All things are not equal.

“You fell for a scam” does not feel anything like “somebody else thinks the normal choice backed up by the whole of human history that you also made is immoral.”

Shame is a tool, and just like how you can’t use a screwdriver to fix a leaky pipe tools don’t apply to every situation.

Shame is valid when a person is making bad decisions that cause harm to themselves and those around them, not when somebody else is grumpy because we like fried chicken.

Not everything has to be about teaching a lesson, sometimes it can be just an observation of a fact.

What pisses me off is you don’t even understand the place of privilege from which you speak. It’s such disgusting selfish egotistical mentality to think that if a candidate doesn’t represent your exact desires, that you think you can wash your hands of the whole thing and absolve yourself your part in the system.

The world is not designed to cater to your personal sensibilities.

Meanwhile, as you abstain and wait literally forever for a candidate that you don’t have to pinch your nose to vote for, you are proudly throwing away your ability to impact change for the better.

Basically you’re saying if you can’t have ice cream for dinner then we should go ahead and burn down the grocery store.

You’re a child.

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.

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.

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.

Call me the fun police, but I don’t think we need to raise Lemmy power users to the position of micro celebrities, and I don’t find this kind of circle jerking cute.

And I say this as somebody with positive opinions of many of the people referenced.

It’s just like… Weird and kind of lame, tbh.

Remember kids, nothing doesn’t apply to you, everything was made specifically for you. If you find yourself in a community that seems like it doesn’t apply to you, remember that you’re never in the wrong place, obviously it is that community who is in the wrong.

Yeah to be clear, if it sounded like anything I said was meant as absolution, it was not. Regardless of which camp they fall into or how they display their wealth, it is impossible, to the best of my reasoned understanding, to acquire mass wealth ethically. I assume all of the ultra-wealthy are morally compromised in some capacity or another until proven otherwise.

I think there are kind of two different groups that get conflated, actually: the wealthy, and the “professionally wealthy.” The wealthy are often discrete and not showy, but the “professional wealthy” are those whose wealth or fame itself is central to their empire, even if not as directly as the influencer wealthy. But these are the Kardashians and the socialites and tech bros, all of those who serve as sort of aspirational versions of wealth. There is no shortage of them, no doubt, and I’m sure even the quietly wealthy have a lavish indulgence or two (a yacht being very likely), but based on my experience I really think there are sort two clear and distinct communities of wealth.

I’ve known some disgusting rich people (born and raised in the wealthiest county in the entire country) - for some reason they love Costco. They don’t even do their own shopping but they insist on Costco. Unless they’re aggressively right-wing.

“Squidward flute” made me cringe so hard I almost passed out. God please tell me none of you are actually that lame

As I said in a other comment, I think “they didn’t live long enough” is a bit of misconception. I’ll repeat my comment here rather than writing it out again:

"So I’m no expert, so take this with a grain of salt, but it’s my understanding that while average ages were much lower in the past, this number is heavily skewed by infant mortalities and deaths due to preventable disease. As I understand it, the expected age of an otherwise healthy individual was pretty comparable to us today. More people died young, but those who didn’t lived about as long as us. So I don’t think not living long enough for skin cancer to take effect really jives with my understanding of history.

But again, I’m not an expert and the likelihood that I’m just an idiot who is wildly misunderstanding things is, frankly, high."

Source? This is my point, that I think we lack evidence for that claim.