WrittenInRed [any]

Proton’s free plan is definitely more than good enough to slowly migrate off without paying for pro imo. I used it for my main email for the longest time and the only thing I even noticed was the no autodeleting of old trashed emails.

Personally I switched off of VPN to mullvad at least, and am looking into self hosting bitwarden and using tuta (and now addy.io too thanks to a comment here). Honestly I’d been considering switching for a bit anyway just to be less reliant on a single service for everything, so this kinda validated that since even if this specifically isn’t a dealbreaker something else could definitely end up as one. Even if I don’t fully move off of proton because moving emails is so annoying, it will still be nice to at least have some other options set up.

I think we both might have misinterpreted each other a bit then. I didn’t really mean a person who said the parties were the same, but someone who says they’re extreme in opposite directions and I think you misunderstood it as the opposite, so I should have clarified a bit.

But regardless, sure, socially stuff like trans acceptance is generally improving, but that’s not really a result of Democrats or their policies, that’s a result of LGBTQ people fighting against hate and society at large becoming more accepting. No policy is responsible for increasing social acceptance, it’s the other way around. Like another user said as well, it’s only socially progressive policies that tend to recieve that treatment too, never big economic reforms. Plus that support only lasts as long as its thought politically favorable, as evidenced by the fact that in the wake of Kamala losing the DNC has been trying to push a narrative that it’s because the party is too socially progressive. The alternative is the DNC admitting that neoliberalism is unpopular, so throwing a minority under the bus is much preferable.

Economically, things haven’t been getting better for a long time. Food insecurity is extremely high right now, same with rent/housing, the climate is fucked, going go a hosptial can put you in debt for life, and corporations keep amassing more and more money and power. That process speeds up under Republicans sure, but it hasn’t been improving much for anyone but the already wealthy under Dems either.

But either way, even if the Democrats wanted to change things the system makes that basically impossible. Trying to change a system only by participating in it is just kinda a flawed idea in the first place, but that’s how liberalism does things.

Yeah but that’s kinda the point. Liberalism is also right-wing compared to leftists, and even on it’s own is pretty firmly center to slighly right of center. Left of center only really happens at social democracies, and they’re still not super far left. Obviously someone in the middle of the Democrats and Republicans will also be right-wing, since neither party is actually left of center and the Republicans are currently so far right.

So basically basically Republicans are super harmful to a ton of people and meeting in the the middle of democrats and republicans is still bad, and compromising on certain issues by doing that sort of meet in the middle approach still hurts people right? Don’t want to put words in your mouth or anything like that.

Anarchists or other very left-wing people have basically the same opinion on liberalism. It’s a very middle of the road ideology that’s favors incremental progress but doesn’t really make real change on its own, that normally has to be fought for outside the system. The Democrats are less immediately harmful to people, but neither party really does anything big enough to truly help people in a meaningful way and things have been slowly getting worse over time. And just like there are a bunch of policies you wouldn’t want to meet in the middle of, there are a bunch of things liberalism supports that are meeting in the middle of something very harmful.

I think the other big thing is the prevalence of the idea that voting for a representative is the most important thing you can do that also wears on people. Whether or not Trump or Harris won, over half the US states are unsafe for trans people, especially kids. Sure things are obviously worse with Trump, but either way for a lot of trans people things have been bad and getting worse for a long time. Same with food insecurity, housing costs, immigration, etc. All of these issues wouldn’t have meaningfully improved much with the tiny concessions that Democrats offered, and most would continue getting largely ignored until a Republican takes office and can be blamed.

I’m not saying the parties are the same, one moves us in this negative direction much faster which I why I’ve basically voted D every time I could, but voting is at most the minimum you should do. Building aid networks and horizontal power and networks to protect queer people or immigrants are all things that need to happen no matter who is in power because either way compromises and the slow advance of capitalism continues to hurt more and more people.

None of this is a person attack against you or anything either, but the way you don’t like Republicans for being too far right or centrists for being too middle of the road with fascism/the Republican party are the same basic reasons leftists dislike liberalism.

This is a genuine question, not some sorta gotcha or anything. What’s your opinion on the “enlightened centrist” style of centrists in the US? The sort of people that say things like “both the Democrats and Republicans are too extreme.”

I hate how quick world is to mass downvote, accuse of being a russian troll, or just straight up remove comments from people who express any sort of actual left-wing opinion. Reading through that whole comment thread there was nothing you said that came across as trolling. Its kinda exhausting how many people take any criticism of the democratic party as being support for Trump, or believe voting is the most important and only way to change anything. I get closer to just blocking world entirely every day tbh.

Even beyond that, they’re all part of the same big club. Something like Jimmy Carter’s funeral was a perfect chance to make a completely empty gesture and at least pretend that you’re actually treating Trump like the existential threat to the entire US you kept claiming he was. But not only was he invited, Trump and Obama were casually talking and laughing with each other. It’s all just empty theatre, both parties serve the same interests at the end of the day, the only difference is how overtly they systematically strip your rights away. They let each other be the boogeyman for their voters and then trade back and forth slightly undoing the last administrations policies but never fully enough to revert all of them.

