Moreover, the founding fathers warned us of this happening, in advance. They knew that it would, they told us that it was all but inevitable, we have had multiple centuries of time in which to shore up democracy... like to implement ranked-choice voting, while instead... we chose not to.

I do not hold out hope for democracy to last much longer, not against such repeated assaults as this. The game of Russian Roulette never ends in happiness, but it does always end.

Which itself is something notable imho, in showing how far it has come along, i.e. as a barometer reading on how far gone his supporters are.

They used to hide it, feeling more shame that their views might not be as acceptable by the general public as they now know that they are.

Don't forget that some sitting members of Congress are currently calling for an active, not-joking civil war.

We ignore all of this at our peril.

Not to be confused with the story about saying the word "transporter" three times and summoning the elder god oh who am I kidding I mean Miles O'Brien who appears as if from out from a pocket universe or something.

"yes sir"

Damn, that dude gets around.

Instructions unclear. Got free and unlimited electricity anyway. So now neighbors won't ever leave me alone.

I tend to start out that way... but it can be so easy to forget and get sucked in. Well, so long as you know what you are doing!:-)

I am glad to have maybe helped, even if only in some small way.:-)

I would not have. She is doing amazing right now at campaigning, but after her snarky sound-bite 4 years ago she has had little follow-through. e.g. she ran for President, but then when she became VP was told to deal with the border crisis, yet complained that it was "too hard" - like yeah, ofc it is, but you asked for the whole job, yet can't not complain about even one portion of it!?

Then again, there has never been a VP iirc under such pressure to e.g. remain in Washington, D.C. to break every tie vote as Congress was more broken than any previous one. Remember Kevin McCarthy? Yeesh!

And then for whatever reason, we don't hear much about her performance after that. Possibly that's our very broken news system - certainly that's at least one component of it.

Others like Pete Buttigieg come across as much more impressive. Though he's gay so unlikely to have any traction with centrist voters who might otherwise swing to Kamala, or perhaps it's that she as VP has access to all of Biden's billion-dollar campaign chest.

Anyway, ofc I may have voted "for her" in the sense of against the other side, but until the last few weeks I really haven't been impressed by anything that she's done. Still, she's not >80 years old like both of the others were, so that's a STRONG plus. Also, even if she is merely following good advice, that's not nothing: the ability to take direction from experts who truly know their stuff is a great skill!

Uh oh, you pointed out a flaw. Expect goalpost shifting in 5... 4... 3...

You will lose that ability as soon as Lemmy.world upgrades past 0.19.3. My instance likewise had 0.19.3 until like a week ago, and ever since it "upgraded" to 0.19.5, I get notifications now from users from blocked instances. The developers of Lemmy seem adamant that people are not allowed to ban whole entire instances, which I find... ironic for... reasons:-).

It is hilarious to see that on every single "we should defed from the tankies" post, the tankies always show up to demonstrate for us all first-hand precisely why we should defederate from the tankies. Not b/c of their political views, but b/c of the abusive toxicity.

b-b-bUt SuReLy rUsSiA hAs NeVeR dOnE a GeNoCidE?!

Or ChInA eItHeR?!

The USA supporting Israel is... ahem, never mind, anyway it's not anywhere on the same class as Russia CURRENTLY and ACTIVELY being the very ones DOING the genocide.

Nobody is that dumb. Therefore that's beyond ignorance - that's sheer, willful obstinacy.

Oh that's so awesome! Mbin, Piefed, Sublinks, and even if Tesseract is currently running Lemmy (though I thought you mentioned wanting to switch it to Sublinks or something when that gets ready), it too helps mitigate some of the known issues. I do have enormous respect for the hard work and effort put into the Lemmy codebase... but I am even more excited to think about the possibilities of growth that lie ahead!:-)

There is only a singular instance in the entire Fediverse that blocks all of the big 3 including lemmy.ml, from what I can see: lemmy.cafe. And roughly a month ago it was still federated with hexbear.net - though that was due to a bug/oversight and when it was pointed out to the admin was immediately corrected. It is a tiny instance, with only 18 users per day or 44 per month, which leaves me wondering how "robust" it is - how long has it been in operation? How long would it expect to remain? (I recall instances such as dmv.social dying off with little to no notice, though that was due to the CSAM attacks that have since been mitigated by software).

I may switch to them regardless - they have some nice features (including a link for new users to check out !newtolemmy@lemmy.ca - so friendly and welcoming!!:-), though was waiting for the likes of Sublinks, Piefed, and Mbin to catch up a bit in case they would be better than any implementation of Lemmy. Anyway I've been busy irl lately and not wanting to spend time thinking about this.

I say all this in case my personal example could help illustrate: there are barriers to switching.:-) Though I don't know if everyone suddenly jumping onto that same instance would count as much of a "vote", and especially people not doing such shouldn't count as a vote in the opposite direction, either? Though I do take your point, ultimately we cannot control others, only ourselves, so it is our "fault" for accepting the way that things are now, rather than seeking to change them.

Also if it helps to add: many people feel that communities such as firefox@lemmy.ml that have ~2/3rds of all monthly active users for a firefox-specific community essentially hold hostage the content that they want to see, without an account that can interact with it. Ideally the politics would be separated from the non-political content - much like the NSFW tag + especially the settings button to filter out such if desired - allows us all to exist in the same space free of any conflict (barring the occasional outlier, which I've seen only like once or twice in the entirety of last year), however, people (such as users of those big 3 instances) refuse to label their politically extremist content, and do other things not in good faith like brigade even instance-specific communities (I can find an example if you like, also relevant is that the option to set them to "private" does not exist until... is it 0.19.6 iirc?).

So for some people, it is not enough to simply leave, they want to help migrate everyone out. By increasing awareness of the situation.

YSK that it is not length, but whether what you tried to say is agreed to by the admin of the instance or not. That is the crux of the dilemma here: that goes against the philosophies of the Western world about non-authoritarian control, which ostensibly so too does true communism, yet here we are: the USA is "doing genocide" and "is capitalist", yet neither Russia nor China are any of those things (in their minds). This makes them a "leftist" instance in the same manner that Trump supporters are "conservative" - which is to say, not.

Ignoring 99% of what you said, while hyper-focusing on a single matter that they choose, asking you to provide your references yet not providing ones in turn (or more commonly by the more prepared ones, the references that are provided turn out to support your position even, if read properly or possibly even at all!!!) is a common tactic. Don't let yourself be distracted from whatever it is that you true goal is. You cannot win an argument against someone who refuses to engage in good faith. Moreover, by trying you simply give them a platform to continue.

Whatever you say, they declare "victory", and those who refuse to realize the difference... well, that's on them.

Tbf, I believe the 2 people running right now are Trump vs. not-Trump. (please don't shoot the messenger!)

You are very welcome my good sir and/or madam! :-)