Yeah. It’s a betrayal of anyone who thought of themselves needing to be loyal to him, or even loyal to the system as a whole, instead of to the human principles behind it. In a perfect world that wouldn’t be too many people still at this point.

I don’t want to be especially hard on anyone who is just now figuring out that he is in every sense the enemy though, whatever his position or level of support with people. Even if it’s way late for them to come to that determination and share it, I’ll take it.

I don’t really understand why people are still obeying these orders.

Guys: The gloves are off. The fire is in the building, spreading fast, and you’re still saying “We can’t run for the exits, there’s no running allowed in the warehouse, and anyway we don’t get off shift until 4.”

lemm.ee and lemmy.dbzer0.com both seem like very level-headed instances. You can say stuff even if the admins disagree with it, and it’s not a crisis.

Some of the big other ones seem some other way, yes.

Update: They started killing in the West Bank, too. Airstrikes with drones and helicopters on a refugee camp, and then a ground operation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg750yzdr8o

Like I say, it’s hard to predict the future, but if I had to guess at the specifics, I would say anywhere from two weeks to two months of no humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza, meaning people are still dying horribly at a pretty rapid pace, and then some pretext to resume the full military operation there. We’ll see whether I am profoundly wrong about that, I easily could be. My only pretty confident prediction is that the dying in Gaza will continue this year.

I didn’t have operations in the West Bank on the bingo card quite this soon, and I won’t make any specific predictions about what will happen there, but it’s not surprising to me that they’re being pretty overt about their rejection of peace. Like I said, any qualified observer could have seen it coming after watching the past year. In any context that didn’t give an opportunity to shit on Biden, I suspect that you’d be able to see it, too, and we wouldn’t be having any kind of disagreement about this.

Edit: Further update: Trump lifted the pause on 2,000 pound bombs.

https://denvergazette.com/news/nation-world/trump-to-lift-pause-on-2-000-pound-bomb-supply-to-israel-walla-news-reports/article_f8a0e8a8-f574-52eb-ad39-0cd579379ae4.html

Not that Biden had enacted any particularly effective level of stoppage of weapons shipments. But, Trump is on his first day going out of his way to undo even the pretty pitiful limits Biden had put on it. It’s a key priority for him. For contrast, here’s what Biden did on day one:

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2021/interactive_biden-first-day-executive-orders/

OP posted:

Donald Trump will now be the president again. A colossal failure by every Republican, Democratic, legal, corporate, and media institution got us here.

Then coffeetest, who I assume you were thinking is OP maybe?, posted:

The establishment has failed us and I think that is why we are were we are now.

Democracy is supposed to be driven from the bottom up, but instead we the people collectively do not pay attention and take responsibility for our our system.

Democrats are absolutely a part of “the establishment,” and yes, I would fully agree that they failed us. I would also strongly agree with that second “bottom up” statement. Like I say, anyone who’s part of the establishment will always “fail us” unless forced not to, Democrats included, for reasons I already touched on.

It really feels like you’re trying to shoehorn a “counterpoint” about the Democrats being bad into a conversation that was already specifically about how they are bad (along with the rest of the establishment, and also along with the low level of citizen involvement) and what to do about it. Why are you singling out the Democrats so hard right now?

This is pretty weird.

“Okay, sure, 67 people have caught the virus, and it’s adapting to survive in humans, and if it became transmissible in humans it would be a historic calamity, and it just killed someone this month. But it’s not time to worry yet.”

I’m not trying to tell the epidemiologist how to do his epidemiology, but that sounds like saying “We’ll only be in trouble if the car goes off the cliff, so there’s no need to worry quite yet.” The time when it’s productive to do your worrying is before that happens.

I see. So I said one thing, you decided I meant something totally different and explained back to me, more or less, exactly the same thing I was saying, while pretending I was saying the opposite. Also, you brought “Democrats” into it as far as I can tell for no reason at all, thinking that I was “leading up to” saying something about them when I definitely wasn’t. Well, glad we got that sorted out.

