Michael

Nah, you’re good. Thanks for responding. Yeah, I agree some projects are better than others when it comes usability or asking for reasoning for design choices, and the like. Sorry that mods deleted your post - I didn’t report it.

Have a good one!

Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 by 2.9 million votes against Trump and she was insanely unpopular for reasons most people can agree on (that don’t relate to gender).

I don’t think misogyny played a major factor in Kamala’s loss.

The fresh water crisis is dire. Is any candidate or political figure, past or present, addressing the issue or suggesting solutions?

If not, they are all insufficient and unqualified to lead.

We can’t wait until 2028 and there may no election to vote in. We need this administration to go ASAP.

Unfortunately, we can’t afford to mess around. The fresh water crisis is something America has to deal with - sooner, rather than later. There are many other crises than water and health care, and they are all very urgent.

If being a progressive has been reduced to: “I’m slightly to the left of Republicans, but just as pro-capitalist as them”, then the term has been co-opted or watered-down to meaninglessness.

It’s like the term “Libertarian” being co-opted by capitalists. The original meaning of libertarianism had nothing to do with capitalism, free markets, deregulation, and privatization.

And how is Buttigieg qualified to lead the country? He did fuck all as the Secretary of Transportation. He’s a pro-corporate hack.

I’m gay and he has never given me a reason to like him. Him acting like Medicare for All would be a bad thing was what initially turned me off from him.

It’s ALMOST like factory farming isn’t a profitable or a sane practice. /s

Unsurprising that he uses slave labor, too.

Bridging gaps, forming strong alliances and communities, starting movements, and organizing with like-minded people for change and mutual benefit is how acceptance becomes broader and is the catalyst for culture wars to fizzle out. These actions are the spark that allow people to broadly start to realize there is nothing to be afraid about. A person who is perceivably different or a minority existing, having rights, and thriving doesn’t harm anyone or have to be at anybody’s expense.

Our politicians and governments no longer represent us and the laws aren’t moving in the right direction any time soon. Fighting unjust laws and restrictions and winning politicians over is typically what you’d do as a minority to have your existence be legalized and protected, but I’d argue that we are past the point of no return - laws, reform, and protections aren’t going to come quick enough and we need to act urgently.

The more we polarize ourselves against others for holding less than tolerant views and sitting in judgement of them, the harder it is for us to focus on joining hands, organizing, and focusing on solutions and the change we’d like to see (and be). I’m not saying that we should put up with violations of our personal sovereignty, consent to being restricted unjustly by the law, consent to being subject to abuse (physical, verbal, or any other form), or enable or platform these behaviors.

Win the battles you can win - that means focusing on solutions with people that are actually on the side of all of humanity (which includes all people and minorities). The planet and all life on it is at stake.

I feel it’s ideal to be generally kind to others to hope for kindness back. Some might say that bigoted and hateful people don’t deserve kindness and I’d wholeheartedly agree - you don’t owe them anything and it’s not your job to force their heart open. But I feel it’s important to listen to our hearts and act on them - kindness has immense potential to soften hearts and dissolve boundaries - hate often has the opposite effect.

For example, do you let a person with conservative views who is intolerant, ignorant, and hateful stand in your way and eat your attention and precious life - or do you join hands with others in mutual support for progress and forward movement in our societies?

We can be an unstoppable force by moving out of the direction of the immovable objects and going beyond.

You can’t effectively address those who are transphobic and racist by fighting them, shaming them, and being hateful towards them. Bigotry and hate are fueled by a lack of understanding, acceptance, sometimes by a sense of superiority, fear, tribalism, religion, propaganda, incoherence and disconnection, confusion, and of course also by hate.

Adding to a cycle doesn’t break it, we need to move past these cycles of hate and hurt by joining hands with those who are on the side of all of humanity.

The people living in hate and fear who have dug their feet deep into the ground, blocking progress or even regressing it, standing with their closed hearts will catch up eventually.

Why would Islamic countries not condemn China? They certainly seem to condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people. Somebody please enlighten me.

Edit: According to Business Insider, they might fear China’s retaliation (e.g. economic vengeance). How reliant are these Islamic countries on exports from China and how reliant are these countries on China importing their resources (e.g. oil)?

Why would any of that matter when people of their religion are being genocided? Fear of retaliation from a nuclear-powered state and facing consequences in regards to western trade doesn’t seem to deter them from taking a stance on Palestine.

Chaos, artificial scarcity, and violence feeds the system and justifies its existence.

Otherwise, why would we still have a mass incarceration system? Why is it still punitive in nature with terrible and inhumane conditions normalized?

A cycle is created that makes people unemployable and industries and those in power reap the benefits at every stage of these people’s lives - any police contact is effectively a scarlet letter. Specifically, many corporations benefit from the slave labor sourced from prisons and the private prison industry is its own can of worms.

With AI tooling screening job applicants with proprietary criteria, public data brokers, mass surveillance disguised as “adtech”, people search websites, social media (where people have a tendency to overshare personal details), systematic reporting of arrest records/etc. in newspapers (generally with no updates to reflect the person’s current situation); you can literally be unemployable in the US with no conviction or crimes that have been expunged or sealed.

