Yeah sure, but I wasn’t talking about any of that. It was about the individual decision making process.

The time for moral grandstanding is always long past when it’s Election Day.

Good line. And good reasoning before that!

I have voted third party in the distant past. It’s not some awful taboo to not play along with the two party system. And given my extended family, the further back I look in the past the more that right wing stuff just seemed normal, so I may not make the same choice now.

But the time to abstain or go third party is when the price of expressing my more ideal choice is worth not voting against the worse of the 2-party candidates.

I guess the logical exception to that is if you’re an accelerationist and you think we are SO far beyond being able to course correct that it is literally a more moral and humane outcome to turn the nu-neo-nazis loose on just about every vulnerable demographic that exists. Then you get to the rebuild phase faster and there’s less time for the government to kill & ruin people. But you never know if your plan is going to hit a little roadblock called nuclear armageddon.

This comment inspired me to design a conservative commemorative coin. Why should only Trump himself have them?

Leopards Eating Faces is obviously heads. I’m thinking of a big dumb face that’s kind of laughing and staring at you, but you can only see one of the eyes. The other eye is covered by an open leopard mouth coming down at an angle and starting to envelop the face.

Owning the Libs will probably be an effeminate man getting kicked in the butt. It will resonate with conservatives because it has it all: potty humor, bigotry, dominance, and superficial judgment.

It is possible for her to be a bad candidate who made consistently bad decisions, and for it still to be a bad choice for an individual to not vote for her.

source: *gestures in all directions *

Not wanting to go to a concentration camp is understandable, especially if you have a high paying job.

Not wanting OTHER people you’ve never met to go to concentration camps? Whoaaa there Che, put down that AK-47!

I can totally see this coming.

The developed world has a population growth problem. Population growth has slowed or reversed in many countries, but the global economy is designed around infinite growth, fed by an infinitely growing pool of workers and customers. Then when they retire they can be taken care of by the infinitely growing population of young people.

It takes zero imagination to picture this administration forcing “high value human resources” to remain in the country, including putting them on no fly lists. Unfortunately since they are stupid, the brain drain has already started.

Damn, that is well said. This sentence in particular:

We are losing our respect for the profound, our empathy for the other, and our curiosity for the unknown.

is the kind of thing that sounds like an empty platitude when your mind/life is in a bad state, but after a few years of progress and healing I read that line and wish I could adequately express the years of reflection and learning that can be distilled down to such a short statement.

It doesn’t always feel that clean cut to me. I’m not arguing that you are wrong. You are absolutely correct! You are describing a huge problem.

But our stupid voting system is another problem that serves to keep that first one in place. Small uprisings against the two party system might be noticed but they will be filtered out. To change the system it seems there has to be widespread and persistent discontent and rebellion well beyond what we’re already seeing. We’re definitely moving in that direction though, for better or worse.

That stupid voting system means that if you are going to support a third party with good ideas, you must necessarily withdraw your support from whichever of the pawl and gear you prefer to the other. Enter ranked choice, star, etc.

So in an election like 2024 when it comes time to cast the actual vote, I’m left thinking: So what if I take my finger off the pawl there, and what we thought was a gear starts spinning like a buzz saw and cuts my fucking leg off?

I guess going loopy from blood loss while I point my femoral artery at people like a garden hose and find ultimate rest knowing I was right about the system sure beats dying from nuclear winter.

So that’s what so many can’t ignore when it comes time to choose. Yeah if we elected Harris we’d be living in a country of capitalism and inequality, with Israel doing horrors under our wing. It wouldn’t be a good outcome.

But compare it with what we got. I’m just some employed straight white father living in suburban nowheresville USA, but I would very much rather my government didn’t have a gestapo, or bomb Iran, or sell access & secrets, or leave NATO, or support fossil fuels, or work against green energy, or round up people who have been living a peaceful productive life and destroy those lives by the thousands because they are ethnically undersirable to the base.

I never thought to look for something like this, but it looks fantastic so i’m going to try it. Thanks!

Maybe he meant it was some Scott Pilgrim style trickle down. When you shoot a healthcare CEO, they explode into an avalanche of coins for the people to collect.

Yeah, they will say all kinds of funny and/or dangerous shit when their definition of rational and logical argument is “the one that produces my answer.”

Anti-Luigi posts only serve to illustrate the underlying fatal flaw with our culture in the US. It’s a flaw with humanity, sure, but we seem to specialize in it. To wit:

Violently hurting another person, or even stealing their stuff, is inexcusable. The only exceptions are life and death situations.

Destroying the lives of many people indirectly in pursuit of money, however, is just an unfortunate fact of life. Cause and effect is apparently irrelevant as long as the CEO isn’t literally throwing rocks at them as he pours their insulin down the drain.

you aren’t becoming nazi Germany, you currently are nazi Germany.

I can only hope that the body count isn’t as similar as the rest of their playbook.

It is terrifying to consider the very real possibility that the US may have already “deported” thousands of people to a mass grave somewhere. I’m not aware of any evidence of that, but while it would still shock me it would not surprise me.

Yeah, in reality you are totally right. On stuff like Reddit not only did I ignore scores or engagement indicators, but I almost never commented in the first place. On Lemmy not only is is nicer to comment and interact because of the audience, it is interesting to know that a couple people or a couple dozen people agreed/disagreed, or that it resonated with them, etc.

And you have to love how my suggestion got ZERO buy in around here.

That sounds like a challenge. C’mon fellas, this cup size connoisseur thinks we can’t make them look bad with our upvotes!

*click* aaaaand three. Take THAT, oh ye of little faith!

Yeah I’ve said this a few times, but honestly anybody who can interact with Lemmy is in the upper tiers of the scale compared with the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.

Obviously that does not mean that individuals cannot have terrible luck and circumstances.

Just install Mint if you’re already planning on ubuntu. It’s basically the same thing under the hood, but with more polish and shine and without Canonical’s junk.

no, no, I’m pretty sure woman is a class and Emma Watson is an object.

I’m going to have to try that game. I played a bunch of the original but I think nothing in between.

In capitalism the goal is to use the money you have now to help you get more money in the future. If you can spend a few million dollars training your workforce or spend a few million buying corrupt politicians, and the latter nets you 10x the return in 1/10 the time, the system will reward those who make the immoral choice. And if you are working for a publicly traded company, your shareholders and board of directors will probably fire you for not using all technically-legal tools at your disposal.

I was recently thinking that the proponents of unregulated capitalism make it sound like natural selection for corporations. And it kind of does sound like that, until you think about it a little bit. It would be like an animal that grows more mouths as it finds more food, and if it eats even more food it can do magic shit like edit its own DNA and warp the laws of physics. Oh and of course it would be immortal, able to die from injury or starvation but never old age. (and if it did die from injury or starvation, it’s probably so that its owner can sell its kidneys)