He absolutely aims to. Some of his allies are trying to form their own little militias, too, loyal explicitly to the party instead of the country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/nyregion/bruce-blakeman-armed-citizens-long-island.html

https://www.flgov.com/eog/news/press/2022/governor-ron-desantis-unveils-florida-state-guard

No, it’s purely me. Search a couple of things on DDG, Alt-click to open tabs I can copy paste from, and then make the point, it looks longer than it is because there’s so much copy paste.

IDK if I would agree with drop on the ocean… I mean, the world is a big place and everyone’s just in their thing with their established habits of how things are supposed to be. It didn’t get to be the way it is just in one year of building, and it doesn’t change to be a whole new thing just in one year of changing, but over time things can make huge shifts. For better or worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NYhTwLCT-Q

We’ve paid in hell since Moscow burned
These Cossacks tear us piece by piece
Our dead are strewn a hundred leagues
Though death would be a sweet release
Our “grande armée” is dressed in rags
A frozen, starving, beggar band
Like rats we steal each other’s scraps
Fall to fighting hand to hand

Save my soul from evil, Lord
And heal this soldier’s heart
I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord
I’m done with Bonaparte

And so on

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2024/07/25/police-mental-health-alternative-911

In the four years since George Floyd’s murder, many sweeping attempts to reform policing have faltered. But one proposal that has taken hold across the country, and continues to spread, is launching alternative first response units that send unarmed civilians, instead of armed officers, to some emergencies.

For decades, Eugene, Oregon, was the rare city that sent unarmed crisis workers and EMTs to 911 calls. Now, researchers have tracked over 100 alternative crisis response units operating across the U.S. Over half of the country’s largest cities have created such teams.

https://atlantablackstar.com/2024/03/20/a-historic-backtrack-on-criminal-justice-reform-critics-say-new-laws-could-disproportionately-affect-people-of-color/

After Floyd’s death, states passed hundreds of reform bills, including chokehold bans and other use-of-force guidelines, while several cities vowed to invest in community programs and crisis response teams to assist with behavioral-health-related calls.

https://laist.com/news/criminal-justice/george-floyd-police-reform-los-angeles-black-lives-matter-sheriff-lapd-gascon-aclu-defund

There have been big changes via the ballot box:

• Reformer George Gascón ousted incumbent L.A. County District Attorney Jackie Lacey in the November 2020 election. Gascón’s promise to review hundreds of past police shootings for possible prosecution of the officers involved helped him beat incumbent Lacey, who was heavily supported by police unions.
• Voters elected L.A. County Supervisor Holly Mitchell — a former state senator who championed police reform in Sacramento — to the Board of Supervisors.
• Voters approved Measure J, which requires the county to spend at least 10% of its discretionary money on social programs designed to keep people out of the criminal justice system.

There have also been funding cuts and policy shifts:

• The Los Angeles City Council cut the LAPD budget by $150 million.
• The Los Angeles Unified School District cut its police budget by 35%.
• The city council is developing a program to use unarmed social workers instead of police to respond to some mental health calls.
• The city council is studying whether it could remove police from traffic enforcement.

“I think police reform now has become turbocharged,” said Raphe Sonenshein, director of the Pat Brown Institute at Cal State L.A. “I don’t think anybody could have possibly imagined that so much would be on the table right now.”

https://www.axios.com/2020/06/10/police-reform-george-floyd-protest

This one has a big list of anecdotal reforms from different parts of the country.

I realize that a lot of these describe cases where some reform was initially popular, but now has lost steam or gone backwards. That is what I am saying. I was saying, the wrong people are in charge, and when ordinary people fight to make things better, it happens, and when it’s on autopilot, it doesn’t. It sounds to me like police reform took some big steps forward when people demanded it, including your friends who were fighting like hell to make things happen and good on them for doing it. And then, when the pressure wasn’t on, things stopped happening or backslid.

I don’t know in what world you expect to say “police be better pls thank you” and it suddenly happens. Who is supposed to be setting up the system for you, so that they will be better, if not you and me?

