CarbonIceDragon @ CarbonIceDragon @pawb.social

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2 yr. ago

"Not slaughtering the Jews" does not require letting Isreal slaughter the Palestinians instead.

Because having a revolver or a rifle or something is going to really do anything if the government comes after you personally.

Any actual resistance movement capable of achieving much is going to find a way to arm itself regardless of if the country theyre from allowed guns during peacetime or not, they seem to in other countries that such things have formed in after all. Could be through illicit purchases from elsewhere, or homemade weapons, or theft, or whatever else, it always seems to happen.

Not to mention, these are people that have proven that they'll try to attack the government if made angry enough. Now, it was Trump that got them angry on his behalf last time, sure, and few if any are likely to eventually change their minds and turn on him, but if you're about to be the government and dont need these people anymore, is having such people publicly pardoned really the precedent you're going to want so set?

hypothetically, if they do stop water fluoridation, is it possible/practical to add the proper amount to one's own water? or would getting the dose right and the required ingredients be dangerous? Or would just using a bit more toothpaste give enough of the effect to make such a thing not worth it anyway?

Morality is easy in some sense, it just requires thinking to figure it out, and in practice being the moral choice when the other side is this bad requires doing basically nothing at all. Retooling the economy to increase the wealth of average people, directly against the forces of the already wealthy seeking to suck up all the available wealth for themselves, is both much harder and requires being given an amount of power that's rarely won these days.

I dont know that that is even what his supporters want. Like half my co-workers vocally support him, and they seem to legitimately believe that he will just wave his magic wand or whatever and make gas and electricity and groceries cheaper, and make crime go away, and that then all the democrats will admit he wasnt so bad after all. Im not even sure what is worse, disillusioned anger being directed in completely counterproductive places, or whatever sheer delusion believing every promise in his word salad is

assuming they dont get rid of the filibuster, and then put it back on their way out if they manage to lose power again

to be fair, he had more checks on his power then, had less motive for revenge against the justice and electoral systems, and is now even more crazy. Im hoping it will be just some incompetence and international embarrassment, but Im worried that it might be more.

In an election with stakes like this one though, doesnt maximizing their chances for a win also serve that? Like, being rich offers you some protection from the law, especially in a corrupt regime, but when the other side is an actual authoritarian, half-assing it so that they win while also being publicly against them is dangerous to one's personal safety. Even rich people dont tend to get away with being against authoritarians, when they are in charge. If all you care about is power and influence, and you dont actually have any values beyond that, and one side is an authoritarian, then being on their side serves your interest, and being put in power to stop them serves your interest, but publicly failing to stop them puts a target on your back and gives you no power and influence by which to ward it off.

I mean, we've seen plenty of authoritarianism and facism before plastic was invented, so that seems like a dubious notion

Couldn't you still study populations with more or less plastic, even if "zero plastic" cant be found? Or is the amount of it more or less even across groups?

I mean, I feel like it is quite fair to blame the people who voted for Trump for Harris's loss tbh. I don't really buy the "the dems would win if they didn't just refuse to try to win over conservatives and instead promised to go all-in on progressive policy that I've seen lately. I wish we got more progressive policy too, but it's not like they don't have any idea what people want, they have whole teams of people whose job it is to figure out that kind of thing. If promising some more progressive policy was a clear winner, why wouldn't they do it? The answer I generally see implied or stated is that the dem establishment doesn't want that policy, but that isn't really an adequate explanation, because politicians are perfectly familiar with dishonesty. If supporting some progressive policy they didn't like would win them power, they'd just promise it and then just not do that thing upon getting elected. It's happened for state and congressional races before, so it's not like that's never been thought of.

I don't think Harris's loss is down to refusing to say the right words to inspire her base or anything like that, it's down to the fact that, somehow, Trump is very good at inspiring his. She gave it a decent shot, but it's very hard to win an election against a massive cult of personality. He, and the people that support him, are the problem here.

To be fair, the Americans doing the apologizing probably did, the ones that liked having Bush wouldn't have apologized in the first place?

Not really. It's not good news for climate change, but global climate policy is not solely determined by the US presidency, and there are economic and technological forces set into motion already (like much cheaper solar) that mitigate the effect somewhat compared to what a global business as usual scenario would have been without them.

That isn't to say that everything is okay, even an amount of climate change that doesn't pose much danger to the existence of future civilization still presents a personal risk to, well, everyone, due to increased natural disaster risk and such, but suggesting the door is closed on climate change is misleading; climate change is not a binary "it happens or it doesn't", it's a matter of degrees, and there are things that can influence it even without the US president on board. For threatening civilization itself, I'd say the bigger risk from Trump is the possibility that he get us into a nuclear war or something.

I mean, Harris is in the unenviable position of having to get the support of both conservatives and leftists at the same time (because the democratic party is an awkward hodgepodge of much of what passes for the left in the US, people who mostly just want to not be discriminated against, and people who fundamentally are conservatives but feel like the republicans go too far or dislike their stance on one thing or another.) It is nigh impossible to not have some unpopular positions if you've got to try to maintain the support of groups of people that sometimes want mutually exclusive things, and can afford to lose neither, because no position in that instance is truly that popular.

I know Lemmy likes to think that if she only adopted all of their positions, she'd win in a landslide, and if Lemmy was the electorate that'd probably be the case, but to be perfectly frank, I'm far from the most far left person I encounter here routinely, and I'm already in the position of not knowing a single other person irl that agrees with me on a number of my stances. The issue for Harris isn't that she tries to get votes from conservatives, she in order to win, she has to win some amount of them, the US is too conservative a country to avoid that, it's that at the end of the day, Trump has a cult following, and a lot of people that like him. He might seem "easily beatable" because he does crap that would sink someone else, but he really isn't, having that many motivated followers is a huge asset in elections.

Isn't the blatantly obvious answer to "who is to blame for Trump getting elected?", assuming that he ultimately does, the people that voted for Trump?

Isnt this the exact reason why there was such concern over the idea of Threads federating with the fediverse at large?

Realistically, given a condition where it stood in their way, they'd probably just eliminate it themselves

I know, I was just pointing out how, with the wealth he has, economic hardship just doesn't really happen for him in the same way it does for everyone else

Not even, you could literally take 90% of Elon Musk's money and it wouldn't really hurt any more than it hurts to see one's score in a video game go down. He'd still be among the richest people on the planet.

This discussion is making me vaguely wonder if you could poison a chatbot AI's training data by putting enough Trump speeches in it.