Given everything going on in the world, I can't say this often enough:
The only infrastructure we can trust is our own.
thebardingreen
joined 2 years ago
We should all remember that this stuff is fringe until it's not.
This is something I wrote on a recent post. I think it's something that we should help as many people as possible understand:
This really tracks for me. I grew up around wealthy liberals and am intimately familiar with how these motherfuckers think. I have been telling my friends for months that we cannot expect the Democratic establishment or our current batch of elected Democratic representatives to address the problem.
- People are like "Don't they understand that it's a war?"
- Most of these people think we're idiots for thinking of it as war.
- Their high spending donors think we're idiots for thinking of it as a war.
- They think Republicans are angry idiots who have to be negotiated with so we can "get on with business."
- They see Republican voters MAGAing and rioting on Jan 6th and they think "What a bunch of yahoos!" (my multimillionaire boomer dad's literal words).
- They see Leftist protests turning out en-masse and they think "What a bunch of yahoos!" (again, my multimillionaire boomer dad's literal words).
My father has literally said about the second Trump presidency.
- "This will all blow over."
- "You just watch, the system will slow all of this down."
See, it's not just our "elected dems in office," who don't seem to get it, it's the entire leftish / center leaning, privileged ass, rich ass, mostly white, mostly older demographic, all comfy with their owning of multiple homes and their inflated stock portfolios and their rubbing shoulders with billionaires. We complain about the "elected dems in office," because we see them out there being like this in public, in the news in front of everybody. But this whole demographic is like this and that's why we keep seeing it.
EDIT:
The only way we'll change this is to STOP ELECTING DEMS FROM THAT DEMOGRAPHIC. They're not "spineless cowards," they just DON'T ACTUALLY REPRESENT YOU. They represent other neolibral rich people (people just like them, in other words). Those people's highest values are
- Stability.
- Business Economics (the price of gas and eggs doesn't really effect them that much).
- Maintaining their comfy "compassionate upper class" culture.
They DO genuinely care about
- Philanthropy (usually of a sort of egocentric variety).
- Social safety nets (most of them genuinely value compassion especially when it doesn't really cost them anything).
- Sound fiscal policy.
- Science (they believe in climate change and worry about their children and grandchildren).
- They LOVE to reassure and prop themselves up by talking about all the good they're able to do because they're rich / influential.
- On that note, they tend to embrace a kind of leftist, New Agey take on Prosperity Gospel and see wealth as something that enables them to do good in the world and help people (See? Greed is GOOD!). Some of that has merit, but it is NOT nearly as true as they tell themselves and others it is.
Faced with chaos and instability they will
- Try to negotiate with the people causing it, to get things "back to normal."
- Compromise with those people to keep things as stable as possible Every. Fucking. Time.
- Run off to meditation retreats and vacation homes and time shares in Hawaii or ritzy parts of Mexico to "find their center."
- Abandon their higher values to circle the wagons around the first, basic three (Stability, Business, Culture).
Importantly,
- They DO NOT see you as being "like them," "their people," or "part of their culture." They're actually VERY aware that you are NOT part of their culture.
- They usually honestly think that that's because they made better choices than you. They ARE able to acknowledge that there are people less fortunate then them, and even that they may have an obligation to these people. But they don't think they OWE you anything.
- When I say culture, I'm not talking about your Italian heritage, your black southern cuisine or how your abuela only speaks Spanish. I'm talking about private school / charter jets / fundraiser dinners / owning a mint condition classic car / keeping your boat in the garage of the OTHER house you own on the same street as your primary home.
- They do not feel obligated to go out of their way to defend your culture. Although if your culture is artistic, entrepreneurial, agitates for social justice, or is tangential to their own religious beliefs (looking at you Buddhism), they might be willing to fund it.
- They DEFINITELY feel entitled to exploit or profit off your culture, if they see an opportunity to do so, and will pat themselves on the back for "the good they're doing in the world" and "how they were able to help people" the WHOLE WAY TO THE BANK.
- This doesn't mean they're bad people or lack compassion for you.
When we're asking our congressmonsters to fight, we're asking them to take up our values in ways that many of them (rightly or wrongly) see as abandoning their own core values. THAT'S why they're angry.
They're NOT cowards. They just don't actually value the same things you do and their core priorities aren't in the same place yours are. They never have been. And as long as we primarily elect Dems from this demographic, they NEVER will be.
