Well I don’t respect Pelosi, so I feel like we’ve got balance here

Yes, this is what I’m saying. I’m not saying take up pitchforks and bring the fight to the democrats like they’re the villain, I’m just saying not to blindly trust them either. They are a part of the system; even if not in permanent institution certainly in effect. Bernie didn’t say go fight the Dems, in fact he proved that you can strategically use them. But don’t think that D = good or D = hero automatically either.

It’s not about fighting the dems, it’s about trusting in ourselves instead of others. It’s about autonomy and the fact that nobody is going to fight the fight for you, you’ve gotta get your knuckles dirty. Don’t trust anyone to do the work for you, red or blue; get out and do the fucking work yourself.

People have got to stop believing that “things will just work out.”

No, they won’t.

We aren’t guaranteed anything. I’m sorry after school specials lied to you, but there is no “spirit of goodness” that permeates reality that will make all of this okay.

There are no heroes coming to save us from the fire.

We let the worst happen, and now if we ever want decency again, we are going to have to fight tooth and nail against tyrrany to make it happen. Period.

Don’t waste your time listening to anyone still talking about this situation in terms of candyland simplicity and standard decorum. Not even the shitty status quo will save us, because we blew up the status quo in favor of fascism.

This is embarrassing, bro

Yes, but people forgot that his real message was to get out there an be the change. Bernie’s message was never about relying on or believing in the Democrats, it was that change only happens when we mobilize.

He told us to get out there and run ourselves and get personally involved and invested in our local politics so we can be the revolution… We just chose not to listen to him.

If we had run Bernie in 2016, Trump would still be nothing but a punchline.

Who knows. Apparently half my country is full of legitimately hateful people who just want to watch the people they don’t like suffer.

How the fuck do we come back from that? Honestly, are we even worth redeeming?

For me, this is it. This is when America died. If you’re still “proud” to be an American after this, you’re brain-damaged.

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Because the country, the political climate, literally the voters themselves are different today than they were in 2008. Hate is a disease - it grows and spreads, and it has been actively been cultivated and stoked to great effect ever since 2008. Unfortunately it’s also a snowball running down a hill; if you don’t stop it in time, it becomes unstoppable. And we missed the chance to stop it.

Because morality isn’t a fucking popularity contest. I don’t care if the Republicans are more popular when their platform and rhetoric is literally bigotry and hatred - full-blown Nazi shit. I’m not going to change my stance to a less moral position just because hate is trending.

Fuck off. This isn’t about the DNC, this is about half of our fucking country being actual goddamn Nazis who froth at the mouth in excitement at the idea of victimizing women and minorities.

All this election has told me is that half of America is a literal shithole and people will always be more hateful than hopeful.

I don’t even know how the fuck we come back from this.

Chronic cynicism and the abhorrent decisions of a madman in a foreign nation thousands of miles away have done a lot obscure it, but I think there is a lot positive things to be said about Biden’s term and political legacy. I think the long rearview on history will look back on Biden with mostly favorable opinion, personally.

40,000 monthly active users is probably a more useful number here.

I fully agree. Again, I did not think that the random figure, which I tried to appropriately caveat, was the salient part of my comment.

I appreciate the clarity, thank you. As I said, I pulled a random googled number and wasn’t trying to use it as the sticking point of my commentary. But also for what it’s worth, it’s not exactly a fair comparison to the larger giants either as lemmy’s smaller scale means it is also less trafficked by bots, fake accounts, secondary novelty accounts, etc. Depending on what source you’re looking at, twitter is claimed to be anywhere between 15-75% bot or fake accounts. In general my point was there are still a large number of people using lemmy on most scales, we are just choosing to view it on the scale of established corporate social media metrics.

I think we’re going to need to start by defining what “popular” means.

According to https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy, there are 462,745 total Lemmy users. (Note: I know nothing about this site or their metrics; I literally just Googled “Lemmy users.”)

If 462,745 people showed up to my birthday party, I would feel like the most popular person on the planet.

So, I think we need to consider a less abstract figure to answer this. Will Lemmy ever be as popular as a place like Reddit? I think that’s extremely unlikely, at least not anytime soon. But will Lemmy ever be popular enough to sustain an engaged community? I dunno; I kind of think we’re already there.

Maybe this is the old head in me, but I remember the decentralized days of the early internet, where communities weren’t oceans of people on social media giants, but rather smaller, close-knit forums and message boards. If you spent a few months interacting, you would likely get to know and have specific opinions about individual users that you would regularly engage with, unlike the sort of hit-and-run buzz style of the modern social internet. I think right now, Lemmy is almost treading a special sweet spot between the two eras, and I’m pretty happy with it.

Although I will concede that I’m as addicted to social media as everyone else is these days, and I would certainly welcome the increase in on-the-minute activity that additional users would bring.

I’m sure my whimsical entry won’t be divisive.

imgur version in case the lemmy image upload breaks

I don’t think this is credit. I’m not saying he masterminded this, I’m saying he saw a person he remembered he was once mad at an threw a tantrum like a child.

I hate that I’m at the stage that I can kind of see the logic in Trump’s weirdness, but I dunno, I think everyone is missing what this event was.

People are forgetting that Trump is an incredibly small and incredibly petty man. I think this was 100% about punishing Kristi Noem for embarrassing Trump earlier. I think it’s as simple as Trump didn’t like being on stage with Noem so he decided to act like a child mostly to make her uncomfortable. Watch the event and their interactions; watch how he responses when she speaks.

And this is Trump so ignore the fact that none of Noem’s own stupid bullshit had anything to do with Trump and ignore the fact that she’s still a sycophant whose praise he will still accept, and ignore the fact that Trump hates dogs too. None of that matters. I really think what happened in the moment is that Trump looked at Noem, remembered that he had been mad at her before, and decided to act like a child in response.

Seems a great time to see the section of my comment about legitimizing or running as a third party in your community to effect change on the local level, then.

The point of my comment was not to be satisfied, it is that change doesn’t start at the finish line. If you are fed up and think your vote is worthless, then do something about it rather than impotently protesting which accomplishes nothing but throwing away that tiny bit of power you did wield.

Here’s the deal guys: nobody is coming to save you. Not Harris or Trump, but also not Stein, or Bernie, or anyone else. There is never going to be a time when you can just vote and suddenly things are all sunshine and rainbows. Change takes work, and we’re discussing enormous change on a massive scale.

Or, let me offer you a counterpoint - maybe the democrats in your area aren’t a lost cause. Maybe they can be better utilized, motivated, incentivized, etc. Going back to the change takes work/nobody is coming to save you bit, what have you personally done to change the situation in area beyond voting or donation?

Again, you’ve successfully recognized that America puts its own interests before the interests of foreign nations, same as everywhere else.

For all the shit the world likes to give America for acting like the world police or arbiters of society, rightly so btw, ya’ll keep expecting America to act different too. If you think America is deceptive or evil or whatever in our attempts to be the world police, then just stop believing the lie. Don’t expect America to be any more altruistic than any other nation and I think it all makes sense. Imo there is no “third world”; people are mostly the same everywhere. Every nation is selfish and every nation is dealing with some level of corruption - so why in the world would you begrudge the people of America for trying their hardest to at least do what they can to reduce the harmful impact of that corruption?