Ability to force anyone to objectively confront their own cognitive dissonance by maintaining eye contact.

Possibly too powerful. Some heads may spontaneously combust from a lifetime of preferring their own reality.

kbin lacks an API with an equivalent feature set. Ernest is aware of this and it's on the bug tracker. Any working apps for kbin are using site scraping as a temporary workaround. In layman's terms it means the app developer is doing a lot of extra work that will mostly get thrown away when the API rework is complete. Artemis is the only one currently doing this off the top of my head.

Source? I am happy to shit on spez, but my sphincter’s aim must be true.

It's also invoking the same strategy that Reddit themselves did with communicating the API change. They'll provide more information in 4-6 weeks...immediately prior to announcing something uncompromising that flies in the face of the previous promises. :)

This is where the argument for unconditionally providing equal air time to bad faith arguments falls apart, and where paradox of tolerance comes into play. One side demands tolerance for itself but argues in bad faith, and the other is inclined toward tolerance with others because it's what they would want for themselves. The latter is taken advantage of because the former does not return the favor.

The key to solving for the paradox is recognizing that there is a difference of scale:

1. If one ideology demands tolerance for itself but is intolerant of all ideologies aside from its own, its intolerance is broadly scoped. There is more intolerance in play than tolerance.
2. If one ideology grants tolerance to other ideologies except when their own is denied the same, then the intolerance is narrowly scoped. Intolerance is still in play, but it is a false inference to imply that those who champion equality must unconditionally surrender it to those who do not believe in it.

Pay attention to how many ideologies a school of thought is trying to silence and who their allies are. Unreasonable extremists can be found in all camps and their existence alone does not prove a movement's bad faith or your own righteousness. Reasonable people should exist, making it more important to focus on the goals of the movement and how its better stewards comport themselves. Remember that people who open their discussions with rudeness and toxicity are compensating for the insecurity of their debating point and already betraying their own intolerance. They aren't worth engaging with.

• Who are the patient and reasonable people that are standing up for an ideology?
• Does a leader for a movement rely on emotional appeals to unrelenting anger? Are they always angry and rude in a public setting, and primarily trying to appeal to those who behave in a similar way? Ignore their spiel and use someone else as your benchmark. (edit: But if this is the best they can offer and the leaders who are most frequently pushed to the top, this should be seen as a large red flag.)
• What happens when you try to engage in a conversation with the patient ones? Do they keep a level head and respectfully agree to disagree with you while happily trading points, or do they go on the attack with ad-hominems when you patiently poke at the holes in their arguments?

At the end of the day there aren't any simple solutions and you're left with a critical thinking exercise that only works for you. Be one of the patient people who is a good advocate for your cause, but do not allow yourself to invest a disproportionate amount of effort engaging with someone who does not return respect. Seek out those who return that respect, regardless of their stated ideology, and you will both be better for it when the conversation is done. And hopefully the result of those conversations will help other people make up their mind about who is truly acting in bad faith.

Yeah this is a memes community, but it's something that I've been thinking about for a while. Feel free to quote/link/whatever.

Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.

I was actually tempted to include that in the original, but I didn't want to belabor it. :)

I'm fine with this, and would prefer it that way.

Thanks. Direct link to the pimp daddy comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36298422

It's not just that he allowed them to exist, he created a special one-of-a-kind "Pimp Daddy" trophy to award to the moderator of r/jailbait and r/creepshots.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrophyWiki/comments/mohrlg/reddit\_trophy\_pimp\_daddy/

There is some whitewash in the comments there: "[violentacrez] received the trophy because all the work he did to moderate the site..." as if he got the award for keeping things clean, but consider that he contributed the vast majority of those subreddits' content himself by cruising social media for salacious pictures of minors to share while he was in his 40's, and the award is named "Pimp Daddy."

Several image themed subreddits voted to change their rules so that only "sexy" pictures of Jon Oliver were allowed. (in practice, any picture of Jon Oliver) It was intended as a form of protest against subreddits receiving threats from the admins to have their head mod role transferred to any mod who was willing to reopen the sub.

This one was apparently too sexy for the Reddit admins to handle...

A troll is insincere yet playful.