Some of us, yeah. On the other hand, the BLM protests were the biggest in history, and resulted in significant systemic changes that decades of complaining had failed to produce.

I think a lot of the issue is that people just don’t have time. During the pandemic, people had time to realize how fucked everything was and do something about it, without endangering their ability to buy housing and food the next month.

Hm, to me that only says that having weight on their back changes how the horse moves and “may” contribute to some types of injury. It doesn’t say there’s any indication that it is bad for the horse. Do you or they know of a study that says there is?

What on earth made you think I I was talking about voting? I definitely think it’s necessary as one part of the equation, but just voting for one of the provided candidates and calling it good was exactly what I was describing as deadly inaction.

It is the eternal failure of systems. There has to be a system, because you can’t just have everyone doing whatever they feel. But the instant there’s a system, there will be holes in the system, and there will be someone saying “Well, obviously this person is just having fun making us all look stupid, but the rules say that we have to let them stay and ban people who call them the wrong thing…”

Yeah but the American culture is supposed to be different from those. One of the genuine strengths of American culture is that if the boss tells you to echo some bullshit they came up with, most Americans will either just laugh it off, or if they have to put up with it, they hate it and stop as soon as they’re able.

I realize Trump is trying to turn the US into an Iran- or Saudi-style top-down system where the leader tells you what you’re allowed to call things. Like I say, he will certainly succeed to some extent, I just can’t decide how much or how scared to be about that particular aspect of it.

Yeah, makes sense. I think a big part of the problem, too, is that a lot of Lemmy admins are short-on-time volunteers who can’t really spend time or energy even if they wanted to on the finicky task of detecting and removing the trolls, which means they simply get to run amuck. I think sometimes I create meta discussion with the aim that people become more aware of it, but you may be right that it’s better just to block and then not have to worry about them.

I was alarmed about the idea of doing that for political trolls, because I’d rather be around to see what they’re saying and engage with them for the most part, but now that there’s not much to lose politically I may start doing exactly that.

LMAO

Remember when FDR tried to tell people to change the date for Thanksgiving?

My man you don’t control the dictionary, it is still the Gulf of Mexico. I honestly can’t decide whether it is a hilarious overreach that means the whole thing is going to fall apart, or a brief glimpse into a nightmarish future of schoolteachers nervously having to tell their class that it’s “The Gulf of America” or else they’ll get in trouble, wondering what the hell is happening and hoping for someone to come and help them out of it someday.

That is always tradition.

The people at the top will never have your best interests at heart. It’s just not how it works. There is no system where the people in government make sure to include you, and make sure everything is set up fairly, and you can just chill, secure with your voice being un-kept out of it and your inclusion assured. You can either stay engaged and take an active part in forcing the government to be a decent government, or else you can mostly ignore it as we have been doing, and you will get the unfolding horror we are about to experience.

I strongly suspect that there are people who specialize in creating massive food fights on Lemmy between groups of opposing people. To what end, I have no idea. It could honestly just be entertainment. It seems like the formula is to pick some tribal affiliation which has a tendency to be defensive towards its members (vegans and trans advocates being two good examples), and then set up a big dramatic conflict where typical common sense is on one side, and the officially accepted “correct” decision, for that tribal grouping, is on the other.

I am sure it happens accidentally sometimes also, but most issues that blow up into big debacles fit precisely into that framework, and it happens much more regularly along those tribal lines than just along normal shit-happens-on-the-internet lines. And the involved parties are generally these sort of comical Batman-villain personalities. It’s rarely just a guy from Minnesota who posts on Lemmy and likes fishing, who also has been posting Pokemon scams, or something random like that.

On Reddit this shit happened periodically, but it was a normal variety of stuff. Unidan, clearly corporate-sponsored posts, admins editing people’s posts, it was just a variety. On Lemmy the thing that’s going wrong is almost always along those preexisting group fault lines. The drama surrounding MBFC bot is the only thing I can think of offhand that didn’t fit that template.

Just another of my ludicrous conspiracy theories.