a lil bee 🐝

I think the distributed nature of Mastodon keeps government control from being an issue. It would be kind of cool as a space for citizens to ask for assistance or air grievances while giving the politicians an officially owned space for things like announcements.

Hey, that’s a neat image. I’ve seen other ways of visualizing the popular vote on a map but this one looks wonky as hell and I like it.

Are you under the impression that people donate money to politicians as an investment? For some of us, our sights are on yknow… not letting our country slide into a fascist state. My personal wealth is not as important as that.

There is a lot of nuance to that. If Trump appeals on constitutional grounds, the Supreme Court can choose to hear it. State cases can be appealed to the SC if their interpretation of federal law or the constitution are in dispute. They normally just outright deny hearing most cases decided by state courts. A good chunk of the supreme court is likely to grant whatever the hell he wants though, so I’m not so certain anything that boils down to interpretation is safe.

Ah, good call, I forgot the context. Does this apply if he escalates to supreme court and they grant certiorari?

That wouldn’t be necessary. Presidents have the power to pardon and nothing says it cannot be used on the self.

Not doing this with you. If you can’t follow the logic between the post topic, this thread’s OP, and the common experiences of anyone on the internet, that’s fine, just don’t discuss. Not going to do the thing where you’re “just asking questions” and critiquing every pedantic little point along the way. That’s sealioning and it’s tiring and lame and why half of the people here don’t want to discuss the issues they’re bringing up. The only one here who can’t seem to follow the logic is you.

Yknow, it’s really something else to come into a thread discussing topics people don’t want to talk about because they get treated to shitty behavior and sealioning, and proceed to sealion on one of those topics.

See, I think this is what they’re talking about though. I hate Christianity. I was raised Protestant and because of other factors in my life, Christianity effectively ruined large swathes of my lifespan. It’s still an active threat to me, and likely will be for my entire life. I’m likely to be a fairly stringent atheist forever.

All that said, edgy internet atheists are one of the most annoying archetypes to run into online. If even a whiff of a religious topic comes up, they pounce and nip and bark. They satisfy almost every stereotype the religious people have of them because they often seem to delight in the cruelty of knocking on beliefs. Like, my whole top comment still being relevant, religion has a reason to exist. It gives people feelings of hope, love, and belonging. Anyone who has experienced a lack of those can understand why people fall into religion and why it’s like any other addiction.

I’m breaking one of my rules right now, talking about religion on social media, but I figured the “meta” aspect of this thread would make it productive. I hope I don’t regret it.

Oh, oh! I have a more recent example of a cringy militant atheist now, do you need a link? Here ya go.

Oh cmon, being jailed by the Taliban has gotta be peak transition goals

…right, so you’re asking for all media orgs to selectively choose stories in an attempt to make the Overton window (one of the most overused and abused concepts in online political discussion right now, to be frank) what you want. I’m not cool with that, regardless of the underlying validity of the stance you want to push. You can call it fighting fire with fire or whatever, but I call it losing every principle you have in the pursuit of protecting those same principles.

End of the day, I want the news I’m reading to tell me the opinions of the citizens I share space with. It doesn’t matter if I like it or not, it is out there and I need to know about it. The news is responsible for reporting on where the Overton window is, not where it should be.

Edit: I also wanted to add this. This conversation was on my mind as I was reading some of my news feed today and I saw the following articles posted by NYT just in the last few days, that are also discussing the left or their points of view.

How ‘The Squad’ and Like-Minded Progressives Have Changed Their Party

The Small-Business Tyrant Has a Favorite Political Party

Rural Voters Are More Progressive Than the Democratic Party Thinks

And here are some rather right-wing perspectives, from actual conservative politicians, although Cheney is certainly no longer a darling for them.

Liz Cheney: The Supreme Court Should Rule Swiftly on Trump’s Immunity Claim

Mike Pence: Donald Trump Has Betrayed the Pro-Life Movement

I think it’s completely reasonable to share these views with everyone. We need to know what our fellow citizens are talking about and believing, even if it’s completely bonkers.

