You live in a different universe where talk matters more than actions and individual voters have more power than the systems and people that consistently screw them over.

That’s not a gap I can bridge.

If all of the people who stayed home would have been kamala voters then it sounds like she failed to inspire them to vote. It sounds like she lost an election.

Yes, if an unprecedented, impossible turnout occurred then dems might’ve won, but that’s not actually a strategy, that’s fantasy. Assuming there isn’t some level of divine intervention, then people are right that their vote doesn’t matter, because this is the real world where we already know a plurality of people don’t vote.

It’s almost like voter disenfranchisement works.

I don’t know why liberals can’t get this basic concept: if electoralism is meaningful at all, then the electorate cannot be wrong.

If the electorate voted “wrong” then your democracy doesn’t do what it claims to, it does not represent the people. <- this is actually the correct answer btw

Blaming the electorate achieves nothing.

The electorate didn’t fail the dems, the dems failed the electorate.

It’s hard to blame the people who stayed home when disenfranchisement is an intended feature of your electoral system. The vast majority of people know for a fact that their vote mathematically does not matter and a huge number cannot get time off on the weekday it is scheduled for.

If a full third of people stayed home, that’s a systemic problem, not an individual responsibility problem. Your electoral system is completely captured by capital and you are stuck blaming the electorate.

Folks please: US corruption is not a cultural or personal issue, it is systemic. Power corrupts, not just people, but systems. The US has been at the head of the global hegemon for most of the last century, they have most of the billionaires, of course they are corrupt. That’s where capitalists focus their efforts to get the most returns. It’s not an accident that the guy doing DOGE just happened to be the richest man on the planet.

Maybe focus your energy there instead of on the people who have literally no power.

The argument could be made that because the image generator is essentially a regurgitator with no artistic interpretation, there is no transformative artistic value in it. It’s like applying a filter with extra steps.

Also the generators charge for access, so they are profiting off of the IP. That’s quite different to making something for personal use or releasing it for free.

Actually, factually, in truth, for real, fr, no joke, seriously, absolutely, in fact, truly, truthfully, really, in reality, literally, I couldn’t tell you, because only you can figure out how to say what you want to say, and if you didn’t already know that there are countless ways to say that, that makes me wonder if you actually care very much about the topic, for realsies, in actuality. All you need to do is spend a few seconds thinking of another way to say it and you can answer your own question.

It’s language. Of course we have ways of saying things, that’s what it’s for. Also you can say “literally” to mean “actually” as long as you understand how to say it in context, and the fact that you can correct people who you believe are using it wrong is a sign that you can tell the difference and you don’t need to correct them.

And if we don’t have a way of saying something, you can invent one, because that’s how language works. People who tell you that there’s some authoritative measure by which we know what words mean don’t actually care about language. They’re trying to kill our language, because a living language can’t be controlled like they want. The good news is that it’s impossible to achieve that goal.

Like if you’re not going around lamenting the fact that “terrific” doesn’t mean “terrifying” anymore then maybe it’s okay if words change. It sounds like you survived that particular tragedy.

“Literally” literally means “as written”, or “in the literature”.

To use the word “literally” to mean “in reality” or “in fact” is not that original meaning, but is literally - in fact, as well as a written thing - a figurative meaning.

Language changes. There are plenty of words that are their own antonyms. It’s not sad, it’s inevitable, and the sooner you can accept that the sooner you can avert the fate of becoming an old man yelling at clouds.

Well sure, psychos with nukes are scary and there may be an element of the US losing control of their attack dog, but the idea that the Israelis are calling the shots is not really accurate. It cuts dangerously close to the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Israel through AIPAC controls the US government, which also conveniently lets the US off the hook for sponsoring them.

I just think it’s important to remember that for all their brutality, Israel is not charge, and they are not the military superpower that has dominated much of global politics for the past century. They are a vassal state and they would listen if anyone in power had the will to tell them no, they are far too dependent on US support.

It’s probably more like institutional inertia. It takes a long time to stop a ship that big.

Israel is of strategic importance to project US power in the middle east to secure oil.

That’s also the reason they were allowed to continue with their nuclear program.

It’s not fear, it’s power politics. Western powers actively support them. They are not uniquely evil, they are just what happens when fascism is sponsored and allowed to run unchecked.

This is Joe Biden making it perfectly clear: https://youtu.be/A-Ky3dPEnOE

Because issuing a prohibition is basically always a punishment of the people to distract from who is actually causing the problem.

From a political standpoint it very much is either/or, this is done to exhaust any momentum towards systemic change.

“Ban the children to protect them” is an extremely shortsighted way to approach any policy or social ill. Kids will find a way to access social media, and this ban means they’ll need to do it in secret. So now anybody preying on them through those means has their implicit cooperation in covering up the abuse. That includes the media platforms themselves.

Also, why would you need to ban children from social media if the addictive strategies were under control?

A ban like this is only going to cause harm.

See that would require them to not be nazis and the problem with that is that they’re fucking nazis.

“I hope you’re next”

Scratch a liberal.

I don’t know if they understand that their close association with Trump & Musk made the classification extremely easy, politically.

They are historically unpopular and they are dragging all their allies down with them.

I don’t think a comment stating that you don’t think a comment asking for a source is very interesting conversation is very interesting conversation, yet here we are.

Welcome!

Efficiency doesn’t matter if you’re shipping material for production halfway round the world and shipping those products halfway back just because rich people wanted to outsource to cheap labour, and overproduce cheap crap that falls apart way too fast so they can sell us the same cheap crap again a couple years later. It’s mostly waste. Some shipping is necessary, but I’d say a vast majority we could do without.

Like I don’t believe for a second that these tarrifs will actually fix this problem because they’re just a big tantrum with zero strategy involved, but in an ideal world we would make a lot more locally and spend a lot less energy sending things all over the planet to make a handful of shareholders slightly higher margins.

Finally gave in and tried Mint recently when my Ubuntu was crapping out on me. It turned out to be a BIOS issue that I subsequently fixed, but I’m glad I did it, because it is the very first time for me when a linux install went smoothly and got me doing what I wanted without making me tear out my hair for hours at a time.

It actually felt better than a Windows install because on top of being smooth, it didn’t bombard me with dark pattern data mining AI-riddled trash.

I can’t ditch Windows entirely because of a handful of things that cannot run without it, but for the first time Linux has become a daily driver for me.

So yeah, I would stick with Mint. Turns out the hype was real.

Entirely by design. Why do you think they have a “security council” with 5 permanent members, who are the most powerful nations on earth, who can each veto literally anything completely unilaterally?

They are keeping themselves secure against the UN ever doing anything against their interests, that’s the only way the word “security” makes any sense. It is intentionally set up to never get anything done. You would never create such an arrangement if you wanted an organisation to have actual teeth.

If anyone thought Trump’s party was the party of “the little guys” at any point in time now or before the inauguration, they shouldn’t be trusted with a pair of blunt scissors, much less a key piece of IT infrastructure.

And if you’re gullible enough to think that’s a reasonable defence, I’d put you in that category too. I’m not really interested in anything else you have to say, that was just a disqualifyingly vapid argument you just made.

Bye.

He literally said that they are now the party of the little guys. That’s what “the tables have turned” means. That says a lot about how he feels about Trump, and a lot about how much you can trust his judgement on anything.