I chuckled at least. A troll's motivation for the rise that they seek is largely inconsequential, as is the delivery mechanism. ;) Let's not go and disenfranchise the majority of the internet's trolling population with narrow typecasting!

While we're on the topic of trolling, are you familiar with Sealioning?

Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings. The term originated with a 2014 strip of the webcomic Wondermark by David Malki, which The Independent called "the most apt description of Twitter you'll ever see".

It's a rhetorical question, no need to respond. Someone else might learn something they didn't know before today. :)

A friend of mine does too.

I'm ready to form a supervillain league with the sole motivation of performing unethical research experiments on your kind. This power must be brought to the masses!

It means you aren't suited to run a public facing business. There's nothing wrong with that, but speaking as someone with a lot of social anxiety baggage there are things I'm equipped to do well and things that I'm not. I shouldn't let that stop me from opening a business if I really want to, but if I simply don't want to deal with the social rejection elements I have to accept that I'm better off letting someone else run that side of a business.

As for the non-business elements of your question, all you can really do is conduct yourself in a way that you don't believe you'll find yourself regretting later. If you say something in a public place, especially online, consider it part of the public record. It can and will come back to bite you later. Assume your [morally positive family member here] is always watching.

I’m also here to expose bad excuses.

Not being able to help someone who is refusing to provide technical detail is a pretty damn good excuse in this industry.

If your goal is to expose the bad excuses of others, step one is to put in as much effort as you're expecting from others. :P

Edit for good measure: (links fixed, forgot about direct linking comments from outside of a lemmy instance)

• Your instance was not federating with lemmy.world. [1]
• You assumed that the blame had to rest on lemmy.world because you had "eliminate[d] all the possibilities [you] had at hand". [2]
• You made this post to vent about a bunch of unrelated nonsense and refused to provide technical detail that would assist the admins in troubleshooting. It's a given fact that your privacy is your choice, but it's also a given that you shouldn't be a dick about it if you choose to withhold details, even from PM. For the record, the information being requested was the bare minimum for an instance administrator to troubleshoot network interactions with a remote instance.
• A random (but cool) third party identified the issue with your instance not federating. [3]
• Instead of apologizing, you proceeded to act like you were entitled to that solution from the admins you wrongly accused. [4] You are not god's gift to the internet and they are not technical support for your instance.

There's no room for niceties here, you are either an asshole in denial or some brat who is too young to know any better. Sleep on it. Come to terms with that fact and make good on it, or don't. You aren't worth anyone's energy, and I'm only bothering with this summary for everyone else's sake. Your problem is fixed, it was never on lemmy.world's side to begin with, and somehow you are still acting like the failure of the admins to figure out what was busted with your shit is some Sherlock gotcha moment.

I am unaffiliated with lemmy.world and my toxicity does not represent the opinions of the admins. (but they're probably thinking it)

many of us would like to simply have full federation and curate content ourselves, though it's understandable that moderation needs to happen in some cases.

Agreed. I think the emphasis needs to be on usage of NSFW tagging, and making sure users have the ability to block magazines that they think are borderline (or just bad at tagging their content) without having to click into that magazine.

That said, I would not be opposed to a middle ground where entire instances can be flagged as NSFW so that their content is automatically tagged. 1) Instances should be able to voluntarily tag themselves like this so that all posts originating from that instance are automatically tagged, and 2) admins of other instances should be given the option to flag other instances as NSFW to their local instance as an alternative to defederating. There is still some room for overreaction with #2, but it's still putting control in the hands of that instance's users whether they want to interact with that content or not.

Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

——

Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse

Most likely because American politics frequently pound the talking point of "far left politics" when talking about the political opposition (moderate left at best from an overseas PoV), to the point where American liberals have been conditioned to assume that they are being spoken down to when this type of language is in play. American leftists are also very anti-authoritarian on average and do not appreciate being lumped into the same category as tankies by simple virtue of people only discussing left versus right.

Honestly, no. People are pretty bad at filtering for Unicode alternative characters. It can be worked around when the site admins understand what's going on, but...have fun skimming all of the Unicode code pages for every possible lookalike character.

