The term originated in a British socialist political party, I can't remember which, as a term for other socialists that supported the Soviet Union's invasion of I think Hungary. The tank parts originates from the fact tanks were used. Like you say though, the term has become very watered down now and people kind of just throw it around without much discernment.
Yeah I think people have what happened to Digg in their minds and think there'll just be one single huge Exodus and Lemmy will explode over night, but that's unlikely. We just have to keep trucking and overtime reddit inc will make more and more stupid decisions and each time Lemmy and the dedicated will grow a but larger. Not to mention Twitter is imploding even faster, maybe we'll gain users from there.
Having a small community in the meantime isn't so bad anyway, there's less low effort comments and you can recognise people sometimes which is cool. There's positives and negatives to both small and large communities.
Also Lemmy is becoming a larger platform and Twitter- or "X"- is becoming a smaller platform. Sure total users might be down since right after the Exodus but that is obviously normal, a new baseline will be established that's still significantly above the pre Exodus baseline. Then reddit inc will do something else stupid and people on the site will be talking about Lemmy again.
I think there's positives and negatives to having a small platform, and there's positives and negatives to having a larger platform. With a smaller platform, the quality of the comments in general is much higher with less low effort jokes which usually you've already read 500 times. With larger platforms, the smaller communities are much more active because there's a larger pool to draw those people with niche interests from.
Most of the lyrics are benign and he has plenty of musical talent. But the lyrics that comment on politics are just incredibly brain dead, I don't know what else to tell you. It is proposing welfare recipients as the reason for poverty, but what percentage of tax returns go to welfare? Obviously like, nothing. Additionally his own region of the country has some of the highest rates of welfare recipiency and if that was cut off does he really think that would improve anything?
I think the reason it leaves so many people with a bad taste in their mouths is because clearly a bait and switch is being performed. The first part draws your attention to the issues the singer is experiencing in his life such as low pay, then in the middle he goes on to talk about the "Rich men North of Richmond-" which if that is in reference to DC politicians then fair enough- in addition to welfare recipients as if those two things are related. He is just running defence for the wealthy by trying to distract people from the problems downstream from general extreme wealth inequality by trying to convince us fat people buying candy is causing everyone's problems. Not to mention the humour there is in seeing someone that looks pretty severely overweight themselves calling out other fat people (much like how he is an apparent working class man going after over working class people.)
In my opinion the purpose of the song is just to turn poor people against each other so we won't get any ideas about taxing the rich or anything like that. This is probably be reason why lovely people like Matt Walsh were early promoters of the song.
I think you're probably right due to the target audience of the song and who originally seeded its success, e.g. Matt Walsh. Although I suppose you can just argue that Richmond just sounds good put next to rich men? Though if they weren't comfortable with it being associated with the confederacy though they just wouldn't have used it.
If I was to disregard the confederacy association I would say it's an OK name because if you're referring to politicians in DC they're a group that's worthy of being called out. It would still be stupid though because of course many of their favourite politicians are, you know, politicians and also very rich (like Donald Trump but also many more who were born into great wealth and continued to be wealthy throughout their lives.)
I don't think very many people use those definitions for first/ second/ third world anymore. The colloquial definitions of "first world = rich second world = not so rich but not so poor and third world = poor" are more useful anyway due to as you say the Soviet Union not existing anymore so nobody can align with it.
Not to mention AdSense and YouTube with whatever percentages they control of their respective markets. Google holds a lot of separate monopolies for just one company
The term originated in a British socialist political party, I can't remember which, as a term for other socialists that supported the Soviet Union's invasion of I think Hungary. The tank parts originates from the fact tanks were used. Like you say though, the term has become very watered down now and people kind of just throw it around without much discernment.