Everyone has this drawer, but this one is too organized. It appears to be 100% kitchen tools. You need to add a deck of playing cards, a bunch of soy sauce packets, a few half-used books of matches, a few take-out menus, and some loose keys in order to do this drawer properly.

“OK, now do these two pictures-”

“Not guilty!”

“Excuse me?”

“Oh , sorry, too soon? I’ll wait.”

No, I think they match, but if I wound up on his jury, I might start to doubt it.

…well, again, I definitely think that would be a bad thing. Truly terrible. Definitely wouldn’t be happy to see the billionaire class living in fear of the people they’re exploiting. Oh no. Stop. Police. Murder.

Fair enough, but that’s a variation of a variation, and pretty obscure (I’d heard of the Fat Man variation, but not the Fat Villain).

But if CEO deaths started matching school shooting numbers things would likely change.

I mean, that’s basically what I’m saying, but that’s not really the Trolley Problem. That’s basically the French Revolution. (And, again, should any law enforcement agents happen to read this, I’m definitely not trying to incite violence against the billionaire class, no matter how badly they deserve it or how much better the world would be for it).

I see what you’re getting at, but this isn’t the trolley problem. The trolley problem is predicated on the idea that killing one will save many, but it’s assumed that everyone involved is innocent. It’s a philosophical question about moral choice; is inaction that allows many to die more moral than an action that directly kills one? If the one person being killed is somehow culpable for the deaths of the other people, that changes the entire equation.

Also, that’s not even what happened here. One person was killed, but just as many people are going to die today because United Healthcare. No one was saved. Maybe if dozens of CEOs were gunned down in the streets, that would change something, but one dead CEO isn’t going to do anything.

(And, to any moderators or FBI agents reading this, I’m of course not advocating for that. Can you even imagine? The ruling class that has been crushing the American working class for decades suddenly getting put down like rabid dogs? With the very weapons that the gun manufacturers allowed to flood our streets in order to maximize their profits? Makes me sick just to fantasize think about it.)

That’s why like Emma Vigeland. She’s calm, cool, and pretty open minded, and when things do get confrontational, it’s Tim Pool that’s screeching, not her.

Yeah, I fell off of TYT in 2017 or 2018 for a lot of the same reasons I can’t stand listening to right-wing pundits; a lot of smug and little information (mostly from Cenk). I hadn’t heard anything about Ana Kasperian. What happened with her?

There are some leftist podcasts that I like, but they are kinda just angry and unproductive, like The Insurgents; I only listen to them when I’m deeply angry or they have a good guest. The Lever is probably the best new left-wing podcast I’m listening to right now, and the Majority Report is always great.

I follow a lot of podcasts that are either center-left sources or Democratic party cheerleaders: NPR and the NPR Politics Podcast, Ezra Klein (God he’s an insufferable twat), the Daily, Pod Save America…some of these I listen to because I want to know what the, “mainstream American left,” believes, some of them just have good information; NPR’s Up First is a great 15 minute morning news wrap, and the Daily does good in depth reporting (even better when Michael Barbaro is on vacation).

I don’t listen to right-wing pundits like Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh very often. They’re mostly culture war crap, and there’s usually very little information to be gained from them. I do regularly read conservative reporting though, mostly WSJ and the Economist.

It depends on how much of an absolutist you want to be. No government allows absolute freedom of speech. Libel, slander, and incitement of violence are all forms of speech that are illegal in basically every country. If your platform refuses to remove these forms of speech, you would be protecting what is generally not considered to be free speech, and it’s possible you could even be held legally liable for allowing that kind of speech to spread on your platform.

If you decide not to be a free speech absolutist, and instead define free speech as legal speech, then things get complicated. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has held multiple times that hate speech is protected under the First Amendment, so censoring hate speech would mean your platform wasn’t allowing all forms of, “free speech.” However, the U.S. has much broader protections on speech than most Western countries, and hate speech is illegal in much of Europe.

So, TL:DR; free speech is a sliding scale, and many countries wouldn’t consider hate speech to be protected form of speech. By those standards, you could have a platform that censors hate speech but still maintains what is considered free speech. However, by other countries’ standards, you would be censoring legal speech.

The Switch is fantastic for what it is. Sure, it’s anemic and old, but it’s a creative design that more or less created a whole product category and allows for very creative gameplay.