“I’m not gonna get in trouble for this, I’m not gonna have to worry about a kid cuz I can make her abort it!” Ik that sounds retarded but I kid you not when abortions are made legal (where I live anyway) we will see a huge wave of young kids coming to get them as a form of birth control.

This is a "trust me bro" argument. It doesn't contribute much to an online discussion because it's speculation that cannot be affirmed or denied based on the information you have presented.

What about rape? Silently putting the kid up for adoption is an option, no one has know and there are couples waiting to take kids in. Well what about women’s rights!? Well, what if I told you I don’t care. I only care about the babies right to life, if he/she wants to off themselves later on (which they shouldn’t and should seek help) then that’s their choice.

This, on the other hand, is useful to the rest of us. It regretfully informs us that you are very poorly informed on the subject of mental health, and aren't likely to be persuaded to invest the effort that would be needed to change your mind. You have already chosen the life of a potential child at all costs and the mother is an acceptable casualty of circumstance, because she gets a "choice" in what she does with the trauma from being forced to bear a child against her will, and the fetus having no agency precludes all further discussion.

The fact that you will likely read that italicized text and think that is a checkmate argument in your favor is the crux of the issue. I apologize for not being willing to invest the energy in convincing you otherwise, but I also thank you for being honest with it. Way too much time gets wasted when people pretend that isn't the core pillar of their anti-abortion argument.

Now, if the mothers life is in jepordy, as well as the babies then why not abort it and save the mothers life? Well there is a thing called c section.

There is also something called non-viable pregnancies. They tend to be conveniently ignored by policy makers and half-researched attempts to steelman a pro-choice PoV. (aka, what is happening here)

If medical practitioners are placed in a position where they can't provide preventative care without risking a lawsuit, then the mother gets traumatized by being forced to carry a corpse to term, and at worst both die pointlessly. The baby will never develop agency to begin with, and the mother isn't given any agency either because she's an acceptable casualty. This has happened several times in recent news already: one woman nearly bleeding out on the floor of a salon, and another being forced to bear a baby without a head.

By all means, let's allow politicians to make these decisions for us in advance of pregnancies instead of medical practitioners. Politicians are equipped with an infallible combination of medical experience and psychic powers that allow them to anticipate all medical scenarios ahead of time and prescribe the correct dosage of lawsuits to their constituents.

Lemme tell you a story:

Appeals to the fear of non-existence are not uncommon, and sympathetic to a degree. Non-existence is the shit that keeps a lot of us up at night. Fear of non-existence and ignorance of mental health unfortunately don't make for good policy making.

I will delete this account in a few cuz apparently this isn’t the instance for me, I think I might make my own!

Not gonna actually help anything, that's not how ActivityPub works. You're participating on lemmy.world from your account on lemmy.fmhy.ml. It does however suggest that you are in search of an echo chamber, in which case...best of luck.

Since there is always some sucker to be found on Reddit who enjoys taking orders and licking boots, no sub can really defend against this move by Reddit admins. Which is probably why some other mods decided to maliciously comply instead.

Yeah, pretty much. To not reopen you have to have absolute confidence that no one on the mod team will succumb to the temptation to steal ownership of the sub. The fact that some subs have fallen prey to this (like /r/piracy) is why mods have been wringing their hands and reopening subs left and right.

Honestly this shit is early IRC drama all over again; kick all the other ops from the channel and it belongs to you, provided those people aren't registered in the ChanServ. /u/spez is the ChanServ, and he's letting everyone know he's willing to look the other way.

Just take it slow. Migrations tend to happen in waves, and we've got several more ahead of us even in the most ideal scenario for a Reddit exodus. The next pivot point will be at the end of the month when the bulk of account deletions will hit the server. From there it depends on peer pressure, how the quality of the site continues to decline, and how many more times /u/spez throws tantrums in the public media.

If you truly want to take your community with you, the best thing you can do is go cold turkey on Reddit yourself, regardless of whether you choose to self-delete or not. Deleting is better because it reduces temptation. From there, anyone who cares about timely updates from you will have to content themselves with waiting for others to repost, or they will need to follow you.

In my work, when someone comes to me and assumes I or my team is screwing up because they “eliminated all possibilities at hand” 90% of the time, they screwed up and didn’t realize it.

