I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/

Just wanted to direct folks to [email protected], which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers!

Just wanted to direct folks to [email protected], which is a brand new community for exactly these kinds of discussions. Cheers folks!

I’m not sure you’ll get that from any instance that allows politics, to be perfectly honest, as politics will tend to swamp all other discussion because it generates more traffic and discussion. I’ve spent time on microskiff.com (a boating forum), which is intensely right-wing, and it got so toxic they had to ban political discussion altogether. They have an open feud with The Hull Truth (another boating forum) which leans more left and attracts more voices who challenge conservatives. /r/Hunting was kinda conservative and generally policed itself, but that’s because the mod team nuked anything that went off the rails.

Conservative-friendly spaces usually stay functional one of two ways: either they create a conservatives-only safe space or they refuse to let conservatives be overtly conservative. As someone who was a Reddit moderator for over a decade, you’re kinda driving at the major gripe conservatives have with the open internet. They tend not to get a warm welcome not because they’re conservative, but because when they flock together they tend to get disruptive and toxic very quickly. So then the warnings, removals, and bans come out, and the toxic crowd crows about being “censored”, and the toxicity/pushback ramps up in an endless loop. It’s the same song and dance everywhere they go, unfortunately. The conservative-sphere is just too infested with toxic conservatives for non-toxic conservatives find breathing room.

Additionally, Lemmy the platform has a steep learning curve which limits it to a more tech-savvy audience, and these kinds of forums naturally attract more left-leaning users, so I don’t think Lemmy is the place you’re going to find much conservative traffic in the first place.

Arrrgh?

Agreed. It’s like walking around a party with a post-it note stuck to your forehead that says “Don’t ask me about watermelons.”

All anyone is going to do all night is ask you about watermelons. Every single time.

Palestine ≠ Hamas

Assuming you give a shit, of course. I’ve not seen more than a handful of lunatics defend Hamas. Most folks are just trying to avoid exactly the same conflation you’re using here, because there are innocent Palestinians caught up in this bullshit, and they don’t deserve to be murdered any more than Israelis do.

Holy fuck, dudes.

That’s quite literally not what they said. You’ll get better responses if you don’t argue against what people are not saying.

Boil it down even further than OP and everything, ultimately, is just binary impulses between differently oriented clusters of atoms.

Time and time again I find myself coming back to a deterministic interpretation of the physical world. We’re now at the point where a simple scrape-predict-regurgitate AI language model (ChatGPT) can convincingly imitate the communication pattern of a human being with good factual recall but low social acumen, almost like what we generally associate with the autism spectrum. It’s harder and harder to argue that we aren’t just walking flesh bags with simple electrical impulses that carry us from decision to decision based on a finite dataset. It’s amazingly complex and sometimes can seem unpredictable, but it’s still finite. Were we ever able to build a sufficiently complex computer, I believe it could predict every decision we ever make with remarkable accuracy. The concept of “free will”, at least to me, seems a comfortable agreed-upon illusion that keeps us from killing and eating one another.

NPR interviewed a woman in the local Republican Party in Gaetz’s district. Her response to this shitstorm:

“The less Congress does, the better it is for all Americans.”

These people are fucking morons.

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Military secrets have existed since the dawn of civilization when the first savannah tribes kept their spear cache hidden until it was time to attack the neighboring clans. Aliens have never been even kinda confirmed with anything even whispering in the general direction of scientific evidence.

So when something weird/unexpected happens and the military says, “We can’t talk about that”, the logical course of action is to conclude that it’s likely the exact same kind of secret folks like them have been keeping for literal millennia, and not that it’s suddenly the most fundamentally groundbreaking discovery that’s ever taken place on this planet or in our solar system. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and “we saw something we can’t identify” ain’t extraordinary anything.