4 of the richest men in the world who own 7/10 of the most popular websites on the internet donated to and sat at The Presidents inauguration. They own the information pipeline and can literally control propaganda completely unchecked and unsupervised. Most of those gun toting freedom fighters use those platforms because it’s all they know. Their family is on it, their business is on it, their news comes from it, they get their daily dopamine kicks from it.

There isn’t going to be any Civil War. It’s just going to be a slow rotation into what Russia currently is now. Little by little by little, hardly noticable changes, over a long enough period of time (say 4 years or so), until one day they wake up and say “Well, it was better then but there’s nothing we can do about it now.” and go about their day.

The next war is going to be a war of ideas and a war of messaging. We can’t rely on online outreach and have to be proactive IRL spreading messages that it really is a class war. There’s no better time than now, no more apparent point in history than today, it’s just pulling those people away from the propaganda for them to realize it. Somehow, We The People, need to convince the Boiling Frogs.

Alternatively, as a little side-hobby, we can be more politically active locally, voicing our opinions and trying to educate the local populace of the immense wealth disparity and the issue of corporate money in politics. No doubt those are easy concessions to agree on and no doubt things are just going to get worse as the rug slowly gets pulled. It’s only going to be easier with time to win over more folx with the fact that they’re in the same boat as us and it’s sinking. We can be proactive with small amounts of our time to involve ourselves in (local) politics. Spreading ideas and voicing opinions has always been the defacto way to progress. Change starts locally and spreads from there.

I saw that, I wasn’t commenting to your entire opinion which is why I quoted the specific parts I was referring to.

The only thing he’s spreading is the illusion there is place for progressives in that horrible party

That’s not the message I’m getting from his talks and video blog updates. Maybe stop reading article headlines and head to the source directly to reinforce your opinion on the message he’s spreading. I don’t think you’re here to convince people of some kind of solution or better future though. All you’ve done is doomsay and complain. None of your opinions address the current message he’s trying to get to the people, which is that Billionaires are buying Politicians and money in Politics is a huge problem right now, and We, The People, need to voice our opinions on it or do something about it before it gets too bad.

Your Doomsaying only distracts from the current problems at hand, which I’m willing to bet you understand.

Your claim is that “Bernie being the only one voting ‘no’ is virtue signaling.” where my point is that if you know a vote is going to pass or fail, you might as well either stand out of use that opportunity to voice your opinion. If a vote is going to pass regardless of Bernies vote, who care if he wants to use that as a catalyst to spread his message, ideas, and opinions.

This honestly isn’t a bad idea at this point. It would still take a ton of money, a ton of support, a ton of boots on the ground to achieve though. It would really need to snowball into a movement. Who are the superfriends of “Fuck you, pay Americans fairly” kind of politicians?

In today’s political climate, I think that’s unfortunately true. It would take some drastic outreach, Obama levels of outreach and more, plus a ton of money to change peoples biases and opinions (again, as of today).

Real Question - Bernie Sanders is old; it’s 83. If Bernie passes - who carries on his message? AOC? Who fr? You?

Which, in my opinion, the message is honest outreach to people, IRL, and share the message that Billionares are buying our Politicians which needs to be addressed (like, the sooner the better)?

He and other fake progressives do this when they are absolutely sure it will have no consequences.

Not when it’s possibly a close call. Pure empty virtue signaling.

First off, based on everything else he does - who fucking cares fr What a great way to both share your stance on an issue and garner attention for your causes - stand out. It’s both harmless and clever - in American Politics even.

when you’re talking about mass heuristics like “the united states is falling apart” it definitionally, should be falling apart

Hard disagree. That downplays the importance of the issues at hand, at the time, whatever they may be. If it’s “mass hysteria” as you claim, maybe it’s something important that should have some attention brought to it , and discussion, at looked at with an open, but objective mindset. Discussion at minimum.

the most correct way to define this is that “The US is in deep political turmoil”

It’s both.

but we are hardly “falling apart at the seams”

My man, a downfall is a fall. Let me explain.

