Lemmy is literally the same format as Reddit, except instead having some company running it all, its run in bits and pieces by the people who would largely be moderators, or at least found subreddits, on Reddit. That decentralized nature has benefits, thats why Im here after all, but being the same format and to a large degree literally the same people as are/were on Reddit, well it shouldnt be surprising to see act similar.

I seem to recall some poll suggesting that Harris was doing better than typical for the dems with seniors, so Im guessing they were probably referring to what remains of the generation before Boomers

Not to mention that, being a decently sizable country, making them is really more a matter of motivation to put in the resources and deal with the diplomatic effects than it is capacity ultimately. Like, North Korea was able to build them with a fraction of the population and economy and as even more of a pariah state, the technology has existed for just about 80 years at this point and while details of the specifics are secret, the basic gist of what they require is well known. Basically any country that isnt a microstate probably could build a few eventually, if they really wanted to spend all the money

The issue is that people will use votes for if they like the thing or not instead of if it’s in good faith, even if you tell them not to, both on purpose to harm opposing views, and unintentionally because they’re more likely to notice a bad faith tactic coming from someone disagreeing than from someone agreeing with them.

Leftists will already know that the democratic party leadership are conservative to vaguely center at best, hardly anything new

There is quite a lot Trump could do to speed things up. He could, for one thing, send American troops to assist Israel on the ground; I have concern that he might do such, because Israel has increasingly been dragging other countries in the region into this, notably Iran, and Trump pursued a policy towards that country during his term in office that very well could have led to war had things gone slightly worse. Given his support for Netanyahu, whose government has itself been tempting fate of late by engaging in back and forth missile strikes, and his disregard for the consequences of attacks against Iran, I have serious fears that he might give Israel a green light to pursue a full scale war with that country, by promising to commit US forces in the event of such a thing.

At a lesser degree, he also could simply increase US military aid to Israel beyond the current level, and end what efforts (insufficient by a country mile but still better than their absence would be) have been made by the US to convince Israel to limit its actions, such as the recent threats to cut some of its military aid if Israel does not allow more food aid across Gaza. He appears to actively dislike Muslim populations, as seen by his efforts as president to ban travelers from Muslim majority countries, so it strikes me as rather unlikely that he would do anything, even something basic like that, to assist a Muslim majority country like Palestine against the wishes of one of his allies.

Also for the record, I do not think that I am simply protecting “my outgroup” in opposing him. I am of the view that he, (or more importantly, the fascistic movement that he has grown around him, of which Trump himself is the leader, but which may persist even after he is gone), presents an existential threat not just to myself and those whom I know, but to you, to everyone in the country, to everyone in the numerous countries who he seems actively hostile to (including but not limited to Palestine as I have said, and Iran, as I was saying earlier, and Ukraine), and to a lesser extent, to the future of every single person on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme, but we are talking about making a narcissistic old man showing signs of mental decline and known for lashing out at things that anger him the commander in chief of a nuclear armed state, we are talking about putting someone who does not seem to believe in climate change at the head of the world’s largest economy at a time when getting carbon emissions down is critical to keeping the planet livable in the future, and we are talking about putting the country with the world’s largest military budget in the hands of a person who idealizes fascists, has attempted to maintain power despite a previous election loss, and has a following composed to a large degree of racists and religious zealots.

I am not saying that I worry about what Trump will do as hyperbole, or to justify what the current dem administration has done in arming Israel while it bombs and shoots civilians, I am saying that I worry about what he will do, because thinking about it quite literally keeps me up at night and has quite literally given me actual panic attacks within recent weeks upon seeing the prevalence of his support in polls and among my coworkers.

I do not think the democrats are actually “willing to throw out trans people” the way you seem to suggest at the end there. I dont even think that they are happy with what their “ally” in Israel is doing. I think they are a fragile “everything that isn’t the R’s” alliance of much of the right and what passes for the left here that includes both LGBT people and their allies, and conservative types who never wanted them in their party in the first place but arent quite extreme enough for the republicans, who are sort of mashed together in a broad coalition that as a result has no real collectively agreed upon ideology and doesn’t have the guts to rock the boat by withholding military aid to a country traditionally seen as an ally, even though that country really deserves to have that aid cut right now. Their vague compromises of positions do not really align with mine on many if not most things, especially economic and foreign policy, and I resent that they stay just barely to the left of the republicans to get the support of the left while offering it little but scraps. I do not like them, except maybe a few on the leftmost edge. But we (or at least I, I guess I’ve just assumed you were probably also American if youre invested in our election but I guess with our international influence that doesnt actually mean much) live under a system that guarantees that if they dont win, Trump will, and when he and his cult look so startlingly similar to the fascists of history, just before they succeed in subverting the systems that constrained them, not voting for them is a luxury that I do not think that I or any of us in this country really have.