Yeah, at that point the onus is on the person putting forth the problem to show their work. Start listing off possibilities that you've eliminated. You can have thirty years of technical experience and still be completely useless by assuming that you're just as smart as the person you're explaining the problem to.

"I did eliminate all the possibilities I had at hand"? Naw man, anyone dropping that line has only eliminated all possibilities that they can think of, and all of that supposed thinking about "all the possibilities" is worthless if they aren't going to offer it up as a starting point.

If we're going to get academic about it, the political compass is an imprecise tool and it's a fool's errand to take an absolutist approach to assigning political ideologies on the spectrum. :P Just because an ideology is generally in the authoritarian-socialist quadrant doesn't mean it can't crib notes from a philosophy in a different quadrant. The authoritarian axis is more anchoring here than socialist/conservative.

She should be punished for mishandling classified information, as much as Trump should be punished for using an unsecured phone for his presidential duties. As we keep saying in this thread, it's possible to have a consistent opinion in all of this.

Next you have to prove that her servers were handled that way for the purpose of tampering with evidence in a court of law. Y'know, like people are trying to do right now with Trump? The problem here is the matter of proof. It's unfortunate for Trump that his lackeys were caught trying to destroy evidence and, y'know, left behind evidence of trying to do so, but that's what it takes to prosecute someone for that particular crime.

Let me reframe the question for you. Do we think Hilary and her aides should be prosecuted if evidence supported targeted tampering instead of incompetence? Yes. If it was deliberate, is it a shitty thing that she and her staff were not prosecuted because there was insufficient evidence to support a conviction? Also yes.

The important differentiator is that anime is a medium. There is high-brow stuff and low-brow stuff. Both fans and non-fans make the mistake of treating it as this all-inclusive hodgepodge, particularly because there happens to be a large market for that low-brow stuff.

Removing sexuality from the picture for a moment, both the anime and light novel scenes (where a lot of anime originates) are much more derivative and prone to copycatting than their western counterparts. Competition is fierce and sex sells. I don't like it when stuff I find creepy finds its way into something I like, and sometimes I have to move on if the author keeps coming back to it. That's just how it goes.

Find what anime you like, stick to the communities for the anime that you do like. Avoid mainstream or generic "anime" communities, because the disproportionate amount of low-brow content is going to drag discussions down in that direction. Either you accept it, ignore it, or stay away from it. And if some jackass tries to tell you that you're not a "real" anime fan if you don't accept their fetishes, nope right the fuck out of that conversation. Anyone trying to shove their fetish down your throat is just looking for self-validation in a public place and engaging with that is utterly pointless.

Nah, it's pretty evident that either you don't understand or are willfully ignorant/trolling. In the off chance that you are in fact that confident in yourself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post\_voting#Tactical\_voting

When I was younger I was one of those "enlightened centrists" who believed in things like the purity of my vote, but reality caught up with me eventually. There is no merit to such purity in first past the post systems with an entrenched plurality.

The only virtue of a wasted vote is the personal satisfaction that you get out of it, and that personal satisfaction has no real world effect on politics. The only exception is when you are voting for a visionary with overwhelmingly popular support. (i.e. you would know if one is in the race)

But are you suggesting this somehow impacts Lemmy?

Mostly irrelevant in this context, because the topic at hand is the developer denying that they condone these practices and insisting that it is a manufactured narrative. You are replying to a rebuttal of this.

Your opinion is a completely fair one to have, but we don't need to shift the conversation back to it every time someone provides a rebuttal to "the dev never actually said that" with receipts.

I wouldn’t want the Republican party to vanish and have nothing take its place. Having only Democratic party candidates to choose from would be bad.

I agree with the spirit of where you're coming from, but I don't think this is a realistic risk. More than two major political ideologies effectively exist already, but their coalitions are the parties themselves due to the limitations inherent in the US voting system.

The Democrat party already encompasses a broad spectrum of political philosophies, and they're not in the same party because they want to be. They are a de facto coalition of whatever the Republican party isn't. This is because the US leans to the right on the Overton window, and the two-party government of the US forces the role of the leftist party into being the kitchen sink coalition. This regretfully gets wallpapered over by the "radical left" narrative talking point that Republican media chestbeats over relentlessly, to the point where the average American never makes this connection.

