs feel spooky and hostile to me.
• more people means it’s easier to get group activities going. Join a soccer team. Brass band. Bird watching group. Knitting community. There’s everything. Usually more than one, in case a particular group isn’t your vibe.
• stuff is open later.

Some of the things people imagine about cities aren’t really true

• it’s not constant noise
• I typically can’t hear my neighbors
• people don’t typically interact with you on the street, but if you need help someone will usually step up
• it’s not shoulder to shoulder constantly. People seem to imagine it’s always times Square on NYE, but it’s just not.

While you’re not unseen like you might be in the countryside, no one really cares that they do see you.

Some people want “more space” but I don’t really know what for. A one bedroom apartment is fine for me. What would I do with more rooms?

If I had kids, I wouldn’t want to put them in the suburban hell cage like I had. Nothing to do. Can’t get anywhere on your own. Don’t like the few dozen kids in your school? Well that’s your whole pool of friendship options. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could just get on the train and go to the beach, or go skating, or go to a punk show, or whatever. I had to beg my parents to drive me anywhere interesting, and usually they didn’t want to.

I don’t think fucking idiots are evenly distributed, so the odds depend on where you go.

The fact that if you’re rich, you stop paying social security tax is insane. I hit it one year and was like why did I get a big bump in my take home? I absolutely did not need the extra cash.