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Cake day: November 8th, 2024

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  • Miss Cleo was big in the 90s. And she wasn’t even the dumbest one. Americans have always believed in stupid bullshit. The CIA used to hire psychics too. Go back to the 1920s, and Americans pretty much took it for granted that fairies are real.

    What’s changed recently is that the news media went from being a mostly curated place where completely lunacy was hard to find, to a right wing clown show led by con artists. When I was a kid news was for nerds only, now it’s more like the national sport where everyone has their team. And don’t underestimate the degree to which this was done deliberately - Elon buying Twitter was a pretty clear example of the billionaire mafia taking a platform that was sort of trying to be more attached to reality and making it a lot dumber and more right wing.


  • Because protests don’t do shit. There were mass protests over police brutality in 2020. Didn’t do shit and the right wing media reaction arguably helped kill off police reform legislation that was in progress before the protests.

    The reason protests from the left don’t do shit is because the most popular media is controlled by Maga. The top social media network for news, the top podcast, and the top cable TV news are all outright maga propaganda. A narrative can arise without them, but they will determine what happens to it. So last time, the protests arose due to George Floyd, but the right wing media turned it into a narrative about lawless riots, using exaggeration and fake images.

    See also Palestine protests.

    Basically, the left is fucked in the US until something changes in the media so there’s no point in trying.



  • It’s completely unrealistic in the short term, more so in the long term. This would require arresting millions of people - there simply isn’t enough jail space. They would have to execute people on sight, and that’s also not realistic because low level soldiers would refuse (there’s a reason the nazis needed to build a system instead of just executing jews on sight). Obviously if this were attempted it would result in extremely violent resistence which would destroy any economic, political, or other incentives for such an action.

    Instead we can see what happened in Russia for a more realistic example - there was a slow elimination of dissent. Even today there are some Russians who vocally oppose Putin and don’t get arrested so long as they stay small enough. And that’s in a place where the society never had a culture of freedom to begin with, so here it will probably be much harder and obviously MAGA is much dumber than the Russians too. But regardless that’s why it’s very important to be vocal now and oppose any silencing of dissent, like the removal of pro-Palestine activists here on green cards or even the pardoning of pro-Trump people, as this combined with harsh punishments for others is effectively silencing of speech. It may not affect you now, but if they keep at it for a decade or two it’ll get to you eventually.




  • I’ve often been a defender of Democrats being realistic, but Schumer is on some bullshit here.

    It’s unclear what, if anything, Schumer got in return for his decision to allow the House bill to proceed

    Says it all right there. The Republican bill was just a list of laughably insane things they knew Democrats would oppose so they could blame the shutdown on them. It actually cuts funding of DC’s local budget forcing them to fire teachers and even cops. Again, nothing to do with the federal government. It just grabs power from a local government and says that they can’t use their own local tax revenues to educate kids and fight crime. It’s complete rabid insanity that has no point other than to bully a blue city. And Schumer’s like “Sure, ok. whatever.”


  • Because to me personally this kinda feels like America is still stuck in those slavery/segregation times

    Yes. American culture is very much based on social hierarchies, and slavery created a very easy, color-coded social hierarchy. So it’s hard to get rid of because a lot of people are invested in it - whether they admit it or not.

    Americans (except for the most liberal) tend to look at race as a biological reality and regard anyone saying race isn’t science as woke extremism. Generally when science conflicts with common/traditional sense in America, common sense wins. The only reason quantum physics isn’t banned from schools yet is because probably only about 10% of Americans know the first thing about quantum physics.

    Americans also regard a wide variety of racial discrimination - such as in dating (including who you allow your kids to date), or where you live, or where you send your kids to school, as “not racist”. This is considered not racist because the goal isn’t to harm racial minorities, but rather you’re just doing it to protect your place in the social hierarchy. The race-based social hierarchy. And if this harms minorities, well it’s not like it’s your fault right?

    And if you dare try to suggest that the above is racist, people will get very angry at you and do things like elect Trump.

    So yeah, racism is still very prevalent in the US.


  • Is the point of the community to promote conservativism or to discuss it? Conservatives aren’t banned from other Lemmy communities, I don’t see any reason to ban non-conservatives from this one.

    Besides it’s probably not so much that the community has been “taken over” but that conservative dogma shows low survivability in the presence of alternative ideas, hence the need for conservative safe spaces like Fox News and truth social. I mean really posting Trump bootlicking by Jonathan Turley is just not going to compete in a free marketplace of ideas.


  • To me I’m not really sure what his reply even means. I think it’s some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:

    Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn’t use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.

    Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn’t use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon’s ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it’s really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.


  • He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about “poorly batched RPCs” in the timeline which makes zero sense because that’s obviously not how HTTP works.

    The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, “I’m so smart” idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he’s a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.

    *Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.



  • There’s probably as many theories as there are people.

    My own is that cognitive dissonance is a powerful force, especially for a narcissist. Hitler spent 4 of the best years of his life is the pure misery of the trenches of WWI, and even worse - running between the trenches to deliver messages. He was gassed so badly it put him in the hospital for the final month of the war. Hitler was probably also deluded about Germany’s failing position in the war, probably kept in the dark by German propaganda and made quite gullible by his fierce patriotism. So when Germany surrendered, that must have actually both shocking and enraging for him. And we know that because he frequently attacked the treaty of Versailles.

    The “stab in the back” myth is the idea that Germany’s surrender was corruptly carried out by politicians, and due to common antisemitism across Germany and Europe generally it soon focused on Jews. In reality there was virtually no Jewish people significantly involved with the surrender and events leading up to it, but that didn’t matter because as is often the case today, emotional truth is more important than reality. Given that Hitler couldn’t possibly bring himself to believe that he incurred tremendous pain and suffering by voluntarily and stupidly buying into an imperialistic war that was doomed to failure from the start, the stab in the back myth would’ve been extremely appealing to him. He wanted to believe it, so he did.

    So when he happened to be assigned to monitor the DAP - the predecessor to the Nazi Party - he was ready to wholeheartedly accept their antisemitic ideas. Even though he seemed to get along with Jewish officers during the war, by a year after the war he was already talking about “removing” the Jews.




  • Trump had the best performance among minority voters of any President in recent memory. And then:

    • One token black cabinet member - in HUD of course, just like last time
    • Top priority is deporting Hispanics specifically
    • Silences and discussion of diversity/inclusion in federal agencies on threat of firing
    • Eliminates ability to do anything about discrimination
    • Approves ethnic cleansing of Gaza
    • Allies closely with South African who blamed LA wildfires on black firefighters and Boeing’s door problems on racial diversity

    I think we need to be unafraid to say the truth. Trump is definitely, obviously racist. Yes, people do get accused of being racist unfairly. Trump is not one of them.


  • So the article just ignores the two cases that actually establish birthright citizenship:

    the Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers*, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes.

    United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649

    In case that’s too old-timey to be understood, there’s also

    no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.

    Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982)

    *“foreign sovereigns and their ministers” means basically diplomats.

    Note that the author has a “bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in public policy, finance, and international relations from the University of Colorado.” He has no legal training which makes it a bit less surprising that he missed the key cases, but then again all you really need to know is how to use wikipedia.