And no one is stopping him. People giving him planes. People funneling billions to him via crypto.

Because he commands a loyalist, flag-carrying, armed, nationalist army. The purest form of raw political capital. You can hire standing armies and pay them and drive for volunteers until you’re bankrupt, but you will never have as much power as having a segment of the population who are fanatically obsessed with doing whatever they’re told to a point of mindless, religious zeal. That’s the kind of power that has toppled empires and people in power around the world know this.

This is why I believe January 6th was a weapons test, a demonstration of sorts… while it wasn’t the most organized or planned demonstration, it was still the actions of a group wanting to show the world what they can do with even the slightest gesture.

I feel like if we accepted this framing we would be able to mount a more effective opposition, or at least counter it with our own show of solidarity, reclaim the goddamn flag and start collecting up the guns that aren’t going anywhere anyway. At least then tyrants of the future will understand that it won’t be so easy to put on king’s robes and start raiding our coffers.

He views himself as the sole entity of the state, everything is here to support him. Like kings of old. The kind we used to routinely overthrow or drag out of their castles and test if they were made of cake.

The company I’ve worked at in a specialist/management position for slightly above minimum wage where I haven’t had a pay increase in two years, reported record profits this year.

This is literally bait designed to make you mad.

Even though I agree with you that the “meme trading” rage-bait bullshit is utterly pointless and ruining our whole world… it’s not stopping, and telling people to stop just makes them mad. Because it’s ruined humanity’s brains broadly, if you push back on anything that makes someone feel validation they assume you’re an enemy.

There’s no way out of this pit but to let it run its course. Something will eventually change, and it will be a whole new systemic erosion of our minds and free will.

It was cynicism towards people in the post even before reading people’s comments, it’s deliberately inflammatory and I call that stupid attention-seeking shit out when I see it.

it hurts your feelings that much

Oh lord you’re one of them. Never mind, another for the list.

More evidence on the controlled opposition pile that will be completely ignored by the Dem guzzlers here.

This is just a weird, cynical take that makes you sound like the tankies who regularly escape .ml, where anyone who isn’t marching in an olive drab jumpsuit with a red star is a “dem loving liberal.”

Yah and you painted the entire post with a broad brush already, you can’t pretend to be offended.

No they’re saying don’t vote. That always works out so good.

no, that’s the joke.

You miss your life from when the app was popular. Like all nostalgia, we don’t miss the product or game or app itself, we miss who we were and how things seemed simpler.

It is absolutely not possible in every company.

This was about when we started fixing the ozone hole too, the Sega Genesis just came and the Cold War was ending, so it was a great time to be alive.

Other than all the things that were terrible of course.

That difference matters a LOT. Leadership personality and tone-setting matters a lot. I don’t think that she would have made things broadly much better in a policy sense, but I didn’t vote for her expecting her policies to make life better, I voted for her to keep fucking Trump out so we can have a few more years to desperately try to keep pushing the needle back left and raise up more potential socialist and progressive leaders like we saw with Mamdani… something that gets squashed more often when someone like Trump is prying the whole system apart and installing judges. I swear we need more fucking mandatory civics classes.

I don’t get why this is controversial for people. It’s like everyone tunes the fuck out every four years and just focuses on that ONE sporting event, instead of looking at politics in terms of a gradual, ongoing process.

Lemmy is really bad about this being a little further left, and I’m not even counting the .ml shadow side of the valley. Generally this site is a good view into the attention spans and mature political analysis of our current leftist movement. Which is to say, any day now some amazing socialist is going to descend from socialist heaven and start leading us to a huge revolution and even after it ends somehow we don’t have to worry about the tens of millions of people who didn’t want the socialist revolution.

It doesn’t really matter though because the last several federal elections have had the highest voter turnout and youth turnout in US history. The problem wasn’t angy leftists folding their arms, the problem is our population has gotten dumb. People tuned out the news because nothing makes sense anymore, you don’t know who to trust, and people broadly don’t socialize as much so there’s less social incentives to have and hold values and opinions. Think hard. No think, scroll.

Would you be in favor of nationalizing the internet in order for this to work? That is, no more commercial entities controlling access, no more media sites allowed to use algorithmic or artificially intelligent systems to influence the viewing habits of users, no more ads working their way into everything you see and do, no more sensationalized headlines and distracting video titles competing for attention because it will all be demonetized by law. (ideally, in a world of spherical, frictionless cows.)

In the US the government used to have standards and regulations for things like if a kid’s show could be exclusively used to market toys, or that news stations had to follow a fair press agreement. The reason for this was all access to television had to go through airwaves, and the broadcasters for those airwaves were US government property. All broadcasters had to follow a host of rules and guidelines. This is why cable news was such a world-changing thing. Cable was privately owned.

This also has the side effect of the government controlling the news narrative, and I think we have seen enough of that.

I just don’t really know if there’s a good solution here, for a problem that has to have a solution or we all suffer.

I would have to look it up, I didn’t watch documentaries, I watched it all on live TV at the time. I’m sure there’s boatloads of stories and documentaries on youtube, just beware anything that tries to paint the case as anything other than a massive clusterfuck and failure of the system to safeguard judicial system from money, fame, influence and media hype. What went wrong, was it was the first huge celebrity trial covered on live TV, and all the same nonsense and political bullshit you would expect to happen today, happened then.

The DNA evidence was biggest the key which would have clinched any similar case today, but it was still a very new thing, and people were as dumb about science then as they are now, so that ignorance was leveraged by a rich man’s legal team and whatever political funding they were getting.

Time is a flat circle.

There was more than DNA evidence, there was a fat ton of circumstantial evidence, testimonies from associated people, and of course things like Nicole Brown Simpson having previously called 911 as OJ was beating her up and threatening her life, the whole massive performance piece of the slow-speed bronco chase, it was just a fuckup from the start and everyone involved just wanted to get famous from it.

The solution is education not bans.

I agree.

But what do we do about the fact that even though our knowledge, research and understanding of the problem has increased, the problem has gotten worse? Is there more that can be done on that front that you think would be effective? Genuinely asking to help me shape my opinion.

It’s blooming into a larger-scale societal problem than just hoping enough people pull through, a lack of stable mental health and attention spans across large swaths of your population start to erode your society.

I don’t disagree with any of that.

I am mostly asking people here what they think the alternative should be. Like you say, parents who manage and monitor this are going have better outcomes… but that’s not the norm, and the problem is getting worse despite all of us having more knowledge and proof how vital it is for their kids to have their internet use managed. So I am not convinced any kind of education campaign is going to do much. Most parents are just as addicted to their phones and rather scroll than parent. This is a societal problem with many intersecting problems.

Okay so you’re just some completely unserious edgy kid who doesn’t care about the betterment of anything, I am no longer interested in your opinions. Go live in the wilderness.