If I were to wave my magic wand and enact voting reform that doesn't empower a two-party system, we have at least four parties worth of politicians in play:

• establishment liberals, neoliberals, etc.
• everyone in the democrat party who is to the left of them (who would realistically form more than just one party)
• non-MAGA conservatives (Republicans who jumped ship to Democrat already/are too indoctrinated to consider it, conservative politicians who don't agree with party leadership but maintain status quo for their careers)
• Far-right Freedom Caucus types. McCarthy would already backstab these guys in a heartbeat if his speakership was politically viable without them. The fact that Republican leadership cares more about ego than principles is what put them into this predicament. (largely a consequence of what safe primaries have done to political strategies, but that's another rant)

You can split this up even further by pointing out libertarians (ones that aren't really just conservatives who don't want to be Republicans anymore) and others, but it's enough to make the point. Let the Republican party collapse. Something else will immediately take its place, and as long as their replacement recognizes that the Freedom Caucus is what sank them, maybe they can steal enough of the right leaning Democrats to where they no longer need the far right crazies to be politically viable. A system that accommodates more than two parties would be better still, but congress critters are never going to vote in favor of something that weakens their own power. Voting reform will have to happen at the state level.

14 day old account on its home instance, its only posting activity is within this thread, and both comments are low effort outrage farming with images.

The emotionally evocative hyperbole in the second sentence was pretty good though. Is it your own material? If so, can you write some more persecution porn for us? You don't need images as your crutch, you've got some real writing talent going for you here.

Taking a poll on this one: Spez's PR people

• have been replaced with a poop emoji

With it being pronounced "kay-bin" (named after Linux directories with a -bin suffix), I personally vote for a smug trashcan avatar with a suspiciously snoo-like mascot sticking out of its mouth. Maybe just the antennae should be visible...that would help avoid legal claims.

Edit: Or maybe a recycling bin? It's more eco friendly, and comes with the implication that the old is being recycled for the new. :D

Edit: Recalling terrible dad joke because it wasn't obvious enough I was making fun of the Reddit admins.

I won't deny it, at least one third of my motivation for making this post was to deliver that diss.

(the other two thirds are split between Chad deserving the recognition, and doing my part to make this place more attractive than Reddit)

Would you and your BF enjoy shooting at alien scum while your characters scream DEMOCRACY!! and HAVE A NICE CUP OF LIBERTEA!! at the top of their lungs? Would you be entertained by accidentally killing each other in the heat of battle when you radio for an ammo drop?

Then Helldivers would be for you. Join the forces of Super Earth and spread Managed Democracy throughout the universe!

PROTIP: If you want to assert dominance in your relationship, find a gun with a bayonet attachment. You will mix up the melee and interact buttons on at least one occasion.

The title of that article does not support its conclusion. Lazy pasting what I commented the last time I saw this.

Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn't) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.

What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:

Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.

You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.

This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here...for now.

The cycle of social tech becoming mainstream and conversational norms being dragged down to a least common denominator predates modern social media. The earliest example I can think of is Usenet (newsgroups):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal\_September

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, which continued through to 2015 according to Jason Koebler, making it feel like it is always "September" to the more experienced users.

It's the same cycle. Social tech starts off being used by a smaller number of technically inclined people. Communities are smaller and normalized civility is more commonplace. Peer pressure holds people to those norms. Once a social tech balloons from mainstream interest, the norms (or zeitgeist if you prefer) shift toward the incoming population because they outnumber the early population and exert more peer pressure. The new norms become a compromise between the norms of the incoming mob and what the community moderators are willing/able to enforce.

It's tempting to put a label on the incoming demographic and use it in a derogatory way, but removing the label from the equation doesn't change the source of unhappiness; the memory of what once was and the knowledge that it can't last when cultural dilution sets in.

(no, I'm not providing any solutions to the problem, this is just rambling that might provide more insightful people with a starting point)

No one cares what either of us are, it was only relevant to my anecdote. :P Your commenting pattern appears to have become somewhat manic, so I'll leave you to it.

having people go out for original research is basically saying “Let people make up bullshit.”… not a good idea.

