When people feel ignored in a democratic country, they begin to feel like the democracy they live in is a sham or that democracy itself doesn’t work.

Votes like this aren’t necessarily about “we need a different direction” and more about desperation and/or anger. They want to show the elites of their country that they still have the power, they want to cost them something for treating the population like it’s there to be harvested from, they want to shake up the status quo at all cost.

They want to prove to themselves that their vote still matters.

Letting it get to this point is really bad governance. Once you get here, either they win, or they don’t. And of they don’t, most of the people who support them have their suspicions confirmed, they don’t live in a democracy, they voted and didn’t get what they want, again. This creates a division that is difficult to come back from.

There’s a lot of discussion in here about how great this is. And it is. But it is at odds with another environmentalist concern.

What if we could take carbon dioxide and turn it into something that can’t be degraded by living organisms? Well, plastic is one of those things, or was. Plastic is a form of carbon sequestration.

These micro organisms, they’re turning plastic into carbon dioxide. Any and all carbon compounds on earth will enter the carbon cycle. every drop of oil pulled out of the ground, even the stuff that’s used to make plastic, will wind up in the atmosphere.

How so? The parties they’re competing against are incumbents, and often, there are laws preventing them from campaigning. If anything they’re at a disadvantage policitally, and yet they’re winning. Obviously, what they’re offering is popular for some reason.

Well, they win because they get votes, what is it that they’re unhappy with that they’re drawn to the potential leadership of these parties? I’d start with that. These are democracies, so these parties can’t gain power unless they offer the citizenry of their countries something they want.

I said that those who seek power over others are subhuman scum. Curious you took it personally.

I’m not a racist, but you know that already and just like to shout insults at people because your ideas cannot stand on their own merit and everything is a means to an end to you. You’re a con.

People who seek to dominate others are subhuman scum, I don’t think I’ll get a lot of disagreement on that.

Of course. You’re one of them. Got it.

“On principle what specific words do you want to say” lol yeah OK. You need to go understand what “principle” means, by definition it ignores specific circumstances.

When what I can say is subject to someone else’s dictat, de facto they have power over me. The interesting thing about that is that the kind of people that seek that out aren’t the kind of people who wield it wisely or fairly. I avoid giving others power over me, I can’t always prevent it, but I avoid it where I can. That’s the principle we are talking about, whether I want to give someone that power, not whether I agree with them on what words should be said. And that’s what this whole speech shit is about, not words, it’s about power. Generally I would agree with those people on what words should not be said, what I don’t agree with is giving them the power to tell me or other people that we can’t say them. I used to do the compromise thing, but those people inevitably overreach and begin to try to control what ideas are allowed to be discussed, because again, it’s about power and they’re power hungry subhuman scum who just want to dominate others.

No matter where you go on fedi, it’s one type of toxic or another. Either it’s people shouting the n word, or it’s people sharing drawings (at best) of little kids, or it’s power hungry subhuman scum who just want to dominate others. It’s an architectural problem endemic to the federated network architecture. So I prefer an architecture with less discoverability but which gives the user the power to censor their own feed how they see fit. There’s no real reach on either, but at least people can have their echo chambers and nobody can lean on the architecture to silence the people they don’t like.

It’s not about what I want to say lol typical. Take a conversation about principle and imply that I want to shout slurs.

You don’t have the right to dictate to me what I can say out loud, period.

That’s actually nor possible because there’s no global feed. Your network is what you make of it. I’m not a fan of voat types so I don’t interact with them online all that often.

It’s interesting, the people that tell you that they’re in the majority somehow also believe that online spaces that are left for open discussion don’t wind up the way they want them to, almost as if they’re a minority.

Nah I leave that shit to the guys at the #1 spot on the list lol. I just say what I want. I’m actually not into being angry and hateful, but I’m also not into being told what I can and cannot say.

Really? I know they have a bunch of porn bots, I don’t think I ever interacted with someone on there, just saw bot posts in my federated feed. I never noticed anything pedoish, but of course I don’t click content warnings so I wouldn’t know, I’m not interested in NSFW stuff on fedi.

#2 represent! Getting defederated is street cred. If crybabies don’t like you you’re doing something right.

I don’t mess with fedi anymore though, besides dicking around on here. Socially I’m all about Nostr now, it’s the future of the non corpo social media, federated network architecture is simply too prone to abuse.

Yes, they have been turned into prisons. It sucks. I wish they weren’t in there. People seem to be conflating my statement, “it’s a dangerous environment”, with something I haven’t said, something like “these are criminals who deserve to be in there.” All I’m saying is they’re in there, it’s dangerous in an environment like that, some people will try to hurt others in a place like that and since they’re there you’ve gotta try to prevent that.

Not water. Water bottles. People in places like that make knives out of paper. A guy taught me how to start a fire using a pencil and toilet paper. You’d be surprised what some people can do with some simple materials in a place like that. I’d be willing to bet there’s some security that’s the direct result of something someone did.

The knives Sikh people usually carry cannot be drawn, FYI. They’re harmless.

We are talking about prisons, not schools, although I concede that the distinction is getting fuzzier by the day.

Water bottles for ablution and head scarves…

I doubt they let Jews have tefellin in jail either. Or Sikhs carry a ceremonial knife at all times. Not everything is a violation of religious rights, some things are dangerous to give people in situations like that. They make a good faith effort, they let them take time for prayer and eat at the right times during Ramadan, they don’t make them wear immodest clothing, they can wash up before prayers. I wish they weren’t in there, but it’s a potentially dangerous place, the ingenuity people have with the materials around them you wouldn’t believe.

“Islamically significant” lol who comes up with this stuff.

Well I think relativity tells us something more fundamental, that the world emerges as interactions from relative frames of reference, even in the quantum realm. It’s easy to forget, every single thing going on is a quantum system with astronomical complexity, complexity of a system is the square of the number of quantum states in the entire system. A molecule is a quantum system, a cell is a quantum system, a tree is a quantum system, a tree rustling in the wind is a quantum system. A person interacting with another person for example is entangling those systems and is itself another quantum system. And I don’t think entanglement is a binary thing, it’s a thing of degree and quality. You’re influenced by everything in your light cone, even if you’ve never directly observed a specific star for example, you still interact with it to some degree, you’re a part of a quantum system composed of the entire observable universe, and even part of the unobservable one. Once you observe it, now your interaction is more than that. You can picture it in your mind, look for it again later, tell people about it. If you could orbit it, or touch it, you’d get entangled with it even more. I think a lot more about our experience than what we realize consciously is quantum phenomena, I think we experience these phenomena directly but we just take for granted those experiences and don’t realize what they are fundamentally, just like someone who doesn’t understand gravity doesn’t realize that the experience of falling from a tree is the same force as the one that keeps the planets moving around the sun.

Why doesn’t relativity explain it? It looks like a classic case of relativity to me, what am I missing?