This but unironically. I’ve got a coworker who took vacation days to help build a temple up in Pennsylvania. He was incredibly proud of his contribution and happy to participate.

With the electoral college and FPTP, even opting in is of dubious benefit.

If Nato fails and Russia attacks

That already happened back in 2022 (arguably all the way back to '08). NATO didn’t do shit because it’s just the US military wearing a dozen different European baseball caps. And after the US finished scrubbing out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, it didn’t have the logistics to launch another Asiatic land war (while keeping China at gunpoint in the Pacific and Iran in check in the Middle East).

American slippage is already apparent across Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Things are only going to get worse for DC going forward.

You would have to be suicidal to stick your neck into that mess, at this stage of the game.

The idea that medieval peasants somehow had more free time than the average modern american still is absolute bullshit

Paleontologists will tell you otherwise. One reason you had all those giant cathedrals going up in the Medieval Era stemmed from the enormous excess labor just wasting around in between harvest seasons.

Agricultural surplus creates free time. It’s the whole reason why people opt for farming over hunter gathering.

Dems have to deliver on those policies when given the opportunity. If all they can deliver are excuses, they won’t have a base that trusts them.

Go down to Mexico and see how this is done. AMLO and Sheinbaum have been on a historic electoral tear, in large part because they’ve been so effective at delivering their reforms. They’re crazy popular right now.

There’s a staunch libertarian view on Lemmy, wherein people will advocate for personal liberty ahead of technological progress. The Country Mouse has it better than the City Mouse, because he can own a gun and drive a big truck and smoke weed without the neighbors ratting him out to the cops. The lack of basic amenities - subways and school systems and high speed internet and big medical centers - is worth the increased personal autonomy.

The “Serfs had it better” trope takes this to its logical conclusion. Rolling back the technological frontier 500 years is worth it, because the surveillance/police state and the corporate oligopoly even on the fringe of society is seriously that bad.

I don’t agree. But I can’t really argue against it. This is just a personal preference. Its not any kind of objective truth.

So you’re not really a serf if you’ve got plumbing? The labor relationship with your employers isn’t the issue?

The dark cowboy rides again.

If you can buy a ten and one works, you’ve saved money. Two work and you’re making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.

I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

My real point is that if they had been more subtle Lincoln would absolutely have let them keep slavery.

Lincoln wouldn’t have enjoyed the majorities necessary to rewrite the Constitution without the Civil War. He’d have been in the same position as Quincy Adams or Filmore, two outspoken abolitionists who lacked the tools to functionally end the practice.

The war, the voluntary dissolution of opposition in Congress, and the massive depopulation that neutered immediate blowback left the door wide open for revolutionary change. And Lincoln - unlike his successor Johnson or even more distant successor Truman - walked through that doorway. That’s what makes Lincoln significant - he was presented with a serious opportunity to affect change and he took it, when less lucky presidents never had the opportunity and less moral presidents never had the conviction.

A lesson the modern South seems to understand well if the last few decades of the Republican party are any example.

What makes guys like Trump and Bush Jr so horrifying is the fact that they did pounce on their opportunities to affect radical change. The Republican Party is seizing their moment and reinventing the country while the Dems dither, trying to extract as much personal profit from the decaying system.

The modern South is a consequence of bold Republicans capitalizing on a wellspring of white nationalism that’s been bubbling up since the Civil Rights Era, while Democrats seek to apologize for FDR/Kennedy/LBJ and sell off a generation of progressive reform to the highest bidder. When you look at the Dem strategy in states like Texas and Florida, you see this in spades. Candidates falling over themselves to prove they hate student protesters and brown foreigners and union advocates as much as any Republican.

The lesson we’re all learning is that you might as well try to reign in hell, cause heaven is a lost cause.

It doesn’t need to be effective, because the pendulum of politics always swings back in the end. Trump will become the next scapegoat of American politics just like he was back in 2018 and then 2020. If the economy tops itself (as is increasingly likely), they’ll be facing even bigger headwinds. Even if it doesn’t, inflation and sky high rents aren’t going away. Consumer debt isn’t getting any lighter. The Trump Admin isn’t going to be nice to people.

That’s the electoral strategy at the end of the day. Just to keep being the Other Option and wait for people to come around. Wait as long as it takes. Maybe it’ll take twenty years, like in Arizona. Maybe forty years, like in Georgia. Maybe it’ll be over 60, like in Utah. Doesn’t matter. Just keep squatting on the Other Option until the day comes.

Or drinking from the same well of propaganda.

The idea that men can be duped by a wall of Murdoch press but women can’t seems dubious.

It is expected that many .worlders would just jump ship to another instance.

Why? Why wouldn’t they just consume the click bait content and shameless pandering propagated by the incoming owner, just like folks still on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit?

For as long as one organization doesn’t control 60%+ of all user’s instances

You don’t need 60% of instances. You need the plurality of site content. That’s what the users are coming for.

the GOP has gotten more extreme in many ways

They ate the Dixiecrats, who were already openly white nationalist. But it’s the same extremism, just migrated from one party to the other by way of the oil and automotive industry barons.

Looking back at what the John Birch folks said back then, it’s a lot more mainstream.

The Birchers were mainstream. They got Goldwater in '68 and Reagan in '80. The Tea Party and the MAGA movement can trace straight lines back to Bircher organizers and funders.

I’m just not as confident that the anti democratic sentiment isn’t just rhetoric meant for political theatre.

The problem is that most of the damage is already done. The VRA has been shredded. House seats are heavily gerrymandered. Systematic disenfranchisement is institutionalized. Media is captured by corporate interests loyal (or at least amenable) to the party. There’s not a whole lot left to dismantle. Republicans have heavily entrenched, functionally unassailable state level majorities across the country.

The real threats the GOP face are from within - business and paleocon wings feuding over orthodoxy like 12th century Popes.

And democracy at least keeps this kind of fighting civil. Which is its purpose. Give people a non-violent outlet for civic participation, but limit the terms of debate to what the elites desire.

Nobody currently winning wants that system to change.

Lincoln was totally willing to keep slavery to end the civil war.

The thing about Lincoln wasn’t that he was willing to keep slavery to end the war. Virtually everyone was willing to do that.

Lincoln was willing to end slavery to end the war. This was the truly revolutionary view and the reason he’s so celebrated.

So he freed the southern slaves and ordered the South burned to the ground instead

I don’t think you get to rampage all the way into Gettysburg, looting and burning and raping and massacring your way straight through the heart of the Midwest, and then discover moralism during Sherman’s March.

He wasn’t the abolitionist hero American history portrays him as.

He literally was, though. He wielded abolition, first as a weapon to bleed the Confederacy dry and then as a sucture to knit a new nation out of the 13th-15th amendments.

He achieved policy the most radical abolitionists hadn’t even dreamed of ten years prior. An absolute living legend.

If only he’d made Butler his VP or… idk… ducked.

The majority of white women voted for Trump, tho

That wouldn’t make for a pithy comic punchline

the other guy comes off as, “Phew, I was just making small talk and don’t actually care how you’re doing.”

What if the other guy is also depressed or otherwise dealing with his own shit and just looking for pleasant socialization rather than emotional baggage carrying?

Is it possible for two people to enjoy each other’s company without airing all their dirty laundry on each other?

Things were better before they got worse, sure.

But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.