Yes.

The pressure is mounting. The overt harm that the billionaires do merely by their existence - merely by holding wealth that could instead have served to keep the poorest people sheltered and fed - becomes more obvious with every passing day and every newly unhoused and unfed American.

But, psychopaths that they necessarily are, the billionaires are unwilling to give up any of their wealth, and in fact are instead looking for any opportunity to increase it. Always.

So, to them, the solution is simple - we need to kill as many poor people as possible, so they won’t be around being poor and making billionaires look bad.

And to all too many of them, that much the better if most of the dead are minorities.

It turns out that their Great Replacement conspiracy theory was projection - they insisted that there was some sort of conspiracy to eliminate whites because they were working on their own conspiracy to eliminate minorities.

It’s simple really - eliminate DEI and, more to the point, put a chill on hiring minorities generally, then cut Medicaid (and if possible, institute work requirements for the little bit that’s left) so that people without jobs have no healthcare and monorities are more likely to be without jobs. Then just sit back and smile as millions of people, with minorities overrepresented, die.

That’s exactly what they’re very deliberstely doing, right now.

Almost.

The expectation is to work as many hours as you can, buy the cheapest groceries, bring them home to the cheapest apartment you can find, and just sit there until you die.

I watched it in person, sort of.

I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.

And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.

Occam’s Razor says that if nothing notable has changed even under Trump, then it’s likely that the simple fact of the matter is that the allegations were mostly true and it’s just that the CIA, as opposed to Trump and his minions and lackeys, won’t lie on his behalf.

I didn’t get it right off.

“National anthem of the internet” was the clue I needed.

I propose that the name of the Supreme Court be officially changed to Donnie’s Rubber-stamping Service.

They aren’t even pretending to uphold law or precedent or even the Constitution. They’re just using whatever illogic and lies might serve to let them hand Trump whatever he wants.

Which means that what they actually are are criminal insurrectionists - active co-conspirators in a deliberate and concerted effort to defy the Constitution, overthrow the government of the United States and replace it with an institutionalized (rather than ad hoc) plutocratic oligarchy.

This whole “loneliness epidemic” thing is almost enough to make me feel sorry for extroverts.

Almost.

But you know - as an introvert, I’ve spent my entire life dealing with smugly well-meaning extrovert assholes who think my introversion is some sort of problem that needs to be fixed, so now that society is shifting in my direction - now that living my life without having to subject myself to a bunch of spiritual vampires demanding my attention is easier than it’s ever been - I just can’t really find it in myself to care that they aren’t coping so well with it. Almost, but not quite.

To be sort of fairish, I get the impression that anyone who would say that is the sort of person who could read a book cover to cover and manage to not get anything more than a rough outline of the plot out of it anyway.

Science in general for that matter.

It’s almost as if Trump and his cronies and sycophants looked around and picked out all of the rhings that were going to be most vital and significant in coming years, then said, “Okay, these are the things we’re not going to do.”

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m never going to stand in the way of anyone’s right to haul off and punch themself in the face.

But here’s the thing: MAGA and the manosphere may hate clean energy, but they won’t be able to stop the rise of renewables. All they can do, possibly, is stop the rise of renewables in the United States.

That’s the most important (and most stultifyingly stupid) point. They’re acting as if they can stop the rise of alternative energy, and they quite simply can’t. It IS the future, and the only real question is whether the US is going to be an active part of that future or not. And for all intents and purposes Trump and his cadre of angry, shallow dipshits have chosen “not.”

That’s exactly my concern. It’s gotten too much exposure too quickly recently, so it doesn’t feel organic, and between subscription gatekeeping, software level censorship snd the reputation anti-features, it just feels like it’s been cynically designed specifically to undermine the benefits of the fediverse and turn it into another place where narratives can and will be shaped and controlled.

That’s the way the fediverse works.

Someone posts something to a community on one instance, then it’s mirrored to all of the federated instances, and people on all of those different instances see it and, if so inclined, reply to it. It doesn’t really matter which instance it’s posted to or which instance the response comes from - it’s all shared throughout all of the federated instances.

rimu has said he’ll make it more neutral

I’ll believe it when I see it.

It’s an odd thing - the Lemmy devs are notoriously opinionated and intolerant, and are constantly castigated for it, but I don’t recall ever seeing even a single hint of their opinions or even their intolerance baked into the Lemmy software.

Piefed, meanwhile, is a direct reflection of the dev’s biases right from the start, and with everything from the curated subscription lists to the karma and private voting, seems designed explicitly for the purpose of empowering bias.

Say what you will about Dessalines and Nutomic - at least they keep their biases to their own instance and out of the Lemmy software. And further, they appear to have gone to some lengths to make the software as neutral as possible - not only not reflecting any specific bias but limited in ways that make it difficult for it to even be used to impose bias.

And the same can NOT be said for Rimu and Piefed.

It tracks karma, automatically collapses replies and hides threads based on downvote thresholds and attaches icons to usernames to tell other users in advance that they have been downvoted in the past. And alongside that, votes are hidden. So a few determined users (or even one determined user and a few bots) can easily silence other users or even effectively censor content just by mass downvoting.

Just like Reddit, and notably NOT like the rest of the threadiverse which has done away with karma, doesn’t auto-hide downvoted users or content snd makes votes public.

I don’t trust Piefed at all - they’re far too eager to curate my experience, and they’ve reintroduced all of the reputation anti-features (plus more) that were part of what drove me away from Reddit and the absence of which is part of what I like about Lemmy and Mbin.

If you’re contemplating a second instance, I don’t much care, because I can simply not use it. If you’re contemplating a move, I think it’s an awful idea.

I think the oppression was sort of secondary and that the most important thing to keep was the corruption.

In fact, I think that that was exactly how they each sold the reforms to the rest of their respective governments - by convincing the politicians that they could implement some measure of capitalism without losing any of their privilege - that in fact, if they played it right, they could do even better collecting bribes from private business owners than they ever did siphoning off public funds.

Better than average, but that’s not saying much.

I built my last three computers ( which basically means I can read and follow instructions and successfully match up plugs and sockets and devices and slots), and I can generally track down and sort out simple bugs. And I can generally work out how to use software (I taught myself to do 3D modeling, for instance). But that’s the extent of it - as soon as it gets more complex than that, I’m hopelessly lost.

Wow… people are turned off by genocide. Who’da thunk it?