I imagine this looks a lot like what people in the cyber security sector do after a breach. Audit all the code, scan all the servers, monitor everything for several months. It's a ton of work and very expensive, but there are people with lots of real-world experience unhacking systems.
There have been two court orders requiring that payments continue normally. It looks like Musk has decided that court orders do not bind him. It hasn't even been two weeks and already we're at the constitutional crisis?
I think the idea here is that, as Republicans have repeatedly demonstrated, the minority party can do a lot to simply break the government.
If the Democrats had the intestinal fortitude to be real resistance against an authoritarian takeover, they could start filibustering everything, and using every procedural trick to delay or block every Republican action until some set of demands are met. Perhaps removing Musk from every government system, or reinstating all of the DoJ personnel who have been retaliated against.
Here we see Democrats basically unanimously going along with the Republican agenda so that they can feel like "the adults in the room," rather than fighting for the life of our republic.
Then they have a higher hurdle to clear. All I'm saying is it seems reasonable to give a state representation based on the number of citizens.
I got curious about the size of the issue. The numbers I found for Texas was an estimated 1.6 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 30.5 million, or roughly 5%. There are 38 reps from Texas, so they'd lose one or two.
This doesn't seem like it ought to be all-or-nothing. Knowing the number of citizens and the total number of residents is useful for different purposes. Electoral votes: citizens. Disaster response: residents. And so on.
This mirrors how I've been thinking about the broader world trends. The neo-liberal world order is dying. It has solved all the problems it has the capacity to solve, and the people have run out of patience with the problems it can't.
The groups that have been best positioned to fill the gaps created by these retreating institutions are the ones that had always been excluded; nationalists, authoritarians, xenophobes of all kinds, et al. The left? They joined the neo-liberal coalition to try to change the system from the inside, or refused to participate and languished in obscurity.
IMHO if we're going to avoid a century of oppression, the left needs to abandon the neo-liberal coalition, and get into the fight for what comes next. We're already two steps behind.
That's roughly the total COVID death toll for that period. The term "excess deaths" is used to refer to the deaths which occurred above the typical yearly mortality rate. In other words, the deaths which are roughly attributable to COVID.
I don't know if that's what you meant, but it would be easy to read your comment, given the context, as saying that Trump caused 522,368 deaths in 2020.
If you want to quantify the deaths caused by Trump's mismanagement, you'd need to compare COVID deaths relative to population. I actually managed to find that (to my surprise)
If you sort by deaths per million (total), the US is 16th from the bottom right above Brazil, Slovenia, and Lithuania. And right below Latvia, Chile, and Poland.
You could also download that data set there, find the global average, sum up the difference between that and the US, and roughly say that number is the death toll for Trump's mismanagement.
I think there's a place for both. So long as none of it becomes mandatory, and online communities can freely choose to offer anonymous or verified identities, it's an idea worth trying.
I've been thinking recently that Lemmy would simply be better off without any comment votes. I've heard some instances disable them, but it still seems to be the norm. Group think already has enough pull given human nature. It doesn't need a boost.
Resistance requires hope. I appreciate people being willing to imagine how things could get better from this point. If you aren't willing to allow yourself to even imagine victory, you've already lost.
That's all I was saying. But there are, I think, three groups which it would be interesting to have this answer for. The first is the one you mentioned. The other two are people who voted for Biden and switched to Trump, and people who chose not to vote in 2020 and voted for Trump in '24. I couldn't find those answers readily.
Perhaps he's objecting to having the alleged hand gesture referred to as feminist. A bit of a quibble, but not completely baseless.
Then again it may not be fair to claim that whenever feminists do hurtful things in the name of feminism, that it's not real feminism. Feminism can do bad things too. Any philosophy can.
I know some areas have laws mandating certain minimal coverages. I wonder if the insurers would even be allowed to issue policies that didn't cover wildfires.
I think it's more about being able to play as the oppressed, and whip up their base. There have been many platforms where they could post their hate. Censoring speech just fuels outrage and invites the Streisand effect.
But in this case I don't think Zuck really cares about enabling these right-wing messages. It's about saving money by cutting a bunch of expensive fact checkers, and displaying friendliness toward the new president; either because they don't want to be singled out for punishment, or they hope to be rewarded with some largess.
I really don't think so. If the process was so simple as writing false or hurtful things, and then your political opponents are blocked from power, then why doesn't the left just become a bunch of shitposters and kick all the fascists out?
I think a more plausible explanation for why the left has been excluded from power is simply that American politics runs on donor money, capitalists have lots of money, and they have a class interest in excluding the left. You can certainly get deeper than that, but that's sort of the heart of the issue.
Note here that Zuck and Meta are capitalists, and were never going censor the narrative contrary to their interests.
I still think this whole idea that we were going to get big tech (or anyone really), as owners of the modern mediums of communication, to act as the arbiters of truth and harmful messages was always a ridiculous notion. It's both not in their interests and not in their power.
The mainstream of the liberals and the left seem to have become so obsessed with policing speech that they've nearly completely given up on meaningfully improving the material conditions of people's lives. You win the narrative by delivering real results that people can see and feel, not by trying to ban charlatans from spinning bullshit.
Change the world, and the narrative will follow. Not the other way around.
I imagine this looks a lot like what people in the cyber security sector do after a breach. Audit all the code, scan all the servers, monitor everything for several months. It's a ton of work and very expensive, but there are people with lots of real-world experience unhacking systems.