OBJECTION!

If that’s why Kamala lost, then explain why Tammy Baldwin is winning Wisconsin and Elissa Slotkin is winning in Michigan.

There’s definitely some truth to that. The media gave Kamala front-runner status in the 2020 primary and she blew it so hard she dropped out before a single vote was cast. If we’re being as generous as possible, we might describe her as, “unproven.” There was never any real indication she had decent political instincts or could draw people in, and it’s unlikely that she would have won in a competitive primary. Internal criticism is necessary to root out ineffective strategies (and candidates), but there was never a time when that was really permissible in this cycle.

Tammy Baldwin is looking set to win Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin is ahead by a hair in Michigan, so no, that narrative is dead in the water.

Of course, it has nothing to do with corporate money or higher prices for consumers, it’s purely the people not participating in the system of abuse who are the problem. Very logical and definitely not just a defense mechanism.

Oops, you forgot to answer my question again.

Cut the crap. It’s plain as day what’s happening here - you want to discredit the people who are actually doing things in order to make yourself feel better about not doing anything. It’s just a defense mechanism, and the person you’re really trying to fool us yourself.

Whomst amongus could’ve predicted that you couldn’t answer?

Oh, which candidate that supports those things you mentioned were you going to vote for but now aren’t? Love to hear even a single name.

Of course, you can’t answer that, because that’s not a realistic path in the short term. Let’s say you were going to run for office on that platform. First, the major corporations that have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are are going to dump money into the opposition. Second, people will oppose it because it would increase the price of meat - they’ll say you’re an elitist who wants to make it so that only the rich can have access to it, and emphasize the effect it’ll have on grocery bills. They’ll also talk about the environmental impact your regulations would cause, since it would take more land to treat animals humanely. And they will also call you a hypocrite for refusing to give up meat while calling the production process unethical, to the point of being deserving of jail time.

So explain to me how exactly you would’ve overcome those obstacles, if only us mean insidious vegans weren’t so preoccupied with asking you to give up your treats.

Thoughts and prayers? No. Fines. Potentially jailtime. Potentially forcing them to sell farms and factories.

And how do you intend to implement those things? Thoughts and prayers.

Sources that I’d prefer to regulate in terms of animal rights, but every time that comes up, you people divert the conversation to “if you’re not gonna be vegan you’re evil either way so it doesn’t matter” and everyone tunes out.

Pack it up, vegans. This person was going to wish upon a star to regulate animal agriculture, which would’ve done it, but we just had to go and advocate for making material changes on a level we have control over, and that forced them to be explicitly fine with abuse. If only we had your thoughts and prayers, what a horrible miscalculation on our part.

Technicians that will probably demand a commission not a flat rate.

Never heard of anyone in that field doing this. If you walk into a computer repair place and say you need to recover data off a hard drive and they say they need to know how much the data’s worth before they can tell you the cost, you should probably just immediately walk out and go to a different store regardless because that’s probably a skeezy place.

Absolutely it’s a clownshow.

If you ask me, the whole point of it is to get everyone to sort themselves into one of two horrific camps, where they’ll feel like any criticism of the people in power is an attack on them for voting for them - or, if they don’t vote, then they generally disengage from politics entirely. It’s probably the most effective system of propaganda ever designed, because you don’t even need to tell people that horrible people are on their side, they’ll happily convince themselves of it all on their own. It’s basically a race to the bottom where one side being dogshit allows the other side to be dogshit because there’s no alternative, and of course every politician wants to be as dogshit as they can get away with because that’s how you win favor with the corporate donors, who have no practical limit on how much money they can spend to influence the outcome.

There’s also this level of spectacle in our elections that’s above and beyond anywhere else in the world, we treat it like a reality show, and our debates are complete jokes where nothing substantive is ever discussed. We have absurdly long election cycles and entire industries around milking them for entertainment. It’s unlikely that we will ever even begin moving in the right direction in the foreseeable future, because the brainworms run so deep.

The worst part is when the spectacle becomes so eye-catching that people from other countries get drawn into it and start thinking in terms of our politics and what we define as normal or reasonable. Americans rarely learn from non-American perspectives and we have corporate influence constantly pushing in the direction of maximizing short term profits over all other priorities, and so our country is unable to understand or adapt to the changing conditions of the modern world, which is why we are in decline.

Look at us only as a cautionary tale of what not to do.

When we do it, it’s only a “pseudo-occupation”

When Nazi Germany occupied France, was it only a “pseudo-occupation” because the Panzers then “protected” the occupied territory from the British? What a ridiculous line of logic.

totalitarian control

Lmao y’all are wild. Why are you on a platform where people you don’t like have, “totalitarian control” over the structure? Is it, perhaps, because they used this “totalitarian control” to create a structure that was decentralized and allowed communities to form that operated on different rules and different views? Doesn’t sound very totalitarian if you ask me.

for the same reason I now understand better why some women would prefer the bear.

Now, please downvote me, you know you want to… just this once, I want you to know what it’s like to do something with the recipient’s consent.

Lmao wtf are you talking about? Am I violating someone’s consent by holding beliefs they disagree with? Completely unhinged.

My biggest problem with .world is that people will just make up whatever they want about the out-group and everyone just believes it without question and with no interest in examining the evidence. It’s a toxic element of the site’s culture that encourages circle-jerking and the automatic dismissal of opposing viewpoints while making intelligent and informed discussion impossible.

The moderation is also pretty heavy-handed with censorship and things get removed for “misinformation” pretty frequently just because the mods disagree with it. You don’t have to go very far back in the modlog right now to find removed posts from Cowbee and Alcoholicorn, despite both backing up their arguments with published books from respectable authors. It’s best to avoid engaging with the mods at all, I got banned from World News because a mod couldn’t defend their position so they just banned me. There’s a pretty clear bias towards NATO and the US.

But like I said my main issue is the first point, and I’ll stop judging .worlders when I start to see people actually ask for evidence when someone says, “I saw a bunch of tankies eating kittens” instead of just blindly accepting it as fact because it’s about an out-group.

Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have ‘communists’ arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin. Although that is more rare, it does happen.

If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

The culture where these sorts of blatant lies are accepted without question is my biggest problem with .world. You can have whatever actual beliefs you want, but lying like this is really despicable.

A one state solution doesn’t mean that everyone in Israel would have to leave. It would just mean that everyone in the region gets an equal voice in governance. Many people would probably choose to leave, in the same way many people left South Africa when their system of apartheid ended.

This thread has made me realize that while I was watching the hearings on it purely for comedy aspect, there were actually people out there being like, “Yeah that makes sense.”

Love it when the government takes away our stuff. Please, take away more of our stuff. Love me that security theater.

If you don’t like the app, just don’t use it. Nationalism is a hell of a drug.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with data security and everything to do with other social media companies lobbying to eliminate a competitor, using anti-China sentiment and fear-mongering as a justification. It’s all about the money.

I’m gonna have to admit to stealing that line from Dimension 20

Because he’s rich and powerful and laws are just threats made by the ruling class, which he’s a part of. The law is primarily a tool of class warfare and as such is only enforced consistently and in full force against the working class. Very occasionally, one rich person pisses off enough other rich people to be subject to it, but you have to be extremely bad at the game for that to happen. The more rich people are subjected to the law, the easier it is to be subjected to the law yourself if you’re rich, so generally you’re better off looking the other way while they do illegal shit so that you can get away with your own illegal shit. Plus they have the resources to fight you, so it means picking a costly battle.