What’s happening in the U.S. is an important moment. A Multi-Billionaire was seen addressing The Nation through the States allowed Media literally behind the Oval Office Desk. This has never happened and really shows the intense influence money in politics has, for better or worse. Multiple factors has led the U.S. in a deficit (debt) of close to 2 Trillion. Instead of raising taxes on the Billionaires (~400 Americans), 4 of whom sat Presidents inauguration were worth north of 900 Billion. One of whom has had direct access to the American National Treasury without Congressional Approval or Independent Oversight. Federal employees are being cut. Eyes on Federal Programs that help the most low-income and vulnerable to be cut next.

This doesn’t even get into the international issues such as Gaza, Ukraine, Elon Musk influencing German politics, the aggressive and unnecessary negotiation tactics with our neighbors and long-time allies. It’s a long list of anti-teamwork, anti-peaseant, and quite frankly unAmerican actions that The United States haven’t seen at this extent in arguably 50+ years, over half of many of our lives.

In short, if you’re a fan of the ideas of Democracy and ensuring working people are taken care of, and you’re living in the American Democracy, then this is an important timespan.

fr tho - in one of the richest countries in the World, why should it need to get that bad before people start wanting something better? Not just for themselves, but for every American: coworker, neighbor, friend, family. Why should we (or a majority of Americans) just get the bare minimum on the standard of living and just accept that as normal?

When are we going to start recognizing Action, Causation, and Consequences over lip service? America has ~400 Billionaires.

First off, there’s nothing we can do about moving away from larger hosting Corporations, not with the technology we currently have. If we want to reach a national or international audience, we need infrastructure, and that has to come from somewhere; a business model makes sense. If you’re hosting to a small community, you’d be able to get away with 1 selfhost, but to scale you’d need redundancies and bandwidth. The best choice we can make is the companies we would rather do business with. At this point, I’m definitely favoring Cloudflare and Azure (in that order) over AWS.

I would argue that the fractured - often openly hostile - intra-instance infighting on Lemmy feeds directly into OP’s image’s “this is too weird and scary” attitude.

I see this in a lot of comments about this so while I don’t want to downplay the severity of this, I’ve personally never see instance in-fighting. Maybe it’s the things I’m subscribed to, idk, but I usually visit both my local and all just to see what’s going on. The Hexbear domain being sold is probably one of the first times I’ve run across discussions about other instances. Also, their domain being sold is lowkey hilarious. That was a problem as old as the internet (losing a domain). As we move to decentralization and privatization/ownership of data that’s going to continue to be a thing I think.

Its the same intra-channel fighting we saw on Reddit,

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the intra-channel fighting - is it just disagreeable people commenting, or is it like “This community is better than that” or “This instance is better than that”? I often see discussions on Reddit, arguing, bad faith actors, but I wouldn’t classify that as in-channel-fighting. idk.

There’s not a lot we can do about it individually.

Complain. JoinLemmy is Open Source on Github. If you have ideas - share them. If you take a look through their issues and feel like adding in your 2 cents, go for it.

Hard disagree. The entire point of Lemmy is to move away from Corporate run, Billionaire run, Millionaire run, social media (which Reddit is). Without attracting new users Lemmy will almost certainly perish. It’s goal should be a low bar to onboard new social media users coming from places like Reddit, Facebook, X.

Saying “Not our problem” is a woefully shortsighted.

At this point in history, yes.

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MUSTARDDDD!

Why do you think they would be keen to release power to China? Economics?

Definitely the wrong meme format here.

IMO it’s a logistics problem.

The wealthy own the Internet. 7/10 of the top websites on the entire Internet are owned by the same people at Trump’s inauguration. The interest is no regulation so that they can keep pouring money into marketing tactics, ethical and unethical, for engagement. The bottom line is wealth, power, control.

Their websites are visited by Billions, daily. They control the narrative. That doesn’t even get into news networks.

Education has been eroded for close to a century now.

Technology has grown far faster than we can keep up with.

AI is going to make information control, data gathering, and data compiling faster/easier.

How do you fight a beast this big? How can any other party get their message and their narrative out to the masses on par with the wealthy? How do you convince the ignorant of harmful things that they can neither believe nor fathom?

I truly have little hope for non-dystopian future.