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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 18th, 2026

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  • Just to talk through conservatives’ blatant hypocrisy:

    Conservativism is correlated generally with a lack of empathy (general scientific essay collecting evidence here). For people who fundamentally lack empathy, one explanation is that they literally cannot tell the difference between “free speech” and “my free speech.” To them, they cannot understand why any valid moral goal would be different from theirs. That implies that any exercise of free speech by them and those like them is valid, and free speech by others with different goals would be invalid.

    So likely they see Charlie Kirk’s “censorship” as a free speech issue, and not LGBTQ censorship, because they actually lack the cognitive tools to understand the contradiction.

    I’m not sure what the solution is here, short of sending Henry Cavill to the predominantly-male conservatives who think this way, and giving them a long, romantic kiss to make them realize they are also a little LGBTQ, to expand their sympathy base to make up for their lack of empathy. But I doubt Henry Cavill would volunteer for this particular task.



  • Trump’s future public statement on the matter:

    I have no idea where the $17 billion went. Who can keep track of $14 billion anyway, during this war (that is actually an excursion) (but is over) (but also will be soon). Such a nasty question, ask sleepy Joe Biden where the $8 billion went. If our SO-CALLED allies ponied up the $7 million Gaza would be rebuilt already. They came up to me, but strong men and with tears in their eyes, saying “Please, Trump, can we have the $2 million to feed my kids?” I shook my head, and said, “It’s coming in two weeks after the Board pays me back the $10 billion it owes me.” He said “thank you, thank you sir” and so the Board members better PAY UP or we’ll have to send a message (with BOMBS) and it’s “light’s out” for Gaza!


  • American taxpayers will help fund the project, according to a publicly available spending plan for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) released by the White House.

    As per the spending plan, the NEH will dedicate $2m (£1.5m) in special funds and $13m in matching funds to the project.

    The American taxpayer will “help” fund the project? Where are the other funds coming from? Seems like the NEH, a federal agency funded by… the taxpayer?

    Or is this going to be Ballroom 2.0, another billionaire bribe monument to oligarchy?



  • I feel like the EFF’s messaging is just not going to get through to anyone still on Twitter.

    The problem is that the fundamental catch-22 of social networks is that the content and the users reinforce each other. Self-hating/regretting Twitter/X users exist, but they are there because there are network effects, including organizations who still also use it, they are not willing to give up. Similar organizations are there because the users are still there. And yes, I do think they still see the people they want because of follows/subscriptions, even if alt-right fascism is also being thrown into their feed by the algorithm.

    It sucks so many people haven’t left yet, but that’s why every choice to leave is worth celebrating, because it breaks down the long-term network effects every time, even at the cost of short-term value to the users or orgs.






  • Schumer’s just playing the smart game, waiting until Trump’s approval is 0% before raising any alarms.

    Sure, politically unsavvy people will say, “Oh, a psychopath is at this very moment doing war crimes won’t our elected leaders represent us and stop him,” or “Please, please, you useless hump, just lift up even one finger to stop the most dangerous demented narcissist in the greatest position to do harm in the history of the world.”

    But c’mon. Don’t be an idiot. You people are worried about “reality,” but this is more important than reality. This is politics. The most important thing is never ever risk any political capital on anything ever.






  • It costs next to nothing to include Lemmy in a social media astroturf and propaganda campaign, and is even easier and more effective because the small userbase means people’s posts are viewed less suspiciously (case in point: Your entire “the userbase is too small lolol” argument here). I am absolutely certain a few people I interacted with during that time were astroturf, MAGA-in-disguise or propaganda accounts. Re-read the part of my reply about necessary but not sufficient causation, to address your “third party vote” argument (I said nothing about third party voters, note, but you also ignore depressed turnout).

    But to get a little meta: I’m engaging in good faith discussion and giving reasons for my arguments. And you come here, respond to me twice (edit: three times?) with condescending derision when I wasn’t even talking to or about you, and are making an illogical claim that a 50K userbase somehow means Lemmy is immune from propaganda (whether state or individual). You then downvote me, which I didn’t do to anyone I disagree with here. It’s childish and petty.

    We are two people who probably want the same left-based outcomes and have disagreements on the method to get there, but you’re ranting to me about random things in this thread that I didn’t even say. You’re being extremely unpleasant, unkind and uncivil. I stand by what I said.

    Second edit: Seeing your profile and comment about being banned, here’s a direct question: Did you go by the username UniversalMonk prior to the election? The MO, aggressive response style, and AI-generated profile stuff is almost identical.


  • I realize I’m late so am just responding here for posterity, but - while I’m open to evidence - in my experience the people who were banned were clearly or very likely bad faith astroturf and propaganda accounts. They were clearly trying to split the vote, depress left turnout, and would just repeat LLM-generated junk rather than respond to any good faith debate.

    And I think the bans were right in retrospect because the timed (not typically perma) bans expired and those people still magically disappeared completely from Lemmy after the election.

    In the end, they probably did their job. Trump is in office destroying the country/world, and right now there are probably real people in this thread who think their “both sides” opinions are being censored in part because of the echoes of the noise those bad faith agents made way back in 2024.