Roundcat

Make the job as easy as you can for yourself, and TELL NO ONE!

About a decade ago, me and my family were part of the very movement that changed the Republican party into the beast it is today. We made it very clear to party members that moderates would not be tolerated. We demonized the RINOs as much as we demonized the Democrats, the Liberals and the Obamas. By primary season of 2016, the last influences of the old Republican party were stamped out. Trump was the achievement of the Tea Party, and how it flipped the neo liberal conservative party into a fascist one.

Blame the Democrats all you want for being milquetoast, weak, or ineffective in the face of the Republican party. As someone who has played for both teams, I have never seen the same fire from Democratic voters to change their party as I have from the Republicans. There is no party wide effort to weed out Democrats who work in the interests of companies only, or are essentially Republicans with the Democrat label. There has been no unified direction for the future Democrats want to see for the US other than the current status quo.

What we did in the Tea Party, is we got involved at every stage of government. We found out who our state and federal legislators were, and if they did not stand with our views, we primaried them out. We took trips to Washington as a church, or as a young Republican’s association, and we rallied in front of every monument that they would allow us in front of. In our eyes, our goal was righteous, and we were in a battle for the soul of the country.

I abhor everything I was back then, and feel guilty for the present we have created today. But if there is one take away from my time in the Tea Party that I think could apply to Democrats is you don’t have to settle for less. By all means vote for Biden again, but you should make it clear to every Democrat defending their seat next year that you won’t be settling for spineless enablers. Now’s the time to start campaigning progressive candidates to run against them. Any progressive you get elected should be seen as a victory, and every neo liberal who loses should take it as a message that they are no longer electable. You should practice that democracy as much as you can while you still have it.

Democrat isn’t really an ideology though as much as it’s a coalition of voters. They can be anyone from Communists and socialists to conservatives who don’t align with the Republican party. The majority of politicians within the party tend to be free market liberals akin to Clinton, with a few European style Social Democrats akin to Bernie Sanders and AOC. As someone who supports gun ownership and rejects the existence of corporate welfare and monopolies, I might not identify with many of the politicians within the Democratic party. Likewise I take issue with the Republican’s stances towards human rights, the establishment of religion, and putting the legitimacy of elections into question. I might be more comfortable with voting Democrat, but the party’s platform would not be how I would describe my ideology.

Thanks. Seeing Orwell’s name attached to one of your recs is a good sign.

I often go with Anti-Authoritarian when describing my beliefs. I’ve played around with the Anarchist label as well, though it seems to have the same affect on Communists who want an edgier label (which is ironic, considering both groups have clashed with each other throughout history)

Anecdotally I want to say boys have always felt more conservative around that age, especially when I was in highschool in the early 2000s. Granted I lived my teen years in the south, and this probably more of a cope than an actual explanation. There definitely seems to be a lot more active targeting of young men by right wing influencers now. In the past right wing media seemed to always be the domain of old people.

In many ways I still consider myself libertarian, but moreso in anti authority leaning than Republican but with a cooler label. Many of my peers in highschool and university clicked with the pro guns, pro expression sentiment, but when it came actually letting queer people and religious minorities live their lives, or allowing women control over their own bodies and healthcare, they always seemed to side with the Authoritarians in power threatening the to restrict these people. Not to mention many of them had no problem with authority as long as it came from a corporate entity or oligarch.

I still identify with the term Libertarian, but have stopped using it because it truly doesn’t represent what it was supposed to mean anymore.

I actually find myself spending more time here, to the point to where I might have to take a break because it’s starting to become unhealthy.

I think the reason why is since there are less posts per volume, it’s easier to read through everything. Since the communities are smaller, the news and discussion is more focused. And because a lot of the more tech savy and activist minded individuals made the switch over to lemmy, I find it easier to have more nuanced conversation than on reddit.

However some of my bad habits from reddit are starting to resurface here, and I probably need to start regulating my time here. At the very least, I feel like I get a lot more out of my time and participation here.

On kbin and I think most major lemmy instances, you can block communities, so if you don’t want to see content from them, say redditmigration posts, you can filter the whole community. That won’t stop you from say seeing it in unrelated communities, in which case blocking the users who keep bring it up reduces visibility of the topic even more. Finally setting your default page to your subs rather than top reduces the visibility of unwanted topics even more.

I sincerely wish people would use the block feature, rather than keep making threads complaining about content/communities they don’t like to see.

Missed train, but eh, whatever.

The year is 2016, I’m teaching English in Japan, and the Olympics is on TV with Nigeria vs. Japan in Soccer.

I’m normally not into Scoccer or any kind of TV sport for that matter, but I caught the game early on, and Japan was neck and neck with Nigeria. For some reason I wanted to see it play out. JAPAN scores! YES! then I remember where I was and what I was doing, and my train to Sapporo had left 30 minutes ago…

Luckily I was able to schedule another train, and what time I got there didn’t really matter, but I had to wait several hours for it to arrive. Japan ended up losing 5 to 4.

I was introduced to kbin first, and after giving both kbin and lemmy a shot, I decided on kbin as my primary. I prefer the layout mostly. Yes I know you can customize lemmy to get it to a similar look and feel, but kbin feels great straight out the box. The Mastodon integration is interesting, and its nice to keep up with what’s going on there at the same time on one site. Also as federation users, we are encouraged to join smaller instances to lighten the load of ml and world, and kbin seems to be a good compromise of joining a smaller instance that isn’t too empty. Also, with the recent hacks happening with the bigger lemmy instances, I feel like I made the right call sticking around here.