It’s an opinion article, so I don’t think NYT has committed any malpractice here. They published an op-ed from Pence last week about Trump not being harsh enough on abortion, but that absolutely does not mean they dislike abortion. There are people who wanted FISA renewed because they are in intelligence services and see the benefits directly. I’m also skeptical of mass surveillance laws, but I’m glad NYT posted this article so I could read an opinion from someone who disagrees, and I don’t think this establishes an opinion or stance on the part of NYT at all because it’s not what op-eds are for.

Can you please point out where I said anything against almost anything you said here? Are you here to have a discussion about your shower thought or just grandstand your political opinion to a group that by large already shares it? Thank you for starting the thread, but not sure I’m going to reply to any additional messages because I’m not sure that you’re actually reading any of mine.

Not sure anybody is really arguing in this entire thread. Just discussion of edge cases and the gray areas on an interesting shower thought.

My argument would be that by eliminating the means of wealth being an avenue to power, it will merely shift to the government that is enforcing those rules. Those same shitty people will infiltrate that government and use it to inflate themselves while oppressing others. There was no utopian society prior to capitalism and fiat currency, and there won’t be one after.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is an impossible problem to solve. I just do not think eliminating the notion of a billionaire is the cure for all of your listed ills. I agree with you that it would absolutely have impacts on all of them, but we would still wake up to world hunger, climate change, etc.

Each of your listed issues is a complex, multi-faceted problem. We cannot boil down that nuance just so we can point to our favorite enemy, deserving as they might be. Fight them too, but don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.

We’re looking at two extreme ends of the pole here. Zuck, Bezos, Musk are the shittiest public billionaires. There are also more secretive ones who are arguably even more destructive. These people have absolutely justified their own downfall, if it ever comes to pass. On the other side, Dolly doesn’t even technically count on this list because she has given enough away to not be a billionaire. Those are the easy cases where almost every reasonable person agrees on the “right” thing to do.

Now, we have to remember that there are people who exist at every little increment along that scale of giving back to general shittiness for the global population. Focusing on the billionaires themselves and their lifestyles or whatever is not the answer. We need to focus on making effective tax brackets, effective regulations on the avenues billionaires generally target for power (political institutions, media companies, etc), and effective spending of the increased income from those new taxes to help raise the lower class to a more equitable position. That’s a socdem perspective though, because I do not foresee capitalism collapsing in my lifetime and I like to be pragmatic.

Hate both, where it’s appropriate. Some of these players perpetuate the game that we all hate. Elon Musk is a player who has become part of the structure of the game, fighting regulations and damaging democracy for the sake of his own capitalistic endeavors. Someone mentioned below that Dolly Parton could be a billionaire. Not gonna hate on Dolly Parton who I assume did not come by her wealth through being an asshole, but more just being successful and our current “game” rewarding her with more than she would have in a better society. I would tax the absolute fuck out of her though.

I’m not sure that I agree. While I would support something like outlawing billionaires or at the very least, a tax bracket that claws back significant chunks of what they are draining from society, there are vast nuances to these issues beyond “the billionaires want it that way.” When you say “everything from … can all be rendered down”, I think it’s pretty important to recognize how much detail and nuance is lost in that rendering down.

Billionaires and the accumulation of wealth are just stand ins for the accumulation of power in a capitalistic society. When power is removed, it creates a vacuum. Who fills it? In the ideal, I know most of us would say “the people” but this is an insanely complex balancing beam to maintain without some group of assholes finding a new, non-capital way to extract and centralize that power.

None of this is to say that eliminating the notion of a billionaire is a bad idea. I’m with you all that the very idea of a billionaire is heinous and impossible without vast exploitation. I just do not think that issue being solved would be even close to some panacea for all of the world’s problems. There would just be twists in the existing problems and fun new ones.

Define “BLM”, “protests”, and “success” because any combination of different variables produces a different result. Additionally, even then, there is a lot of nuance to being successful when it comes to political movements.

The protests undoubtedly brought more attention to policing and racial issues in general. They obviously didn’t solve either problem. Some states passed progressive policing laws, some regressed out of spite or in reacting to the other states.

Then you also have the category of “well, it might have made an impact on this but we’ll never know”. For instance, does Biden win in 2020 without the Black Lives Matter protests? No idea, and nobody truly does or even can. That would be an enormous impact on many things, some of which may not even have been goals of the protests.