would_be_appreciated @ would_be_appreciated @lemmy.ml

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11 mo. ago

Pretty classic trolley problem here. One track has genocide. The other side has larger scale and more effective genocide, along with a pile of other issues. Nobody's saying genocide is good, but they're saying 50,000 dead in a year is better than millions dead in a year alongside widespread escalation of genocide elsewhere, higher international tensions with a more significant chance of a nuclear incident, and more crackdowns on dissent just like yours and mine.

Your ability to participate in political organization and not immediately be killed or thrown in jail depends on the people who are in power. The United States isn't immune to regressing to that society, and it's very clear the Republicans are doing what they can to move in that direction.

Voting for the Democrats and doing nothing else is far from ideal and won't fix the institutional problems, but it will help prevent new major problems, like mass murder for criticizing the government, from popping up.

Voting for the Democrats so you can continue activism is step one, and is an important step. It's also a trivially easy step with no downside. It's just not the only step.

For fun, I went and investigated this, and learned a lot! Greta refuses to fly, citing the emissions caused by air travel, so she goes by boat instead. She crossed the Atlantic on the Malizia II, a racing yacht that sounds like a miserable time because it doesn't have basic facilities like a toilet. She was taken across by Boris Herrmann of team Malizia, who (as you might guess) race the boat. Neither she nor her parents own it.

She's also crossed on La Vagabonde, known for its Youtube channel where its owners, as far as I can tell, just kind of sail around. The owners don't resemble her parents, either.

I also found a particularly bizzare claim including a notably doctored picture that she was "caught" on a yacht with Leonardo DiCaprio. Even that one doesn't claim her family owns it.

I legitimately can't even find a fake news site that makes the claim you're making. Did you make it up whole cloth? To what end? What relevance would it even have to the topic? Is the idea that "big green energy" is coming for oil companies, and her family made their money off of green energy, and the entire purpose of her activism is to be part of big green energy's master plan to take over big oil?

This a new conspiracy theory to me. Greta Thunberg's parents, a moderately successful opera singer and non-Hollywood actor, are billionaires? I'd be surprised if they were worth a million, let alone a billion.

As great as it would be if she won Iowa, this is the most obvious outlier poll that ever existed. Almost nobody's even polling Iowa because it's not close, and the few polls other than this one show Trump as a clear winner.

I hope I'm wrong, but I've been seeing thread after thread of these one-off polls and just general "there's no way Harris can lose" mentality. She had a huge lead around the time she announced Walz, but it's been downhill since then. Most reliable predictors have her losing at this point. That sucks, but it doesn't help to pretend it's not happening.

Do what you can to get Harris the win, but also consider what your options are if she doesn't.

With the now-totally-legal-thanks-to-SCOTUS voter purging, theft and destruction of ballots, aggressive voter suppression tactics, and polling that indicates an electoral college but not population vote win for Trump, they might not have to 'Stop the Steal' at all. They've "legally" pre-stolen it themselves.

Instead of being concerned what the Republicans might do if they lose, it might be worth wondering if everybody else should really take it lying down like they did the 2000 election.

Same answer it's been for my whole lifetime: a small number of extremely wealthy individuals pumping a constant stream of money into conservative media with the express purpose of changing public opinion.

People who've been listening to this stuff their entire lives don't live in the real world. They legitimately don't believe in reality, and after a certain point I'm not sure it's possible to bring them back. Much like climate change, this kind of thing should've been stopped at the source decades ago, and it might just be too late now.

The point of a billionaire owning a newspaper isn't to be profitable or maximize readership. It's to leverage the readership you do have into power and control. It doesn't matter if this came out, and it doesn't matter if it loses, say, a quarter of its readership. Bezos still gets to use it on the remaining readership and he successfully converts or kills one of the most significant Democratic-sympathizing papers in the nation.

Rupert Murdoch bought up the New York Post when it was a failing paper, and it continued to lose money for decades. I believe it's profitable now, but that was never the purpose. It wasn't for Bezos either.

Edit: a great parallel example of this is Musk/Twitter - huge financial loss, but it doesn't matter, because that wasn't the point. And if the polls are any indicator, it's been incredibly effective and worth every penny.

How cool would it be if he takes this opportunity to do the right thing and publicly denounce him to his face?

Mules are maybe the most useful freak of nature (sorta) for humans. They're still used surprisingly widely - even the US military still keeps them on hand, for similar cases to this one: the terrain is so fucked that ground vehicles are going to have a hard time getting to certain areas.

offensive marionette, designed intentionally for shock value rather than meaningful dialogue

This is the most accurate description I've ever heard of the original.

I signed up on ml because lemmy.world gave me an infinite spinner when I tried to post and ml was the second one I saw and figured it didn't matter. I think living in Russia or China would be awful and think Ukraine is a victim of Russia's terrible aggression. That doesn't mean I can't be anti nuclear war.

Yeah, this is the wildest headline. "Don't fear it, it only works 20% of the time!" Both the US and Russia have somewhere around 1700 known deployed nuclear warheads able to be launched from air, land, and sea. 20% is still 340 nuclear bombs, all of which are substantially larger than the ones dropped in Japan.

The fucking audacity to downplay nuclear war.

It pressures the system in those cities or states, which is actual pressure to the system, just not direct pressure on the federal government. History shows you can mount pressure through local and state changes until it gets overwhelming support on a federal level.

You can make the argument there might be more effective or quicker solutions, but this is unquestionably one path toward it.

Then Putin should be very scared of that risk and withdraw immediately!

He should, but he doesn't appear to be. That puts the ball in everybody else's court, unfair though it is.

Or the Russian people should be scared of that and force him to withdraw.

Who am I kidding, the Russian people can’t stand up to President Putin, they’re too busy listening to General Stolichnaya.

A large number of Russians are trying to protest. They typically get killed or imprisoned. It's hard to fault the remainder for not risking their lives for a probably fruitless attempt at dissent.

He will run out of people, at the expense of both Russian human beings and Ukrainian human beings. That's the best case scenario with continued war, assuming it doesn't escalate to directly include other countries.

That's not mutually exclusive with what I said.

This has the possible side effect of nuclear war.

Pretty much everybody's the bad guy here, tbh. Sort of a Lybia-during-Gaddafi situation - he was horrible, but it's not like they've been in a great place since.

Agreed, but that's not happening. It's wild that the only possible options anybody sees right now are all-out war or Putin suddenly having a change of heart, and anybody who considers there might be other avenues to pursue is ridiculous.

Fine, the war goes on, and we'll see hundreds of thousands of people continue to die. Nothing else anybody in the entire world can do, it all rests on Putin changing his mind, and we'll just have to wait it out. Sucks to suck for all of those people, their families, and their descendants who are going to grow up in a country that's going to take generations to rebuild.