If you have a felony or misdemeanor on your record - good fucking luck getting a job in today’s market - background checks are normalized and are extremely accessible to employers. It’s no wonder why people turn to crime to exist, discrimination is effectively legalized - there is insufficient regulation and protections for job applicants.

The only way to prevent crime is to rehabilitate those who commit crime and to provide services to enrich people’s lives before they would otherwise commit crime. We also need to respect people’s privacy upon rehabilitation - we shouldn’t be permanently labeling (or dehumanizing) those deemed to be fit to return to society (e.g. people that aren’t violent or who aren’t a threat). We have to give them a path to participate in society.

It definitely seems to be the case for me. VPNs and other privacy settings can trigger the aggressive captchas as well.

The agitators on lemmy definitely push the idea that centrism is bad.

Centrism gets absolutely nothing done.

falling for the trap of “I only support candidates 100% aligned with pure progressive values” results in Trump winning.

Kamala lost because she did not run on any progressive policies and shifted center-right. Supporting fracking got her zero brownie points in PA, for example. She really didn’t run on anything impactful - she was continuing a lot of Biden’s policies, refused to list her policies until very late in the race, and was mainly running on not being Trump. What she was proposing was entirely insufficient to attract voters.

Did you forget about Obama’s successes? He arguably ran on a progressive platform and his success was explosive.

But in reality, the progressive candidates get <1% of the vote.

Gee, I wonder why that is. Progressives generally being anti-corporatist and against funding Іsrаеl unsurprisingly makes Super PACs and foreign agents like АІPАϹ spend lots of money to beat them. All funding should be from small donors to even the playing field - campaign finance reform is needed for fair and democratic elections.

People vote based on name recognition and what benefits they get by voting for a particular candidate - they aren’t repulsed by progressive policies, they usually just don’t know about progressive candidates or about their policies. Or they are told by mainstream media that the progressive candidate has no chance of winning and to vote for the establishment to beat Republicans.

The far-leftists who don’t do so well will never be happy

There are no “far-leftists” in the Democratic party, it’s a right party. All capitalists are firmly on the right and socialists are on the left. There’s very few people who classify themselves as democratic socialists or who are left-leaning. Being a progressive does not make you left-leaning or a democratic socialist - see Elizabeth Warren as an example (she is a progressive capitalist).

So according to the “comeback retreat” hosted by the “center-left” group Third Way; the Democrats are too “beholden” to their “far-left members”, they are dismissive of people without progressive views, and the Democrats also need to “embrace patriotism”.

I’m pretty sure people don’t like Democrats because they keep moving right, they seem to be too focused on maintaining the status quo and alienating progressives, and now they’re essentially complicit with a fascist regime.

Sounds like a winning strategy to continue the move to the right and push progressive and “far-left” voices out. No wonder Bernie essentially threw Democrats under the bus in a podcast recently.

And then failing that one too because you take literally any measure to protect your privacy. And then the next one.

If these countries were given the ingredients to be able to develop and there was no outside demand for mined materials, these children wouldn’t be in the mines.

Big if, but less of an “if” if more people are made aware. It’s absolutely sickening how much we rely on lithium considering how it is sourced.

We are collectively enabling modern slavery and child slavery. These corporations prefer to act innocent because they aren’t sending the children themselves into the mines, but they buy the materials they mine regardless (and there’s no way that they don’t know the reality). Many corporations profit off the back of these people and children and they should be required to pay significant reparations.

What is in our power to stop this? We can spread the awareness of our exploitation of third-world countries - including their children, we can develop technologies that don’t rely on rare materials or difficult to mine materials, we can employ automation to mine what we do need in first-world countries, and we can hold the corporations that profit from these supply chains accountable.

There are battery technologies (e.g. sodium-ion) that we could grasp and avoid mining altogether for energy storage. China is proving that sodium-ion batteries are a very promising technology, even in cars, and the sodium can be sourced from seawater or from the byproducts of desalination (the latter which likely needs to be very quickly scaled considering the fresh water crisis).

And how much slower is it to launch and use?

When you put it that way, I guess we better hand over thousands every year to Apple for the new iPhone. Wouldn’t want a child slave to be unemployed.

Buy 10,000 disposable vapes every year while you’re at it (if you really care). Maybe a couple cents will trickle down to the children you claim to care about.

If you’re worried about these children losing their wonderful life in the mines, feel free to support them through other means.

Make it your life’s work to spread awareness, bring aid to the affected countries, and support their development - you only enslave yourself by learning to do absolutely nothing against what you see as oppressive.

And getting companies that profit off of these children to support them would likely be fair. Apple, Google, and many others can handle the hit.

Your trolling aside, we all share a personal responsibility to not buy from companies that e.g. utilize cobalt/lithium in their products - slavery/child labor is rampant in those supply chains and Apple et. al are responsible for supporting it.

If there was no demand, these children wouldn’t be forced to work in mines - it’s that simple.

You enslave others by consuming most common products on the shelves. Modern slavery (and child slavery) is more expansive than most know and third-world exploitation is rampant - western supply chains are not immune.

While you support the enslavement of others with your consumption, corporations continue to become more and more powerful.