PhilipTheBucket

I absolutely think that's part of the strength of Lemmy.

I have no idea why the Lemmy devs copied the reddit "lords and peasants" model of moderated interactions, and I don't know if Lemmy will survive long term against the tide of corruption that Reddit is in the late stages of right now. But at least it's pretty easy to move to a different fiefdom if you want to. If, for example, your home server lemmy.world gets all enshittified and filled with obnoxious interactions, you can just up and leave and still keep nearly all of your engagement if other people are in agreement.

You can take a look at lemmy.ml or blahaj and see what Lemmy could look like if that wasn't possible. To me, moving servers when stuff gets weird is a healthy thing.

She's performatively anti-war, but if you look a little more closely you can see that her "anti-war" always lines up with Russia's "anti-war." She was very upset that Trump wanted to put new sanctions on Russia if a peace deal wasn't reached, for example. An anti-war person would be in favor of going to bat for peace, right?

She also was pretty much the only person who voted against mourning the victims of a massive earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Why? Because (in my opinion) the resolution also had bad things to say about Russia's guy in Syria.

She's willing to break with Trump, when she gets time amid her busy schedule of various nutty things that her trailer-park schizophrenia has convinced her need to be talked about. When has she ever broken with Russia? (By taking a stand against their aggression in Ukraine for example, the same way she takes a stand against Israel or the US or one particular side in the Syrian civil war or these other geopolitical things she occasionally talks about.)

As I understand it, the nihilistic realization that it's all a bunch of insane bullshit and there is no reason to believe in anybody or anything, comes quite early in the Russian system. I imagine the translator takes some comfort in the idea that Putin is just a crazy old man at the end of the day. It probably relieves him from some feelings about his own sins whatever they may be, because nothing matters.

I think that's part of the point.

Trump got distracted, as he does, and has stopped doing Putin's bidding as far as Ukraine.

Putin doesn't like that, and has reached out to some of his other assets in US government, of which MTG is one. She got vocal about us needing to not strike Iran, which was wildly out of character for her (she generally doesn't give a shit about the world outside of her weird little fantasy version of it, definitely not about geopolitics).

If she's now making noise about Epstein, in a way that breaks from Trump, then I think the reason is that Russia is telling her to, because they think Trump needs to be punished on this issue.

I have no idea, but that's what I think is going on. Trump has lost sight of rule number one in American politics: You dance with them as brung you.

This is what happens to a motherfucker when anyone who tells you you're talking crazy falls out a window.

I have a disappointing prediction I am going to make to you

Yeah. 0.7°C is huge. The headline is weird. The article explains it a little better, that that's the global total if every single potential area were used to its full currently known potential. Basically it's a significantly less promising solution than was previously believed. But yeah they should have phrased it differently.

I would add to that: It is also vitally important to see horrible, monstrous, evil people as human. It's a hell of a lot more important than the (also vital) virtue signaling "homeless people / ethnicity people / etc are people too" brand of refusing-to-dehumanize.

For one thing, if you understand why they bombed this city, polluted that river, cheered for this insurrection, whatever they did, then you're a hell of a lot further ahead towards stopping them in the future. You can see how they operate, you can understand it. Even if it's horrible and evil, you can grasp it, come to grips with it, start to work to limit the damage in an effective way, instead of just the "abstinence-only" approach to criminality that is so popular in cities that don't fight their crime very effectively.

For another thing, being evil and doing horrible things is very much a part of being human. It's how we operate. If you can't see that and accept it, if anyone who does something horrible or is just lazy, dirty, crooked, whatever, becomes "not human," then you can't really understand yourself, either. The version of morality where everyone "allowed" to exist in the world doesn't contain some evil is just not useful, in the real world. The Nazis were absolutely human, they were doing human things. They're indicative of a problem with humans. They're not some wild outlier you can safely place outside of "humanity" because they don't count.

"If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Solzhenitsyn

Glad to hear I'm not the only one who would tape music videos off MTV / VH1. Back in the before times, when they would show those.

There is yet another fundamental problem with this: It is absolutely possible to hold trials for people where some of the evidence is classified. The US does it all the time. The system that was set up for it post-9/11 is sorta bullshit, stacked in favor of the government to an almost unbelievable degree, but it does function well enough that the more authoritarian elements have been moaning about how horrible and unfair it is that they have to deal with the FISA courts instead of just "do what I say to this poor helpless person, because I am king."

Of course, now it's all ICE, so they're bypassing the courts entirely. But for over twenty years we were running semi-due-process trials that included secret information as evidence, for this exact reason.

In their own moral framework, it's okay to kill literally anyone, as long as you're in charge and are willing to say a few words about "national security." Good to know, I guess. Presumably they mostly live in places where that's (for now 🥲) not the rule, and would be horrified if someone forced them to go back to places where that is the rule.

Honestly, I think mostly what this means is that they've done a good enough job of chasing away all the reasonable people that they've entered into an increasing spiral at this point. Everyone has to be most unreasonable in order to stand out, and with no one sensible to compare themselves to, they have to get more and more outlandish in order to be the outlandish-est one.

This dude is really just 180 degrees out of sync at all times