Disinformation causes people to believe and spread misinformation. It’s often hard to tell who is being deliberate and who is an idiot, especially with so many idiots on the public stage and so much societal mass mental illness.

Ha, I was just being snarky. I’ve never liked the few parts of Ohio I’ve been at, but I’m guessing there are some good places there.

Not living in Ohio is worth at least $1k a month, so that tracks.

I’m a millennial, I had a gun in my car during hunting season, a few years later that would have landed me in jail. The cultural shift actually moved very fast. Same with drinking in bars underaged. Within a few years it went from doing it everywhere to doing it almost nowhere. I could drink in bars underaged at 15 but not at 19, because the policy enforcement shifted that fast.

I’m not smart enough to spot the error in your comment, so I guess you’re an AI.

Lakes and rivers still have otters and beavers, etc. Not huge biomass but still relevant. Oceans have all sorts of mammals, most of the largest ocean creatures. Only 30% of land is inhabited by humans and our agriculture but land and freshwater is only 29% of earth and 71% of earth is oceans. 30% of 29% is like 8.5%. Once you start factoring in how little of the earth we actually inhabit or our agriculture, it is pretty surprising how heavily we dominate the mammal kingdom.

This is surprising to me, I grew up in a rural area where deer far outnumbered people. Also you’d think despite their small size the sheer number of rodents in the wild would increase the biomass by more than that. There are large amounts of the earth that is still uninhabited by humans, in mountains, cold climates, islands and keys, oceans, lakes, etc. I’m sure the scientists are right, I’m just shocked.

And a way of renormalizing misogyny.

His views have already come a long way, I was more using it as illustrative of communication being a big part of the problem here. He experienced a lot of cruel antisemitism in his life, that makes people see things with blinders on because he is reasonably afraid of history repeating itself.

Sort of a side tangent about definitions. I was always taught, by someone that was previously pro Israel, Zionism is simply the desire of return to the homeland. Which is a very watered down dishonest definition hiding the nationalism of a desire for an ethostate. If someone thinks it means just returning home, then their view of others calling it evil makes it feel like antisemitism, even if it’s not. People can’t communicate because the laymen’s words often get used in 100 different ways that don’t match. I think that’s often one source of miscommunication even among well meaning people. Another is that the anti Israel movement is peppered with actual anti-Semites poisoning the well. I’ve protested against Israel, but as a Jew it can be very uncomfortable, I’ve repeatedly met actual anti-Semites that way. I think these things make it very easy for people dug in to see antisemitism everywhere.

I see that reaction from my father all the time. He’s a lefty, progressive, but talk about Israel and you have to tread very carefully. He hates the Likud and present day genocide, but is suspicious of the motives of a lot of the outside criticism.

God I’ve had that experience, ask a question I have some understanding of, they respond with an answer that completely misunderstands their own products and fundamentally misunderstands how anything works.

Putin getting killed only helps if his own people does it or believe they did it. If another country does it that probably starts WW3.

On the other hand, in my admittedly short visit there, it seemed like the public sector was broken there. You have to summon a magical spirit to find out what day of the month the post office pretends to be open. You have to be currently on fire for the fire department to consider showing up to an emergency… Beautiful country, excellent food, but, I’ve never seen such a dysfunctional “developed” country. If I was a citizen I’d be pretty pissed all the time as well.

Ahh, got it. Well the party is just a mechanism, it can be completely replaced and/or highjacked. I think the problem is really the lack of a cohesive block of people on the left. People on the left have about as many beliefs as stars in the sky, and too much pride to merge those together into a movement with a consensus. I don’t think the left has ever really given real organized effort to highjacking/replacing the party, they’ve spent more time protesting it instead.

Additionally, we are smaller than people on Lemmy believe, part of highjacking the party has to be vastly improved messaging and outreach. Bernie isn’t even that far left and I remember about 3/4 of Dems over 50 in my area hating him, calling him an extremist. True left wing people are smaller than we think.

Accelerationism and violent revolution rarely provide the outcome people are looking for. It just creates a power vacuum that powerful people fill. The idea that we can just break it and start over is a fantasy. If we break it, people like Peter Theil get their wildest dreams of corporate city states, or someone else gets their slavery and genocide. Bernie Sanders and AOC are not going to be starting the new government.

I worked with and encountered many politicians in the past and maybe 1 in 10 Dems was “pro” corporate that I encountered. The problem is that the 1 in 10 are enough to slow progress to a crawl. Just assuming that all Dems are beholden to billionaires is silly.

Many of those running for office are using the only left wing mechanism available. Left wing people are all over the party in state and federal governments. If we want our government to move left, we need the Dems to move left.

You move them left by becoming the party and forcing them further left, imo. The party is a sum of it’s people, if the members become more left wing, then the party will. See what Trump did to the Republicans, half the party despised him, they feed his agenda because without him their party ends. The left wing could do the same if they didn’t see giving up as a viable strategy…

It’s entirely dishonest to pretend the Democrats haven’t had large factions in their party entirely worker based. The largest support system for the party has historically been labor unions. Talking about class traitors, imaging having perfect be the enemy of good and refusing to improve what we have towards a better system. Accelerationism is not a solution.

If you want to run for president, governor, or mayor those positions attract enough money to effectively remove authenticity from the race. If you have 4 Dems in the primary and 1 of them is a business dem, that’s the one most likely to have enormous capital shifted to. Which creates the conditions for their future victory. Our system of government and economic system are both infinitely corruptible irrespective of party.

I have a lot of criticism for the Dems, but I’ve also worked with them at several levels. A huge portion of the party is former or current blue collar. I think a lot of people see what they want to see. It’s easy to think of the party as evil corpo shills, but the problem really is that the corpo shills rise to the top, not that they are as prevalent as people think they are. Money puts people in the executive.

Even if it’s not about other people expecting money, people adjust their lifestyle to their money, even when it causes them to be 10 times as busy as a result. Suddenly you’re managing your house cleaner, your cook, you have contractors at your house every week, you decide you need more things, that all need maintenance, you’re constantly managing people. One day you look at that and think, why do I always have so much on my plate when I’m so rich.

If people simplified their lives at the same time they became rich, they would be much happier, imo.