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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • So i agree that the second Trump administration is going to suck in most every way possible, like the first one but worse because they’re prepared this time.

    BUT

    I think people overrate a government’s ability to influence the conditions in a given country. I think a country is made what it is by history, geography, technology, sociology, ideology, economics, and the accumulation of small decisions over centuries.

    If the Trump administration wants to end democracy in the US, or if a hypothetical based administration were to attempt a switch to ranked choice voting, both ideals would be impossible to implement because our ideals are limited by practical reality. Both would fail regardless of being good or bad changes, because radical change is really hard when the conditions aren’t met for it, especially when it’s opposed by the rest of the country. If the country just isn’t ready to transition to fascism right now, there’s not much that Trump can do to make it.

    We talk a lot about how powerful people changed the world, but i think far more often they’re just the embodiment of a societal trend, and they couldn’t change the world if they weren’t. Change isn’t done by powerful people but deeper movements in humanity, with powerful people riding them like a wave.

    As to where the deeper movements in humanity are leading us right now, i refuse to guess, trying to predict the future is the best way to look like an idiot



  • Lemmy is an improvement over Reddit in terms of its business structure. We don’t yet know what the downsides will be of decentralized social media at scale, but we know that it beats a tech company that went from venture capital to publicly traded while already deep in enshittification.

    Lemmy is not an improvement over Reddit in terms of design: it’s designed the exact same way, so it has the same set of advantages and disadvantages.

    The improvement in community is hard to guesstimate, and will change as the site grows. Aside from the company, it was often the users that made Reddit suck, and Lemmy is completely capabe of sucking in the exact same ways.






  • I was reading this like “this guy should be a furry, it’s what fixed me”

    And then you reveal that you’re a furry. Bro, that’s more than a saving grace, that’s absolutely the solution.

    Now in most contexts, just being a furry already makes you a subgroup, so you get so socialize off that alone; but when you’re in a furry space, it can get awkward integrating into a new group because the commonality you have is not as relevant. In those contexts, it’s easier to socialize in a sub-subgroup within furry. Like we have this group of 5-viewer streamers that all hang out with eachother on and offline. Being able to draw will make you popular just in general. And then there’s the dancers, hackers, programmers, gamedevs, suiters, activists, kinda subgroups within furry that make it effortless to integrate socially.

    The above is true online and off. As far as IRL things go, your local convention will be once a year and that’s probably not enough, if you’re in the US there should be a local scene that will make it a lot more regular. Online and offline feed into eachother.

    That’s all i can think of, if you’re a furry you have a chance to not be lonely for long


  • The best explanation i’ve seen is this:

    Places that put children under the authority of adults (schools, camps, etc) are appealing for child predators; but where most will kick them out when/if found, the Catholic Church makes it easier for them to stay in.

    This is because of a religious belief that God judges men for their sins, eventually rehabilitates them, and the job of mere mortals is to forgive and forget.

    I really like this explanation because it doesn’t flatter my atheist sentiment and provides a very neat and rational cause-and-effect relation, it’s a thing that’s specific about the Church compared to other institutions.

    Priests also take a vow of chastity, in people’s minds they’re supposed to be above sexual desire; and they have an extra aura of authority compared to the average teacher or summer camp instructor. Both of these things makes it harder for children and parents to question them.

    And once they do question them, the Church gets a similar behavior to other institutions where they’ll try to protect their reputation by burying the case. I’m not sure which positions are supposed to be held for life, i assume most of them, and so that makes firing someone (or whatever the right word is in this context) a bigger deal.

    Thems my attempted explanations




  • You’re coming at this from the design and community aspect. I don’t think Lemmy makes significant improvements over Reddit on those fronts, it’s designed the same, has the same benefits and drawbacks. As of right now the small size of the community makes it lacking in diversity and impractical for niche interests (aside from tech-related ones).

    My case for Lemmy being better is a business case: Reddit was a for-profit company backed by venture capital, and is now publicly traded. They are extremely susceptible to enshittification, and are in fact already deep in that process.

    Meanwhile, Lemmy is an open source software that enables users to host their own social media. It’s not even a business at all, i’m not even sure if the developer (LemmyNet) is a business or a person or some other legal entity.

    Fediverse social medias (Lemmy, Mastodon) are structurally resilient to the enshittification that we’re seeing from corporate social medias, and i like that a lot.


  • Ironically, i feel like you’re putting too much emotional stock in what it means to vote. You’re not cheering at the person, you’re not signaling as a fan of theirs, you’re not even actually giving them approval in a way that matters; all you’re doing is influencing the course of which party gains power, and in this case it makes a significant difference.

    Some people can’t affort another Trump presidency. People of color and LGBT and homeless people in many states (i guess every state?) would suffer the consequences a lot more than you and me, whereas the consequences of a second democratic term (Biden or otherwise) are a lot more nuanced. The differences between a republican or democrat administration sure matter to them, and our ideological purity does not.

    We have a mechanism to put bad people in power instead of the worst, this is a meaningful difference, all it costs is some personal discomfort, and it does not replace whatever else you’re doing in terms of activism. You can do both.