I don’t know if that’s a part of the problem or just a separate problem altogether. We expect people to partner up, when we should normalize people being alone. When people don’t or can’t, we might be hardwired in our monkey brains to see them as outcasts from the group.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but the truth is that some people just aren’t meant to be loved. I think accepting that is, for some people, a bit part of growing up and becoming a more mature person. You gotta stop being envious of others who possess something you never will and just kinda…get on with your life. Find a cause you care about. Put your energy elsewhere. Maybe stop watching romcom anime.

I’m sorry, I don’t speak “shill.”

I read enough to recognize a bullshit strawman argument. At least don’t be so lazy you’re unwilling to type it out yourself.

So you’re solution is to give Republican’s majority? Sounds to me like you’re on the wrong side, mate.

First of all, it’s “your solution,” not “you’re solution.” Learn to spell. Second of all, I am not telling anyone to “not vote” for Democrats. I’m saying that the argument that if Democrats are given control over both the legislative and executive branches of government that it’ll result in positive legislation getting passed is simply untrue. The only real reason you can give for electing Democrats is to prevent Republicans from getting elected, because Republicans will actively pass legislation. Horrible, comically evil legislation. As such, presenting the choice as between “good” and “bad” political forces is simply wrong. The choice can only be honestly presented as between “neutral, fundamentally ineffectual” and “absolutely heinous” political forces. Optimism in the Democrats is ludicrous and comes across as disingenuous at best and deluded at worst. If you want to court leftist voters, the only real talking point you have is that it’s not a vote for the Democrats, but one against Republicans. Because that’s at least nominally true. Both parties want to preserve the political status quo of the country. Republicans just want to do it while hurting minorities, and Democrats don’t care as much about that. Minor distinction, but that’s the most we can get.

Oh, it’s not that both sides are bad. It’s that there’s two sides, and the powers that be are all on the same one, and we’re all on the other, and we just happen to have “some people *ahem*” too dim to realize it.

on holy disaster

unholy

I’m not gonna waste my time reading a screenshot of someone else’s conversation like it’s an actual argument.

We can call their bluff or we can just take the beating without trying to fix anything.

The end result is the same, though, because, in this particular matter, both sides are similar enough in their collective hatred of the poor that a law like this won’t get passed. It doesn’t matter if you get rid of Manchin and Sinema. It only got 40 D votes. Manchin and Sinema might bump that up to 42. Or the people who replace them might vote the same way they did on this, because there is a core ideological opposition that exists across party lines to actually helping the working class.

There’s always some obstacle that prevents the Democrats from delivering what they promise.

I mean, it’s just so weird, isn’t it? Like how it keeps happening every. single. time. Oh well, maybe if we try getting the Dems a majority, plus the Presidency, one more time we’ll get a different result. That’s a totally sane course of action, right?

They knew it would fail long before it went to vote. Much of what goes before any part of the legislative branch of government for a vote is purely performative.

That’s a good point. He was actually interning with Cartoon Network in 2001 and also attended a school for the visual arts before forming MCR in 2001. Still, it was never his real first “job” or the area in which he first found professional success. But it was the first “thing” for which he was professionally trained.

Kinda wild to me Gerard Way went on to become a successful graphic novel author. Not a lot of people become so successful across two largely dissimilar artistic mediums. Anyway, I hope Gerard Way is doing Gerard Okay. He always seemed nice. I mean…sad, but nice.

If there’s one thing I understand, it’s the desire to bicker with people. But I will say that anyone who is a true flamewar veteran knows you have to be able to pick your battles well enough that moderators won’t get involved and will let you have it out in the comments with people.