Sure, whatever you say. He might not technically be exonerated, but he might as well be. You had 4 fucking years to actually do something about Trump, but this is the system working as intended. The US keeps drifting further and further right with power further consolidating in the hands of billionaires and corporations, while the Democrats sit on their asses and act like they’re completely helpless to do anything meaningful to actually help ordinary people while in power. Then when they lose elections they get to blame minorities or leftists and use it as an excuse to drift further right.

I posted this in another thread but I also wanted to say it here so it’s more likely one of you will see it. I get the intention behind this, and I think it’s well intentioned, but it’s also definitely the wrong way to go about things. By lumping opposing viewpoints and misinformation together, all you end up doing is implying that having a difference in opinion on something more subjective is tantamount to spreading a proven lie, and lending credence to misinformation. A common tactic used to try and spread the influence of hate or misinformation is to present it as a “different opinion” and ask people to debate it. Doing so leads to others coming across the misinfo seeing responses that discuss it, and even if most of those are attempting to argue against it, it makes it seem like something that is a debatable opinion instead of an objective falsehood. Someone posting links to sources that show how being trans isn’t mental health issue for the 1000th time wont convince anyone that they’re wrong for believing so, but it will add another example of people arguing about an idea, making those without an opinion see the ideas as both equally worthy of consideration. Forcing moderators to engage in debate is the exact scenario people who post this sort of disguised hate would love.

Even if the person posting it genuinely believes the statement to be true, there are studies that show presenting someone with sources that refute something they hold as fact doesn’t get them to change their mind.

If the thread in question is actually subjective, then preventing moderators from removing just because they disagree is great. The goal of preventing overmodedation of dissenting opinions is extremely important. You cannot do so by equating them with blatent lies and hate though, as that will run counter to both goals this policy has in mind. Blurring the line between them like this will just make misinformation harder to spot, and disagreements easier to mistake as falsehoods.

Oh also something I just realized, they basically want to force mods to debate misinformation, which is literally a tatic used to spread disinformation in the first place. By getting people to debunk a ridiculous claim it lends credence to the idea as something worth discussing and also spreads it to more people. I feel like the intentions behind this are noble, but it’s been proven that presenting evidence doesn’t really get people to change their opinion all that often. The whole thing is super misguided.

Holy shit this is such a bad policy lol. World is known for being too aggressive at deleting a lot of content they really shouldn’t be deleting, but this policy really doesn’t seem like it will improve that. The issue is most of the time if they want something removed they do so and then add a policy after to justify it, meaning that regardless of this rule people can’t “advocate for violence”, but they will be able to post misinformation and hate speech since apparently “LGBTQ people are mentally ill” hasn’t been debunked enough elsewhere and a random comment chain in Lemmy is where it needs to be done. Never mind the actual harm those sorts of statements cause to individuals and the community at large.

All I can see this doing is any actual types of that get wrongly overly censored will still do so since the world admins believe they are justified in doing so, while other provably false information will be required to stay up since the admins believe the mods aren’t justified in removing it.

This policy seems to only apply to actual misinformation too, not just subjective debates. So if there’s a comment thread about whether violence is justified in protest would likely have one side removed, while I guess someone arguing that every trans person is a pedophile would be forced to stay up and be debated. Its like the exact opposite of how moderation should work lol.

I mean agreed that one option was way worse, but the issue with that logic is what can we use as leverage in attempting to get the Democratic Party to stop funding Israel? The power people as a collective have over politicians/governments is in numbers, and voting is the easiest of the available ways to use those numbers. Protesting a party outside of their convention and then turning around to vote for them means that the protest was an empty threat.

The same thing is kinda true for any protest sine Trump was elected too. As long as the Republican party exists in it’s current state the Democrats can use them as a threat against their voters because “the alternative is so much worse,” and then use that as a reason to ignore their base. I can’t really see a situation where Kamala/the Democrats would have done something until it was too late, so in 4 years the Palestine would probably look about the same whether it was Trump or not.

And neither party is innocent from leading us into this mess. Even if Trump lost this election, Biden had 4 years, 2 of which had a Democrat majority, to do basically anything to stop Trump and largely squandered it. Plus a big thing Kamala ran on was being the same as or more conservative than Biden on a lot of things. The system that birthed Trump and MAGA won’t just go away without actual change being fought for by the Democrats, and neither Biden nor Harris really tried to do that.

The Democrats can’t keep treating entire groups like the LGBTQ+ community, racial minorities, or people in extreme poverty as hostages to try and drive up their voting numbers. Not only does it clearly not work, but doing so doesn’t make them that much better than the Republicans since they keep enabling them in the first place by not actually doing anything.

All this being said I did vote for Harris, but blaming Trump winning on Democratic voters or people criticizing the DNC/Biden/Harris is misguided and honestly a bit harmful. It isn’t supposed to be a voters job to blindly support a party or politician. The government is supposed to support and represent its citizens. Reversing that relationship by blaming voters for Harris losing is beneficial to to Republican party since it means the DNC will continue running completely as is and continue losing elections they should have an easy time winning.

Are you trying to remove it from a photo or a video? For me at least it seems like it shows up on images but not videos.