This is actually their design philosophy: “Lateral thinking with withered technology,” or, “what can we do with old technology we’re really familiar with?” Nintendo was much slower to market with their 16 bit console than Sega, but they took their time to understand the new tech, and developed the first handheld cartridge console with 8 bit technology at the same time. Sega tried to emulate its success with a color handheld system, but it was large, had poor battery life, and didn’t sell very well. Instead of rushing to catch up with a color handheld, Nintendo released the Game Boy Pocket, which was very popular. and released an entirely superior product in the Game Boy Color a few years later.

This philosophy isn’t always a benefit to them; they lost the Final Fantasy franchise because the cartridge system on the N64 wasn’t powerful enough to run it. However, it’s usually a boon; the switch has been incredibly successful despite its graphical inferiority, and despite being comically underpowered compared to its competitors, the Wii is the secon-best selling console of all time, behind only the PS2.

Their track record on consoles is hit or miss because they don’t make the same product every generation like Sony and Microsoft. For every Wii and Switch, you get a Wii. U and Virtual Boy. They’re shitty with their IP, but hardware development is literally the best thing they do.

I’ll also add that you need to primary basically anyone that has been in politics for more than 15 years. There is just too much, “common sense,” in this party that is just wrong. In 2016, it was smart to run a centrist campaign that tried to move moderates away from Trump, and it failed. In 2024, they ran the same fucking campaign, and it failed.

There are well intentioned people that somehow still think that the 1992, third-way strategy will deliver gains through incrementalism, and it’s just not going to happen. Primary them, so that they at least have to contend with the new political realities. Trump picked up working class voters across across all demographics, not just the white working class. Everyone wants change; offer real change.

Yup. We gotta vote for them this election, but replace them in the next. Otherwise, we’re just hitting snooze on fascism for another 4 years.

What about my original comment led you to believe I thought they were equivalent? As I said, Republicans are vile, hateful, and exploiting our political divisions for power. But the Democrats are just as responsible for the material conditions that have allowed facism to flourish, and demanding accountability and change for that isn’t nitpicking. If the Democrats don’t stop being corporate stooges, this doesn’t end if Trump is defeated; it ends when another fascist finally wins.

History didn’t start in 2016. The Democrats were happy to cozy up to the Silicone Valley tech giants, even as they developed into monopolies whose products gave users the very brain-poisoning that delivered Trump. They were happy to prioritize Wall Street bailouts over homeowners’ bailouts after the subprime mortgage crises, even if meant their constituents lost their homes. They’ve been happy to sideline or undermine anyone who dares run to their left, from Bernie Sanders to Rashida Tlaib.

The Democrats are not well-meaning, helpless progressives that just can’t get anything done because of America’s byzantine political structure. They have actively stopped any significant changes to the status quo in order to keep their donors happy. They’ve spent decades deluding themselves into thinking they could somehow improve conditions for the working class without demanding concessions from the billionaire class, even as the largest wealth transfer in history, from the lowest income Americans to the highest income Americans, was taking place. They may not be as vile or hateful as the Republicans, but they are just as responsible for America’s decay.

Oh, that’s easy; we don’t! Every four years, the fabric of our society frays and tears a little more, while our politicians either exploit our divisions or attempt to repair them without making any changes to the material conditions or systemic problems that create these fractures, because fixing these underlying issues would upset the handful of billionaires that actually control our government! But there’s a new Fast & Furious movie every two or three years, so it balances out.

It’s the only site with a similar post/comment structure and a large enough user base to be viable, so in that regard, it’s the only alternative. Culturally, it’s much different. It’s far more left-leaning and hasn’t fallen victim to the same salf-importance and group-think that Reddit users have. It also doesn’t have the same wealth of knowledge Reddit built up over 20 years, though, and it’s prone to petty infighting between communities and instances (and even admins).

Ultimately, I prefer it to Reddit, and never feel the urge to go back. I’m not convinced that Federation is a silver bullet for all of social media’s ills, but I think Lemmy is an interesting project, and I’m interested in seeing how it develops.

Slightly further away in the sequel trilogies, but slightly closer because it was a prequel.

In the lead up to the release of Episode 1, the Sci-Fi channel ran some bumpers of fans waiting in line arguing with each other. One of them said something to the effect of, “Given that this is a prequel, and that we know the universe is expanding, shouldn’t the crawler read, ‘A slightly less long time ago in a Galaxy slight less far away…’” 25 years later and that still pops into my head sometimes.