If the last few years have taught me anything, it’s that what you do is not important as much as the narrative that you are able to spin.

As long as TV news networks, podcasters, news outlets, and Musk’s Twitter exist, people who are too ignorant to understand they are being lied to, or too lazy to parse credible information, will stay in the dark and vote red in the next election as well.
Democracy doesn’t work when the electorate is too illiterate to cast their vote justly. They’ll just vote for the next clown who promises them the moon.

I don’t have a solution.

You know the times are dire when you find yourself rooting for Moscow Mitch.

Watergate was such a big scandal that Nixon gave up before the impeachment procedure had even began, and it left such a big mark that we still talk about it so many decades later.

Trump was involved in many, many more scandals of far greater magnitude, and yet he won the majority of votes.

What the fuck happened during the last 50 years?

There’s no excuse this time around. People know exactly who Trump is, and they have voted for him a second time.

I don’t have much to say. I feel a mix of anger and disappointment.

Hopefully the Dems will be able to pick someone better to lead the party four years from now… I wonder what the world will look like four years from now.

Is this a meme I’m too Italian to understand?

From the article:

“Conversion therapy,” also known as “reparative therapy,” is a debunked practice that attempts to forcefully change the gender identity or sexual orientation of the patient, which has often been compared to “torture” by its recipients and health care providers alike.

I’m writing this because I was also making the same mistake. I read “Kentucky bans conversion therapy” and I jumped to the conclusion that a republican was banning gender-affirming surgery or something like that (also because I’m not American and I’m not familiar with who Beshear is: he’s actually a Dem politician).

For fuck’s sake, y’all should stop this “enlightened centrist” bullshit whenever someone is slightly critical of the leftist candidate.

Trump sucks. It’s incredible that he’s even allowed to be a candidate for presidency after the shit he’s done. He’s dangerous for the US and dangerous for the democracy of the entire world. If there’s some justice left in the US system, he will lose the elections and he will pay for his crimes.

Not liking Harris’ speech doesn’t make me an “enlightened centrist”. It just means that I don’t think her words were strong enough, or bold enough, to win her new voters, which should be the point of the presidential debate. I think she won because Trump’s ineptitude will bleed him some voters, but I’m not willing to credit that to Harris’ speech skills.

Did she? I listened to the debate and she sounded mid for most of it. She spent more time attacking Trump than she did answering the questions she was asked.

Sure, she fared better than her predecessor, but “not shitting her pants” is a low bar. Trump was definitely worse than her, but again, if the bar is “don’t act butthurt when your opponent says your rallies are boring”, then congrats, I guess.

Reading comments from both sides, it seems that the left sees her not being geriatric as a win; and the right thinks that Trump was unjustly treated (targeted questions, live fact-checking, etc…), which is absurd considering that (a) they also asked Harris difficult questions (fracking and Israel, for example, which she did have a hard time answering), and (b) he was given free reign to talk out of order more times than I can count.

I think Harris “won” because Trump sucked. He sidestepped questions regarding an abortion ban (“I haven’t talked with JD about it” fucking lol) and Ukraine (“Do you want Ukraine to win the war?” “I want the war stopped” TWICE in a row, followed by “I know Putin really well” and a rant about the awesomeness of Victor Orban); he repeatedly told lies (post-birth abortion and pets-eating immigrants being the highlight) which were promptly caught by the live fact-checker, and even showed weakness and undecisiveness (“do you have a plan?” “I have concepts of a plan”).

But those are blunders that Trump committed, not something that Harris should take credit for. Nothing I heard screamed of “masterclass” debate, and I doubt that it will give her an edge in the upcoming elections or sway electors one way or the other. After all, the people who lived under four years of Trump’s presidency and watched January 6th unfold live, and still call themselves “undecided” are pretty much lying to themselves at this point.

Never heard of it, but it sounds like it was a great place. Sad to see it fail against established giants of the internet. I would’ve been interested in trying it out before the end.

I think this is a problem that multiple small realities like this (including Lemmy) are facing. There are people interested in them, but they don’t know them, so they can’t join.

Oh don’t worry, they hate foreigners playing soccer as well.

https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/09/racism-in-football-are-italy-s-ultras-the-problem-or-the-solution

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240120-milan-s-match-at-udinese-halted-after-racist-abuse-of-maignan

I used to listen to Rise Against a lot when I was younger. I pivoted to other genres since then, but reading their lyrics again was super nostalgic. Thank you.

