Voting needs to be changed first. Until it's changed, third parties will never be viable, and voting for their candidates will only cause a spoiler effect for the main two parties. Considering that the GOP is fascist, they need to be removed from office for any type of reform to be made successfully to the American democracy.

Maybe it's Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia? They would be using Australian dollars, with $ as the currency symbol.

Mastadon (and the Fediverse in general, to some extent) has problems with discoverability and the average user finds federation confusing. People tend to either use microblogging to see what’s going on with people they’re interested in or to broadcast their activities to a large group of people, and Mastadon currently doesn’t fit that niche very well.

Most dictators haven’t gone by that term, preferring instead some other executive role like chairman, supreme leader, or president. If Xi doesn’t want to be called a dictator, maybe China should start holding open elections, see how popular the CCP really is.

I understand and sympathize with Rob on a spiritual level.

What a worthless blockade, the whole point of a blockade is to prevent ships from entering or leaving. I wonder if the Russian Black Sea fleet is even still operational.

This is a really good way of explaining the difference.

Probably a rat. I would only live 2-3 years, but they’d hopefully be a good 2-3 years.

It is absolutely an apt comparison. Genocide is a favored tool of fascists because it’s an effective way of quickly wiping away dissident civilians and destroying the mythical enemy they have in their heads. The Nazis alive today would absolutely do the Holocaust again given the ability, and fascism is too popular in too many countries for ridicule alone to work.

Sorry Jack, but I’m an anarcho-Bidenist, and ultimately like our lord and savior Joe Biden said, we’re in the beginning of a happy pride life. Walter White is gay, Jessie Pinkman is gay, and soon, you too will be gay.

Damn, apparently all it takes to turn a show gay is to say the characters in the show are gay. I wonder which show we’re going to make gay next.

Congrats to Firefox, it really has made substantial improvements over the years.

Random person: Hey Hitler, can you please stop doing the Holocaust.
Hitler: Nein.
Random person: Damn, guess I can’t do anything. If I used force to stop Hitler from committing a genocide I would be just as bad, because everyone knows killing a Nazi who wants to kill every Jew and killing an innocent Jewish person are equal moral acts.

I honestly don’t understand how people think like this. All they do is enable fascism and the imperial ambitions of more aggressive nations. As long as we live in a world with sovereign nations, some of those nations may do something extremely wrong that requires a war to stop, and that doesn’t mean you just let them do it. Ultimately, war is bad but genocide is worse and sometimes sacrifices have to be made (exclusion existing for nuclear war, which would render humanity and most of life on Earth extinct).

I think that all people and many non-person animals have dynamic and complex inner worlds, but Conservatives definitely have a blind spot when it comes to political evaluation. Unfortunately, it’s our nature as our species to seek out shortcuts. One of the ways we do this is by finding trusted sources to do some level of evaluation for us, that way we don’t have to think about as much. With Conservatives, many of them learned to trust certain sources from their parents, religion, or their own misguided fear. These sources are conspiratorial and hate-mongering, and they usually don’t apply any critical analysis to them. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle where their sources tell them to trust no one and to be hateful and from that they don’t pick up any new sources, causing them to enter an echo chamber they can’t escape. It’s honestly kinda sad and I somewhat pity them, but I still will do what it takes to defeat them politically.

Indeed. That’s one of my biggest problems with religion and why it makes me uncomfortable even though I ostensibly believe that people have their right to spirituality. Ultimately, with spiritual premises, people can come to faulty or unpredictable conclusions even with sound logic, and that somewhat unnerves me.

That definitely doesn’t help. In an atomized society there are fewer incentives to work with other people which causes people to either not develop proper social skills or to develop malformed ones.

I think some people have trouble conceptualizing those around them as human. From what I can tell it’s not intentional cruelty, at least at first, they just struggle to conceptualize and understand the idea that all of the people around them have just as dynamic and complex inner worlds as they do. When it’s a struggle to make that connection, it’s easy to go through life ignoring the plight of those around you, disregarding them with the same ease most people dismiss a warning on a computer.