OBJECTION!

Yeah pretty much. 2016 was crazier than this one for sure. This one didn’t have a competitive primary on either side, and it was predicted as a toss-up whereas in 2016 every poll and media outlet was saying it was impossible for Trump to win, and there was no precedent to predict what would happen when he was in office. This is like, after people have had eight years to come to terms with Trump being a thing in whatever form that looks like. The general trend though is that things are getting crazier, and that trend is likely to continue.

If that’s why Kamala lost, then explain why Tammy Baldwin is winning Wisconsin and Elissa Slotkin is winning in Michigan.

Absolutely it’s a clownshow.

If you ask me, the whole point of it is to get everyone to sort themselves into one of two horrific camps, where they’ll feel like any criticism of the people in power is an attack on them for voting for them - or, if they don’t vote, then they generally disengage from politics entirely. It’s probably the most effective system of propaganda ever designed, because you don’t even need to tell people that horrible people are on their side, they’ll happily convince themselves of it all on their own. It’s basically a race to the bottom where one side being dogshit allows the other side to be dogshit because there’s no alternative, and of course every politician wants to be as dogshit as they can get away with because that’s how you win favor with the corporate donors, who have no practical limit on how much money they can spend to influence the outcome.

There’s also this level of spectacle in our elections that’s above and beyond anywhere else in the world, we treat it like a reality show, and our debates are complete jokes where nothing substantive is ever discussed. We have absurdly long election cycles and entire industries around milking them for entertainment. It’s unlikely that we will ever even begin moving in the right direction in the foreseeable future, because the brainworms run so deep.

The worst part is when the spectacle becomes so eye-catching that people from other countries get drawn into it and start thinking in terms of our politics and what we define as normal or reasonable. Americans rarely learn from non-American perspectives and we have corporate influence constantly pushing in the direction of maximizing short term profits over all other priorities, and so our country is unable to understand or adapt to the changing conditions of the modern world, which is why we are in decline.

Look at us only as a cautionary tale of what not to do.

totalitarian control

Lmao y’all are wild. Why are you on a platform where people you don’t like have, “totalitarian control” over the structure? Is it, perhaps, because they used this “totalitarian control” to create a structure that was decentralized and allowed communities to form that operated on different rules and different views? Doesn’t sound very totalitarian if you ask me.

for the same reason I now understand better why some women would prefer the bear.

Now, please downvote me, you know you want to… just this once, I want you to know what it’s like to do something with the recipient’s consent.

Lmao wtf are you talking about? Am I violating someone’s consent by holding beliefs they disagree with? Completely unhinged.

My biggest problem with .world is that people will just make up whatever they want about the out-group and everyone just believes it without question and with no interest in examining the evidence. It’s a toxic element of the site’s culture that encourages circle-jerking and the automatic dismissal of opposing viewpoints while making intelligent and informed discussion impossible.

The moderation is also pretty heavy-handed with censorship and things get removed for “misinformation” pretty frequently just because the mods disagree with it. You don’t have to go very far back in the modlog right now to find removed posts from Cowbee and Alcoholicorn, despite both backing up their arguments with published books from respectable authors. It’s best to avoid engaging with the mods at all, I got banned from World News because a mod couldn’t defend their position so they just banned me. There’s a pretty clear bias towards NATO and the US.

But like I said my main issue is the first point, and I’ll stop judging .worlders when I start to see people actually ask for evidence when someone says, “I saw a bunch of tankies eating kittens” instead of just blindly accepting it as fact because it’s about an out-group.

Craziest part is when they horseshoe so hard that you have ‘communists’ arguing that LGBTQ are degenerate vermin. Although that is more rare, it does happen.

If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they’re lying.

The culture where these sorts of blatant lies are accepted without question is my biggest problem with .world. You can have whatever actual beliefs you want, but lying like this is really despicable.