Europe is in a very sorry state lately. A lot of far-right parties are gaining ground and/or winning the elections. Italy has elected a far-righr politician, France and Germany are very close to electing one.

I feel like the 2016 US elections have had a profound influence on ours as well. (Not faulting Americans for how the situation evolved, of course; it’s our fault in the first place).

People crying for these Russians, who are in relative safety and who were free to go, are just comical to me.

There is no “relative safety” in war and “free to go” means abandoning their homes and belongings, which is a fucking awful thing to do. Who are you, random armchair commentator, to speak like that?

Where were you when all these Ukrainian cities were shelled and other war crimes happened?

I was crying for them as well, just as I’m crying now, just as I will always cry for people caught in the flames of war, which is one of the worst experiences a person can be asked to live through.

Y’all think that having fucking empathy for civilian lives means rooting for Putin, which is not true. Putin is a dictator, a criminal and an abhorrent human being, and I hope he pays for his crimes. Here, I said it again. But this article is not about Putin, it’s about a woman lamenting that her government lied to the population instead of doing anything to protect them, and now she hasn’t heard from her elderly parents for days.

It’s something that I wouldn’t wish happened to anyone, ever. The fact that they are Russians doesn’t suddenly change the tale into a comedy. Laughing at the expenses of random civilians who happened to live under the autocratic rule of a violent narcissist is not something that I will ever condone. I can root for the Ukranians while also keeping my humanity. But apparently you can switch it on and off at will depending on who you are looking at.

I said nothing about Ukranians’ actions being unjustified, nor do we have any reason yet to think that war crimes are being committed in the area. If this brings them an inch closer to winning the war, I wholly support them.

Still, laughing at people suffering because of war is such an abhorrent behaviour to exhibit, and the fact that people are bending logic to justify it is wild.

You all should learn some empathy.

You are underplaying the struggles of civilians in a war zone just because they happen to live on the wrong side of the border.

Civilians have all the rights to not want war on their country, at their doors, no matter which side of the border they are, and they are allowed to lament the incompetency of a government that hides critical information from them in an attempt to cover up its failures.

The Ukrainians have the right to keep fighting, and I hope they win this war. Putin is a criminal and he must pay for his crimes. This doesn’t mean that civilians caught in the crossfire are being petty.

This industry has become a place in which you can deliver more than expected, have AA money behind you, and still have the rug pulled two weeks before launch.

I really liked GI. No drama, no ignorance, great articles: quality journalism, which is rare today, and even rarer when talking about gaming publications.

I’m not much of a gamer myself now as I was in my youth, but GI was still one of my main connections to the gaming world that allowed me to keep in touch with the hobby.

It’s sad that the talent of all those people is being unceremoniously dumped like this by executives who only care about money. I wish them all the best.

His performance may have drawn some gasps from the audience, but I doubt it had the same effect on his fan base. He was not there to speak to the US as a whole; he was there to speak to his die hard supporters - those who actually enjoy his racist, sexist, hateful remarks and voted for him in 2016 because of them; the same people who were willing to stage a coup in his favour in 2021, after four years of ignorance, pettiness and hatred.

His strategy against Biden was winning because it gathered him bipartisan support - even Democrats were dubious about Biden being able to do a good job - but now that that’s out of the question, Trump has fallen back to his usual script, because it’s too late to do anything else. After all, questioning Obama’s birth and throwing sexist remarks against Clinton won him an election; why wouldn’t it work again? Just stick to the fanbase that won you an election once and almost won you another the second time, and hope for the best.

It’s more a figure-eight of life.

Dude, you literally say at the start of your comment that:

nerds used to be a little more “I know oh-so-much more about this media than you ever will” and a little less “I’m eternally uncomfortable about the changes being made to my media.”

You then proceed to call a movie director “selfish” and “fart-sniffing” for telling the story the way he wanted to tell it. You’ve got to admit the irony in all this.

Also, it’s true that big companies are following trends and fostering memes to drive engagement, but I very much doubt that they are willingly antagonizing their own fan bases to drive negative engagement. That sounds like a nightmare that no social media manager would purposely walk into. Nobody is willingly stirring the pot by making people theorize conspiracy theories about a secret leftist agenda. That’s just humanity for you. Some are good people, a lot suck.

The entities that are willfully stirring the pot are social media platforms, who have a lot more to gain by having those people scream at one another in their feeds, because controversial takes can populate comment sections more and faster than mild takes, which drive engagement on those social platforms even further.