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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Apathy is the big reason for this. About 1/3 of the eligible voters didn’t bother to vote. And Trump gained support among black and hispanic voters. Ignorance and apathy were the big drivers of this. And ignorance stems from people too apathetic to learn anything.

    And no, democracy is never guaranteed. Some pretty words written by slave owners over a hundred years ago was never going to guarantee democracy. It’s just paper. What makes democracy survive is people making an effort to keep it going generation after generation. American exceptionalism created a false belief that the US couldn’t be anything other than a democracy. But despite all the chest thumping about freedom and democracy from Americans, it turns out not enough people were willing to make an effort to learn who they were voting for or in many cases even to bother voting at all. That was all that was needed, but it was too much for Americans to bother doing.

    There are things Americans can be doing right now, but this Canadian thinks the USA has become a nation that’s centered greed and apathy rather than a country of freedom and democracy. I’d be happy if Americans could prove me wrong by fighting back in any way they could, but it looks to me the US lacks the will to save itself.


  • In a democracy you should strive for having strong people and weak politicians that do as the people want.

    If you’re striving for having strongmen so you don’t have to do anything yourself, then you are being weak. And that’s why the US has gotten to be what it’s become: weak and lazy people looking for someone else to solve all of your problems. This is why Trump’s message of “vote fore me and you won’t need to vote ever again” resonates. You want someone to rule over you and figure out everything for you. This made the US ripe for a fascist takeover.

    Even now you’re whining about someone else not solving your problems for you. Didn’t vote? That’s the democrats fault. To cowardly to discuss politics with your family? That’s the democrats fault.

    In the end, you’re aligned with the fascists in your hatred of the opposition. It’s easier for you to sit back and complain about the opposition than to grow a spine and support the opposition regardless of what your family, peer group, or anyone else will think about for doing so.



  • The Iraq embargo, for instance, gave rise to Al Qaeda and the eventual destruction of the World Trade Towers.

    This is a racist narrative that relies on the assumption that Arabs have no control over themselves and “they’re all the same”. Also relies on the false narrative that Saddam Hussein supported Al Qaeda that was promoted during the build up to the Iraq War.

    The reality is that Al Qaeda were enemies of Saddam Hussein, because not all Arabs are the same person. And a psychopath like Saddam Hussein doesn’t want other psychopaths around as competition.

    Try to see past American exceptionalism and understand that not everything in the world is defined by it’s relation to the US.








  • Of course it’s always difficult counting the dead, and Russia doesn’t allow any monitoring of this kind of thing in the territory it controls. But it’s likely the number of civilian deaths is around double that of Gaza. The numbers for the military is likely more than double that.

    Ukraine does it’s best to protect it’s civilian population and their soldiers wear uniforms. Hamas does not wear uniforms, and actively prevents civilians from evacuating from areas where there’s combat operations. In fact having combat operations happening in populated areas was basically the point of massacring villages while taking hostages, both of which are war crimes. If you want to negotiate a prisoner release you don’t massacre villages, if you want a war that minimizes civilian casualties, you don’t take hostages to densely populated areas.

    Hamas created a scenario to maximize civilian deaths, and it will probably never be known the true number of civilian deaths since they didn’t wear uniforms so the number of Hamas dead and number of civilian deaths can’t be distinguished. Israel claims half the number you see reported are Hamas, while Hamas claims it’s much less.

    Note the difference between a military that protects it’s civilians and wears uniforms and what Hamas is doing. Larger numbers of soldiers than civilians die in Ukraine because they prioritize protecting civilians, while larger numbers of civilians than soldiers die in Gaza as fodder for their propaganda machine.

    Note that Hamas is suddenly wearing uniforms as soon as a ceasefire is in effect. How often do you remember seeing them wear uniforms in combat when doing so would prevent civilian casualties? They have uniforms, they just don’t wear them in combat in order to maximize confusion which results in civilian casualties.


  • Add a bell button and a whistle button.

    I think instead of promoting a page where people have to choose a server, just send people to lemmy.world directly. We should probably just get people to sign up there at first and have the ability to migrate their accounts to other servers if they want to do that later.

    Having to choose from multiple servers is asking people to choose between a bunch of options they know nothing about. Get people straight to looking at content and posting stuff as soon as possible, once they’re more invested, and understand more about the different instances they can change servers if that’s what they want to do.

    But yeah writhing the code needed to make account migration seamless might be a lot of work so not sure if that will happen.



  • A Boeing whistleblower the day before he finally got his big day in court (something he worked towards for years) “committed suicide” in his car the day before he was going to testify.

    Forget the Epstein conspiracy shit, guys going to prison for sex stuff involving minors kill themselves all the time since they know they’re going to have a bad time in prison. An engineer trying to expose his former employer for their unsafe practices the day before he’s going to finally get what he wanted? Wayyyyyy more suspicious than the Epstein stuff.

    There was another Boeing whistleblower that also “committed suicide”.

    But sure, maybe it’s all a weird coincidence that everyone that tries to blow the whistle on Boeing turns up dead before they can testify.





  • The US is basically China now. Xi remains in power because he convinced the Chinese people that China needs a strong man to run the economy and protect them from the evil foreigners. Trump has done the same. They’re both corporate socialist countries now.

    There is one big difference and no, China is not “sitting things out.” A lot of the brouhaha over Greenland stems from China trying to use soft power to gain influence there. As they’ve done in Panama. Soft power means spending money and Trump’s too simple minded to understand the concept of spending money to gain influence. So US soft power doesn’t exist anymore which is why Trump can only make threats. It’s the only lever he has because he doesn’t know anything about the other levers. Of course his threats only further destroys US soft power, but Trump (along with most Americans) simply can’t understand the concept so they see that as good thing. Hell they’re trying to shut down USAID entirely, should be an indication they don’t understand it at all.

    China very much understands soft power and is using it everywhere. So that’s what we have to look forward to… Chinese soft power being met with threats from Donald Trump.


  • An occupation will. And the US has an extremely bad track record with occupations. That’s just a fact.

    You go on counting troops and getting boners when warplanes fly over sports arenas, while Canadians are figuring out how many strategic targets in the US are within drone range. This wouldn’t be an overseas war where you just need to tell someone in uniform some bullshit “thank you for your service” remark and that would be your only exposure to it. It would be a guerilla war on the North American continent, and your dear leader is gutting the FBI’s counter intelligence capabilities.