This isn't a problem with Lemmy, it's a problem with clicking on links in general. Most top search engine results anymore are crappy content mills serving who knows what ad network ads that may contain who knows what malware. You're probably way LESS likely, by an order of magnitude, to get something malicious from any given random Lemmy link than you are from any given random search engine result.
You can't do due diligence on every link you click on. That's absurd (at least for most people). The best thing you can do is make sure you have a reasonably hardened browser and reasonably secure operating system.
How hardened? How secure? Depends on your threat model.
Who says they aren't? Elon has zero problems with double standards.
100%. I watched a video on TFE where there was a minister guy saying the Earth is flat because the bible says so and that any evidence to the contrary is manufactured by (literally) Satan and the US government and that they may not be able to prove it one way or the other, but they have to have faith in the word of God.
There's literally nothing you can say to that.
I'm not going to spend more time on this today, but to be clear, I don't think you're a bad person or my enemy or your heart is in the wrong place. Just that this strategy is in a very counterproductive direction. <3
Let me take you one further: as long as we continue supporting the Democratic party at all, we will never have representatives that care for us.
I actually strongly disagree and think this is a super counter productive (and even dangerous) perspective. We need to change the two party system, I absolutely agree, but the political machinery in this country is basically engineered to create a two party system and abandoning the Dems is abandoning your seat at the table. Do I want to rebuild that machinery? Yes. Absolutely. Should we smash it and replace it with something better? 100%. Can we actually accomplish that by abandoning Dems? Not realistically. It's a pipe dream.
All what you're advocating for will accomplish, with the current balance of things as they are, is the further empowerment of Republicans. You're like those Muslims that refused to vote for Kamala over Palestine and now Trump is giving Netanyahu all the guns he wants and talking about annexing Gaza. Those voters hold some responsibility for that outcome, as do people who speak as you do.
I'm not going to spend a bunch of time and energy arguing about this right now. I've said my piece (and doubt I'm going to change your mind, but this perspective needs to be responded to). Just abandoning the Dems is abandoning ANY meaningful seat you had at the political table for the sake of making a what amounts to an impotent and empty statement at the end of the day. HATING that fact to the point of not being able to process it or engage with it doesn't make it not true.
They know it's bad, and stupid and insane. But it's not really directly impacting anyone that they know, or their standard of living. Yeah it might impact their businesses, but it's not going to put most of them out of business. And the effects of destroying all of these government services haven't even begun to be felt.
So they just can't relate to it has anything other than some annoying chaos that will all pass and things will get back to normal. And in the meantime all these young progressives want to make things even more chaotic! How is this helping? If you want to change things, go to your local Congress person's fundraiser dinner like a normal person.
"Yeah, bad things are happening to people, who aren't me or my friends, isn't that a shame? Isn't that just dreadful? This is all such insanity! Oh well, The Judsons invited us to their lake this weekend. Do you want to come? Your sister will be there."
-literally my familyI read a really good article recently about how people from different generations process information differently and so their UI preferences are wildly different.
The gist of it was
- A Boomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books. There are too many ads for books, so they tune them all out. They choose one by an author they know, that their friends said was good.
- A Gen Xer / Millennial walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They check the various authors they like, check that the cover art is appealing and read the backs of the different books, figuring out which one they want to read, then they buy that one.
- A Zoomer walks into a bookstore to buy a book. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of books, and feel bombarded by the ads for books. They check the authors the influencers they subscribe to on Youtube and Tik Tok say are good. They grab one of those based on the color of the cover, ignore the back and the cover art, flip it open to a random page, read that page and if what they read grabs their their attention they buy that book, but if it doesn't, they move on.
As a result, each of these people will prefer to interact with vastly different UX.
Of course these aren't hard and fast rules, set in stone and there are tons of exceptions, but it's a definite trend.
The Lemmy demographic skews hard to the older Millennial / Gen X demographic and is mostly people who were on reddit 15+ years ago. It's UI appeals to those people.
If I had a dollar for everything important the media "fails to inform" about in America,I could single-handedly stimulate the American economy,
The barrier to entry to get Self Hosted Matrix working is unfortunately pretty high. Matrix is a great tool, but getting it working requires advanced skills and (in my limited experience) hours of troubleshooting.
That being said, I'm associated with an organization that wants to help activist groups self host matrix. If you know a group with need, check out https://rmfuni.org/.