Cars promote social hierarchy in the same sort of way that building big mansions in a city do: The space required for everyone to have one results in an expensive and inefficient use of land, which means that those with the money to afford them get convenience, those without the money to afford one are pushed to the fringe, and those that just barely can afford one see their limited resources taken up with larger maintenance costs and infrastructure taxes for maintaining less cost efficient infrastructure, meaning those resources cant be used to improve their own position. They physically separate people in a way that means that those of high status dont have to rub shoulders with those of lower status the way that they would if they were all on something like a subway together, and they also act as a way to display status to others (a guy driving a rusted out accord from the 90s can probably be assumed to be upper class, for example, wheras a guy driving around a new Ferrari is much more likely to be). This isnt to say that they inherently promote fascism or anything, or that it isnt possible to have a fascist that dislikes cars, or that these things cant be mitigated with effort if you really want to run a car-based society, but fascists do like hierarchy and things that promote their in group at the expense of an out group, and ensuring their favored people can get around conveniently while others are hindered in doing so naturally feeds into that, as do things that let those at the very top display that status to the world. And of course, they require large and standardized production chains to make economically, which makes them a market where large companies, of the sort that can concentrate a lot of wealth and power to those who own them, are much more able to compete than more local players.

How? Do you believe that it is somehow impossible for some side on an issue to have the truth on their side, or the other side to simply be factually incorrect? If you want truthful reporting, you cant present truth and falsehood in a neutral light, you have to be biased towards truth.

Neutrality is not fact based, is the thing. forget the current candidates for a moment, since they have a lot of emotional investment: consider an issue like, say, vaccines. If you were to give equal consideration to both doctors vouching for their effectiveness, and some anti-vaxxers that think they’ll kill you, you would technically be neutral on that “argument”, but you would actually be biased in favor of the anti-vaxxers in doing so, because the reality of the situation is that they are simply wrong, and suggesting that both sides are equally valid by giving equal weight to their statements paints them in a better light than that. Now, for political candidates, things arent quite as simple as that, because they dont represent one single statement that can be physically demonstrated to be correct or wrong, but they do take actions that can be more or less helpful, or endorse ideas that can be shown to work or not work, or make statements that can be more or less objectively correct, and one can take a sum total of these things and suggest that one candidate or the other would have more or less desirable effects on the country than the other. Indeed, unless the candidates are exactly the same, one of them generally will. Which implies that treating them as if their positions are equally effective and their ideas equally valid is biased in favor of the worse candidate, whoever that might be, and thus, if you wish to reduce that effect, a journalistic organization should endorse the one their research leads them to conclude is preferable.

I am not simping for anything. I firmly believe Trump would be far worse for genocide (he has literally said that he thinks Israel should “finish the job” with regards to the war in Palestine, and when he was president, he was incredibly supportive of Netanyahu, and proposed a “peace plan” that was actually just carving up Palestine into a bunch of little pieces that could never constitute a viable state and giving Israel control of the paths between, effectively wishing to formalize Israeli control of the entire region) The only reason anyone can suggest he wouldnt be without getting laughed out of the room is that he happened to get lucky enough to not have the current escalation of Israel’s genocide happen during the time when he was president. From my point of view, any action that brings him closer to getting back in power is asking to throw gasoline on a genocidal fire, and saying that one’s motive for doing so is being against genocide is sickening in the kind of way that it would be if you saw someone suggest that Hitler should have won ww2 because of all the evil stuff that Winston Churchill was responsible for. Consider for a second what people making your argument look like, from that lens.

There isn’t a constitutional mandate that there only be two choices, it’s instead a consequence of poor design. The US, with the exception of a few state and local governments that have tried different things, uses something called first past the post voting: each person votes for one candidate, whoever gets the most votes wins the job. Then, we just hold an election in each of a number of geographic districts for each seat. That’s intuitive, but actually not a good way to design a democracy, because it forces a two party system. If you have multiple parties that have similar ideas, there’s no mechanism for them to form a “coalition” like you might get in other countries. If you win 30% of the votes in a state, split evenly such that you get 30% of the votes for each district, and someone else gets the rest, you don’t get 30% of the seats or 30% of the power, you get zero, because you were the loser for each of those seats, and it’s winner take all. Thus, any time you have two parties with similar ideas, it is in their interest to combine to form one party to get a higher chance of winning the most votes in a given district, and this process continues until every party of note has consolidated into one of two camps. Those two camps don’t consolidate with eachother because they represent views too different to tolerate, and anyone else must join the closest one in order to have a shot of actually winning (unless the election is local enough that personal connections can get you a majority in spite of this, which is why third parties tend to do better at local elections than national ones).