Yeah, I've seen what this does to fan wikis. There is a certain type of personality that thrives on having their version of reality be what is reflected in wiki articles, and they will revert any and all attempts to excise their personal theories. If admins step in to break up the edit war, it's clearly "favoritism" and "admins should only exist in service to the users and have no say in content". Some of these wiki addicts go out of their way to become the wiki equivalent of Reddit's supermods in order to ensure that they have the upper hand in these content disputes.

"No original research" is one of the core pillars of your ability to push back against delusional nonsense. If you're determined to live without it, you need to have very strong content standards in its place to decide the difference between objective fact and someone's conspiracy vomit. Good content policies save you from having to waste a bunch of time on bad faith arguments about why the content of your wiki pages have to abandon fact for massaging someone's ego.

(Somewhat of a tangent, but if you're bored you can look into a brief history of AlexShepherd's crusade against circumcision in the Silent Hill fandom. He's not the only person I've seen thrive on wikis who don't adopt an original research policy, but definitely the most entertaining read.)

Supervillain is giving him too much credit. I'll grant you that he's a cartoon character, but cartoon supervillains have more complexity than him.

Kanye and Musk embody a nearly identical archetype and we'd have the exact same problem if they ran for president and succeeded. The cult of personality that follows shitty celebrities is a self-perpetuating one. It's rooted in nasty people admiring how important people can be nasty like them but without tangible social consequences. They form a mob around their cult heroes for that exact reason, strength in numbers. A safe space for the trash of humanity.

People in politics and business find Trump useful because he'll open doors for them in exchange for attention. They get cozy with leading him around by the nose with that attention until they forget that he will backstab them when they stop giving him that attention or there is more value in betraying them. Musk does the exact same shit, so again, I don't think that Trump himself is worthy of being viewed in the light you're giving him. Similarly shitty celebrities are drop in replacements for him, and worse, they might be more intelligent in their cruelty.

all they had to say is "no we aren't tankies" and people just took them at their word lol

IMO it's a little more cynical than that, they rephrased the narrative into one that they could cleanly reject and be quoted on. As others have pointed out, it is almost a certainty that 1) they do not consider themselves or their ideology to be fascist, and 2) they aren't supporting genocide if they do not acknowledge that the peoples in question are actually subject to genocide.

Edit: ...Which you've already affirmed in one of your previous comments, my bad.

eek, it's the fuzz! Run away!

More seriously, if anyone likes this sort of material it's worth giving a translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius a read. It's a very dry but thought-provoking series of observations recorded by a Roman emperor and stoic philosopher. Rather than trying to read it as a traditional book, I recommend stashing a copy of it in your bathroom (or keeping a copy in your phone's e-reader app) so that you can slowly thumb through it over time without falling asleep. :) You'll get to the end eventually, and if I had to credit this thinking exercise somewhere I'm inclined to steer people in his direction. It's great material for reflecting on the pursuit of justice and self-betterment.

I see no major reason to advocate for one translation over another, but if you're the sort of person who had trouble narrowing down which instance of lemmy to sign up with initially, you can crib off of me and go with The Essential Marcus Aurelius.

No piece of software is a utopia on its first major outing. And kbin has many technical hurdles it must overcome before it worry about it's presentation. A sculpture cannot be polished before it has been shaped.

I agree in principle (devops engineer), but a user retention issue has abruptly entered the fray due to the recent spike of interest. While I'm the sort of person who prioritizes core functionality and stability almost every time, this is one of those rare situations where I'd consider it important to triage usability and aesthetics alongside those. That's way more than Ernest can handle on his own, but it's up to him to recognize it as a potential priority and start reaching out for help so that the problems can be solved in tandem.

Not everyone is going to agree with me on this one. Pretty sure a lot of people predating the Reddit surge are happy to take a "when it gets done" approach to this sort of thing and aren't worried about permanently retaining the Reddit crowd and sticking it to /u/spez. A significant portion of users do though, and there is a non-negligible amount of IT talent to be tapped from those enthusiasts.

(Yes, I put my money where my mouth is, but 1) coding is not one of my top vocations and 2) it's up to Ernest whether he wants any assistance on the things that I've offered to help with.)