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2 yr. ago

If someone claims something happened on the fediverse without providing a link, they're lying.

Evidence or GTFO.

  • When I was a teenager, I encountered a bunch of different perspectives that contradicted the beliefs and ideas that I was raised with, and I realized that if you had wrong ideas about reality and tried to be a good person based on those ideas, you could easily wind up doing more harm than good. So I made a vow to myself to always pursue the truth - to learn about the world, to examine myself and my biases, to seek out and understand different perspectives, to ground my beliefs on evidence, and to reject peer pressure and comforting lies and to face reality even when it disturbed me.

  • No throw, only take?

  • My brother got fucked up psychologically from murdering Iraqis and Afghans and then came home and started "self-medicating" with meth while spending all day sitting in his house alone while listening to far-right propaganda like OAN. He tried to check himself in for treatment at the VA but they committed malpractice which nearly killed him, and he responded violently, which put a flag on his record making it difficult for him to get help in the future, while at the same time giving him a deep distrust of doctors. He was incredibly paranoid and accused everyone of being part of some sort of conspiracy against him and would make violent threats, veiled just enough to not be actionable. Eventually, he went over to someone's house with a gun, but the cops had been watching his house and they showed up, he pulled a gun on them and got shot in the arm, which he lost the use of, but he eventually recovered somewhat on account of getting off the meth while in jail. He's still a fascist and still listens to all the same shit, but he's at regular fascist levels of paranoid-schizophrenia now.

    I don't give a shit about him but the pain he put my family through, a memory is burned into my mind of tears in my mother's eyes as she gets another text and it's another crisis and she can't enjoy even a single night out at dinner because she has to act like a 911 operator 24/7 - and whenever I think about any of the people responsible for the stupid, pointless wars that caused all this, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, and all the rest, I remember that we got off incredibly easy, that our suffering was absolutely nothing compared to the actual victims of our country's wanton slaughter and pointless wars of aggression, and I multiply the pain I felt in that moment and the trauma throughout the whole experience by a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as my mind is even capable of comprehending which is still only a tiny fraction of the reality, and I focus it into pure hatred directed towards all the people responsible for the wars.

  • One time when I was 10 my teacher rolled in a TV and made us watch some building fall over on the news. I thought it was boring and wanted to go back to learning stuff. But then afterwards all the grown-ups, and I mean like, all the grown-ups got really really angry and weird, like I would say things like that I don't want to knock over other people's buildings and they said that meant I was a terrorist.

  • This isn't the most quintessential 90's movie, or even a good movie, but the fever dream of Romeo+Juliet (1996) is the most 90's thing I've ever seen in my life.

  • "Roguelike" has become overused to the point that it's basically meaningless. Nobody's even played Rogue so it just means "a game that's like other games that are described as roguelike," which is like, any game. There's a set of games where the term originated where it actually made sense, games like Angband, ADOM, Castle of the Winds, etc, that are all closely related where the term makes sense. Cogmind and Pixel Dungeon are more recent examples.

    Some of it gets resolved by describing those as "traditional roguelikes," and using other descriptors like "action rougelike" for Hades or "rougelike deckbuilder" for Slay the Spire, but like at that point why not just use "Hadeslike" or "Spirelike" instead of constantly harking back to this 40 year old game?

  • If only they'd joined the SPD in voting for Hindenburg, the guy who won the election and appointed Hitler chancellor, then Hindenburg would've... won the election and appointed Hitler chancellor.

  • That sure is a lot of claims without one single source for any of them.

  • Thank you for filtering out the irrelevant information and editorializing in the opinion piece.

    I'll concede that there is some evidence to support your position, but I would still argue against it. Much of the data used in these studies comes from a different political landscape than what we're dealing with today. There are many studies that show increasing political polarization over time, and I would argue that that reduces the fluidity of voter choices. Republican voters now are less likely to vote for a Democrat now than they were in the 90's, when, for example, Bill Clinton won Louisiana and Tennessee. I would also point out that this conventional wisdom failed to account for Trump's 2016 victory and the fact that the Republican party remains strong despite becoming increasingly extremist.

    I don't have time to read through all of your studies but I did read through the first. Something I found notable, which I expected, was that while the study found that extremism was correlated with general election losses in both parties, the effect was significantly more pronounced in the Republican party. This makes the successful rise of right-wing extremism even less coherent with your point of view. But from my perspective, it makes perfect sense - in the current polarized environment, mobilizing one's own base is more effective than appealing to the center, so much so that even if you're promoting broadly unpopular policies, it can still win against someone who has failed to adapt.

  • For that evidence they’d need to look to Congressional downballot races which are more fluid and open to experimentation. The evidence of progressive voter mobilization doesn’t show up there either.

    I disagree. This is from the 2020 election:

    Funny enough, the two Florida democrats who lost in blue districts also specifically distanced themselves from a ballot measure to raise the minimum wage on the basis that it was too progressive - both they and Biden lost in Florida while the ballot measure passed.

    Progressive policies are broadly popular. Running on things that are popular tend to get you more votes. People like it when you do stuff for them.

    The only evidence I've seen to the contrary is a NYT opinion piece that cites centrist think tanks and random people's opinions. I didn't see anything in there that looked reliable or compelling.

  • The data [from Pew] suggests that the progressive vision of winning a presidential election simply by mobilizing strong support from Democratic constituencies simply did not materialize for Mr. Biden.

    Wtf did I just read? The idea is to mobilize strong support from Democratic constituencies by running a progressive candidate who supports progressive causes. Obviously, if you run a right-winger like Biden, he'll draw more support from the right and fail to mobilize the left. Are they trying to pretend that Biden was a progressive or something? What an incredible take.