Now, there are going to be some parties left out of this, either those that idealize having more parties to the point of retaining independence at the cost of any chance to actually win at most levels, or those so different from the major ones that they just can’t fit with either. The fact that the two party system isn’t really originally intended means they still are allowed on the ballot and everything. But since most people voting care about their choice having a hope of winning, it makes pragmatic sense to not vote for them unless the election is very local in scale and you can organize enough people. Thus, only two effective choices even if more are technically on the list.

In some sense, you can say the two major parties basically are like the coalition governments you get in other countries, it’s just they’re stuck together despite not really liking it, they don’t have independent enough identities that they could easily split up and recombine into new ones, at best they could leave and watch their voters stay behind with the old party, becoming irrelevant, and at worst they could sabotage the side closest to them and ensure they get even less power than otherwise. This is why the democrats have such a wide difference in ideals between more conservative and progressive candidates, and the republicans have both “small government” people and “ban everything I don’t like” authoritarian types in one party, they’re both basically political coalitions stuck together with super glue that have to just go along with whatever most voters in their bloc do or else lose.

I can say the same about you. Putting “no there aren’t” in all caps and adding profanity and personal insults doesn’t make it more true, but it does make people remember that a block button exists for the kind of person that uses things as disgusting as a genocide as an opportunity to troll. I do not think that anyone who both has paid any attention to the past 8 years and is arguing in good faith can possibly support that conclusion.

The difference is that there are real, material differences between the actions the candidates take. It’s not a fair choice, but it isn’t false either, and choosing not to go along won’t give you a better outcome

I am repeating myself because the notion that the least evil option available is the best one, that the lesser evil if you will is preferable to the more evil one, is axiomatic, that is, it’s a basis one takes when constructing a moral framework, not a consequence of one that can be reasoned through. If you do not agree with someone’s moral axioms, then there is simply nothing to debate, you and they are simply operating under mutually incompatible definitions for what is and is not the right thing to do. Restating that in a slightly different way is a way of testing if the axioms we are operating under are truly different, in which case further argument is pointless, or if we merely misunderstood eachother the first time around.

If you reject the lesser evil, and all options possible to you are evil, then you by inaction support the greater evil, which, by definition, makes you evil. “Working against both”, when evil is inherit in all means by which you might do that work, is a fantasy you tell yourself to justify sabotaging efforts to limit the damage by practicing and encouraging what effective amounts to surrendering one of the few levers of power that you have any limited ability to pull.

What message would we be sending if our replacement for them is a guy that wants Isreal to “finish the job” with it? Killing fewer people matters more than accountability

And who, of those who aren’t mathematically precluded by the flawed system we are currently stuck with from having a chance at winning, can you vote for that isn’t about to help Isreal with their genocide? Trump is even more favorable towards that policy than Biden is, and while Harris isn’t Biden, it seems hard to imagine she’d be much worse than current administration on that issue. One of the reasons to vote for Harris is because, despite all her administration would likely do there, having her in office would almost certainly result in fewer Palestinian deaths than Trump would.

Suppose you have two buttons. If you press one, it kills someone. If you press the second, it kills two people. If you don’t press the first button, someone else is eagerly waiting who will press the second. Whoever has placed the buttons here, has enough power that neither the buttons nor the other person are within your personal ability to harm at the moment, and you have neither the time nor the popularity to amass enough people to change this before the other guy pushes the “kill two people” button. Your only options are to press one or press neither and allow the second be pressed. If your answer to this scenario is “I press neither button, because pressing the first kills someone, don’t you care about people’s lives!?”, then you are not choosing morality, you are choosing selfishness, because you care more about the notion that your hands will be clean than about the net life saved if you press the button that kills fewer people. In fact, the blood is as much on your hands by inaction if you decide to reject your choice, as it would be had you killed the additional victim yourself.

I mean, it’s a kitchen appliance that makes bread? Throw the ingredients in and turn it on, and you have bread, in like, 4 hours. I have a slightly nice one, because I found someone selling it used for 20 bucks when that model new is like 200, but I think the more basic ones can get a bit less than $100, so while I wouldn’t call them cheap, they’re not exactly unaffordable luxury for most people lucky enough to live in a developed country. They’re just not really worth it unless you plan on using it regularly (and eating a lot of bread, because homemade bread lacks the preservatives of store bought food I’ve found I get maybe 5 days with a loaf from it before there’s a risk of the bread going moldy)

anecdotally, Ive gotten this with store bought basic sliced bread. I used to love it and snack on just bread as a kid, but Ive been making my bread with a bread machine for a few years, and now the store bread just tastes and feels like weak, dry, slightly sweetened insulation foam.

Sweden in general seems to have way more good game dev companies than most countries, especially most of similar size. I kinda wonder why.