I’m gonna have to admit to stealing that line from Dimension 20

Because he’s rich and powerful and laws are just threats made by the ruling class, which he’s a part of. The law is primarily a tool of class warfare and as such is only enforced consistently and in full force against the working class. Very occasionally, one rich person pisses off enough other rich people to be subject to it, but you have to be extremely bad at the game for that to happen. The more rich people are subjected to the law, the easier it is to be subjected to the law yourself if you’re rich, so generally you’re better off looking the other way while they do illegal shit so that you can get away with your own illegal shit. Plus they have the resources to fight you, so it means picking a costly battle.

I think the phrase is, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

The economy had been trending upwards under Obama, and it peaked under Trump. If you’re a Keynesian, you might gripe that Trump increased spending when the economy was doing well rather then saving for a rainy day. Then, the rainiest of all rainy days hit with the pandemic, which shot spending through the roof. That caused rapid inflation that became most noticeable after Biden came in. Most Americans either don’t pay enough attention or attribute cause and effect to more or less random factors, so the experience is, Trump economy good, Biden economy bad.

Second, skepticism of the government is a facet of American culture, fed into from the national mythos regarding the Revolutionary War, by anticommunist propaganda about how the government doing stuff makes things worse, and also from experience with getting disillusioned from politicians not delivering on promises and the government generally not acting in people’s best interests. Kamala comes across more as representing the political establishment, and her messaging doesn’t tap into that dissatisfaction or contrarian nature.

Third, people feel like they’re getting fucked, and Trump offers a clear, simple narrative of who is fucking them. And the narrative scapegoats people at the bottom of the social structure, who are least able to push back against said narratives, and who already have negative stereotypes about them. If you’re not going to do that, then you either have to tell people they’re not getting fucked, or you have to blame the people who are actually doing the fucking, who are at the top of the social structure, who are most able to push back against your narrative. Imo, in order to employ the latter strategy most successfully, you need a sense of solidarity, a sense that everyone is included in your movement and you won’t allow anyone to be scapegoated or sacrifice anyone for your own advancement -and it’s kind of hard to do that with the whole genocide thing going on.

A crackpot who is connected to the CIA and a known source of misinformation and fake news.

Well, for starters, I don’t blindly believe anything people say about it.

Now they say that. They also lied and said that they weren’t asked any clarifying questions, when the linked comment proves that they very clearly were. They’re just trying to backtrack their unreasonable claims after the fact to make the response they got seem more disproportionate.

Especially anything tankie related.

Y’all will believe literally anything with zero evidence of it means making people you don’t like look bad.

Hell, I had a few members tell me that I was part of the evil capitalist elite because I had a job.

Anytime a person claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link to it, they are lying or misrepresenting what happened literally 100% of the time.

https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/chinese-genocide-of-uyghurs-in-xinjiang-continues

According to Adrian Zenz,

https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/erasing-memories-concealing-evidence-chinas-efforts-to-obscure-the-uyghur-genocide/

provided to UHRP by scholar Adrian Zenz

Whoopsie! That’s already two. It was easy to find those because they were already pointed out to you (along with several other of your sources) in the thread that you’re complaining about.

Here’s a tip - when you post a source on this subject, press “Ctrl+F” then type “Zenz,” and if anything comes up, don’t post it. Obviously, I can’t expect anyone to actually read their sources before posting them, but is 6 keystrokes really too much to ask?

I have a rule that anytime anyone says something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they are lying or mischaracterizing it literally 100% of the time, and that rule has proven itself yet again.

I found the thread and you had several people read your links and go through them in detail. Most of what they’re claiming is traced back to crackpot Adrian Zenz.

As I said, if you go there and say wrong things and then can’t back them up, they’re going to be rude to you. Citing Adrian Zenz is one form of not being able to back up your claims.

Do you have a link to that conversation? I’m interested in what your proof looked like.

If you say something wrong about something they care about and you can’t back it up, they’re going to be rude to you.