I had to check what cabinet position he held and was shocked he wasn’t in there. He seems like he has all the qualifications they look for.

There is also the legality of it and if it is treasonous. The one person at least the senators have some saftey nets from the Supreme Court but they still are at risk here.

The only people who progressives lose to are the Democrats. Even in cases where they win a primary they get kneecapped by the DNC. Most US progressives come in with wild ideas like making the rich pay things instead of poor people. Making sure water is clean. Keeping the government out of our bedrooms. Governing rather than blustering. They also tend to be relatable as most have worked at least one real job in their life.

I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.

People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.

Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.

When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.

This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.

He still is ahead of Kamala by about 2% or 2.5 million votes. Before he was ahead of Kamala + Claudia + Chase + Cornell + Jill + Vermin Supreme + Elmo.

It’s still a closer gap than he lost to Biden by by a lot. But it is also super clear that Harris managed to do worse in this environment than Hillary did in 2016 back when Trump was an unknown crazy person instead of the well known crazy shill for hire.

Some sort of camp to help ADHD folks work on their concentration?

He was elected as Dictator many times on a yearly basis and sometimes multiple times a year. He was so vastly popular the citizenry they killed the assassin’s, hunted down an heir and put him in power.

Julius Ceasar and his follow on Agustus were insanely capable leaders that did great things for their country. The empire was so great and lasted twice the time America has, it’s fall caused the Dark Ages.

Rome is a bad example here because technically the Dictatorship was good for them. Rome fell due to corruption that came in via enabling the Christian church to operate freely. Now that is a much better analog here that we enabled religious organizations to become tax free political action committees and uncapped their ability to influence government. This meant the evangelical grifters became the most powerful political entities in America.

Let’s not lump Trump in with Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a war hero and a capable leader who’s final crimes were giving out citizenship and housing.

Trump’s final crimes will be giving all our state secrets to every other government in the world and obliterating our infrastructure.

He is 78, in awful health, and has no interest in a legacy or supporting a successor. He keeps everyone around him at odds and maintains enough infighting that no clear heir apparent could really show up.

So like, he really only will hold power long enough to make everything terrible. So we got that goin for us.

deleted by creator

I’m an independent that voted for Jill in 2016 and Kamala in 2024. What is your issue with me? You think the country ever could recover if people like us didn’t work together?

None of this hurts me, I’ll be fine. I just question if I want to raise my family with American values now but I have the freedom to easily move anywhere. Others don’t.

They are short about 4 states right now. That isn’t as huge a gap as I’d like. And they have the ability to get the item out to the states.

The we made some mistakes but we are proud of our heritage deal only works when you’re not massively losing due to being out of touch with the morals of your base. It’s easier for me to not see the parallels when they are not sending troops to cleanse Gaza. When you look at the votes for them and realize that it is a combination of both the people who want Democrats and the people who just don’t want Trump and they STILL can’t win it is a huge issue.

It’s the oldest political party in the world, maybe it is time to rebuild it in a cleaner image.

It’s cool though, no way that a President that awful would still be ingrained in our modern politics. Well except for the fact that he is the Founder of the Democratic Party, you know… the “good” guys.

The Republican party is policy wise to the right of both National and the NZ First party as a comparison. They will also control all arms of the government and it is potentially possible for them to amend the constitution without any recourse but it isn’t easy.

So to be clear, they could change our Freedom of Religion and Speech to a Freedom of Christian Religions and “Truthful” Speech and there isn’t a ton that anyone could do to stop them just to give you an idea of the level of power they have taken in this election. It wouldn’t be easy, but the fact that it won’t be impossible should be terrifying.

The goals they have of criminalizing providing abortion services in all cases for the entire country is entirely possible. They could round up every person in the country of a certain nationality and put them in camps like we did with the Japanese during WW2, Trump already cited this act as being something he is considering to deal with immigration.

Historically we killed 90% of our indigenous population. When NZ was signing the Treaty of Waitangi, America was executing the Trail of Tears and rounding up 60,000 Native Americans and making them march 100km to live in a desert, a quarter of them died during the move. We’re not even starting in a similar place here and we’re moving far to the right.

The American people spoke and helped clarify what it means to be an American. It’s fair that some folks who last week felt proud to be an American now would prefer to be almost anything else.

We all have happiness, it’s just hard to see it past all the other stuff we got going on in our heads.

The big issue is that physical media degrades. A cassette tape wont sound the same as it did after just existing for 20 years. CD’s and Vinyl records if kept really well can last for 100 years or so but are delicate in other ways and a bad record player can cause permanent damage.

Preserving the experiences of others, art, media is important, but at the end of the day nothing we do is permanent. I know that thanks to online archives I can go and find old music if I need to. I am glad some folks preserve hard copies but a preserved collection isn’t really a functional one and a functional one isn’t really going to last 50 or 60 years at the same quality as what you can get from streaming.

This is why I used Spotify listeners and not plays or ticket sales or album sales. It’s a metric that doesn’t really require a band to be currently active. New hits will clearly improve the metric but we’re talking here specifically about a person’s outreach today and influence on a voting population.

The idea that more individual people listened to her music than had a single Beatles song in their playlist or a single Michael Jackson song in their playlist is pretty insane. I know I listen to at least one Beatles song a month, it doesn’t matter if it is new.