I think that any accusations regarding their moderation policies or agitprop should be supported with actual, physical evidence, and not just personal accounts from individuals who claim to have had negative experiences. It’s lemmy. There’s a record of everything. Getting that evidence wouldn’t be difficult. Time consuming, maybe, but not difficult. That said, if we are banking on personal accounts, I’ve been on .ml for a while, and while I don’t comment in political threads, generally, I’ve seen little to nothing that coincides with what other users have said they’ve seen or experienced. I have an array of accounts across several major lemmy instances, and lemmy.ml seems…normal…banal even? There’s a lot of benign, largely apolitical communities there that are worth participating in. Saying “well, their political communities are terrible” is all well and good if that’s your opinion, but there is such a thing as throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Honestly, the ongoing discussion of defederation I keep seeing here and in places like lemmy.world comes across as ideological competition. If some instances, like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, want to reproduce the same kind of vaguely liberal ideological soup that you find on reddit, that’s up to them. And that’s what it seems like is happening. I could be wrong about that, but lemmy.world comes across to me as a Fediverse Democrat stronghold. I’ve seen a lot of people there unironically defend things Joe Biden and the Democrats have done that are, from a leftist perspective, completely indefensible. And I have to wonder how many of the complaints about moderators abusing their authority are a result of people going into a Marxist space and pushing unwelcome liberal perspectives where they are obviously not wanted and suffering the consequences of those choices.

I suppose it’s probably a natural course of events that you’ll see instances defederating from one another as time goes on in order to produce the ideological echo chamber that generates the least amount of complaints from users. It’ll start with .ml, but I imagine eventually .world and .works will defederate from any instance still federated with .ml, like hexbears and blahaj. This will, of course, reduce the content and average user count across all instances, leading to people becoming progressively dissatisfied with lemmy instances that already had little discussion and content as they become virtual ghost towns, with people eventually abandoning lemmy and going back to reddit with their tail between their legs or some other godawful source of corporate-sanctioned content.

But part of what’s great about allowing self-determination in a profitless, federated network like ours is the choice of allowing said network to slowly wither and die for the sake of its users avoiding minor inconveniences, like having to interact with people they might disagree with in any capacity or suffering a temporary ban from a community.

Do you think Israel in this scenario is the Rebel Alliance or the Empire? Because you seem confused.

You’re right. Israel was always there and then the Palestinians just showed up randomly one day and attacked them out of nowhere. There is no decades long history of apartheid and outright oppression of the Palestinian people by the state of Israel and this conflict has no roots in colonialism or ethnostate politics. /s

I’m really not sure I understand what point he’s trying to make.

The point is that there exists a fundamental dissonance between events as they transpire in fiction and for which the audience is emotionally invested and those same kinds of events as they happen in real life and the audience’s perception of them as they happen in real life.

Star Wars was originally inspired by Lucas’s perspective on the Vietnam War. The Storm Troopers are, in that sense, comparable to American forces killing unarmed Vietnamese farmers. Most Americans who saw Star Wars never made that connection because this is in conflict with the audience’s internalized notion of “America good” and “America’s enemies bad.” As such, in watching and enjoying the story of Star Wars, you are ironically investing yourself into a narrative that inverts your normative ideological position. You can extrapolate this onto the current conflict in Ghaza without much effort.

First of all he’s equating fiction to reality which is ridiculous at the very least.

They are not being “equated” - they are being compared. He’s making an implied comparison between fictional events and real world current events in order to highlight similarities between the two. Specifically, he’s doing a form of comparison called “juxtaposition.” Being able to do this is a very basic element of media literacy.

he took revenge on the people who actually killed his family

Well, no, the specific individuals who killed his family were probably the stormtroopers stationed on Tatooine, whom he never actually interacted with. The specific people onboard the Death Star that were not part of the Empire’s military high command had virtually nothing at all to do with his family’s death.

As opposed to taking revenge on people that just happened to be in the approximate vicinity of people who killed his family. The Death Star was a military base.

The individual in the image literally says that he “immediately joined the armed resistance and literally blew up the enemy base.” Not sure what your point is here, unless you’re implying that you believe that the Palestinians who are fighting against Israel are only attacking indiscriminate civilian targets and not military ones.