I mean at least from what I’ve seen of it so far DSA is a fairly good choice, as I think for a party to be really progressive and represent the working class people it needs to be run democratically with party members actually having a voice and vote on what the party does. Which so far most other parties tend to follow the normal party strategy with party leadership and candidates making choices about what policies they want which just seems like a path to another Democratic party down the line that is disconnected from the people.

I think if anything though fragmentation isn’t really the problem with breaking past local wins. I think it’s more that the higher up you get the more corporate money starts to have a large impact and the harder and more support you need to run a grass roots campaign. The higher up you get the harder it becomes to reach out directly to voters through door knocking and events and the more advertisements and mass media campaigns tend to have influence which is where corporate money thrives. I think the way around this outside of campaign finance reform is building up that local support so you can have those local candidates that have already done outreach directly with their local constituents provide support and endorsement towards electing people at higher levels.

We’ve been doing pretty good at that in Oregon in the Portland area especially, we got a fair few DSA people elected to the city council and to the state house in the last election. Although I doubt that will ever really convert the Dems into an actual progressive party, it’s a lot more likely that the Democratic party dies with the rise of new progressive candidates and new progressive parties winning.

Honestly out of all those switches email is the one I’ve always struggled with. I feel like that one would take a ton of effort to switch over my accounts on various things to a new email. If anyone has any advice or ways to make that easier I’d love that as otherwise I’m still stuck with Gmail.

I mean I would argue the whole system of having to show up in person to a place to vote on a non-holiday day and wait in a long line is in of itself a way to stop poorer people from voting. I’ve lived in a state with only mail in voting for my whole life and as result we have some of the highest voter turn out. It makes sense the Republicans want to do everything they can to to alter that as the harder they make it for poorer people to vote the better their odds of winning are.

I mean at a certain point legality doesn’t matter if they black bag you and deport you before you can even have a trial. Which clearly seems to be their goal by the fact that they move the detainees away from where they apprehend them to avoid the court there being able to have jurisdiction. As well as with the large numbers of people who were put on planes without any kind of trial or process where they can prove they’re there legally. With this becoming the norm at a certain point your only option really is to fight back and resist arrest or be deported without due process.

They do that cause Republicans win the less people are able to vote. When you disenfranchise people who don’t have the time or care to deal with getting an ID you are left with either richer people or older people who both tend to vote Republican. So of course they’re gonna require ID to vote and make it as hard as possible for working people to get a valid ID for voting.

Yeah they aren’t good but also the main reason they ramped up their attacks against shipping in the region was in response to the US support of Israel after October 7th. I mean most of these groups in the region aren’t good but they get supported by the people as they’re seen as a strong opposition to the genocidal regime of Israel and America who are trying to kill them, displace them, and take their land. Sure they also get backed by Iran but without popular support in the region they wouldn’t have anywhere near as much reach and power as they do now.

As someone who’s 23 and grew up with smartphones and all of that as they were starting to become popular I feel like I have some takes on a lot of the opinions I’ve seen on the different sides of issues like this. I lean in general towards giving your kid a phone once they’re old enough to want to be able to talk with friends and do things on their own afterschool but having some non-intrusive ways to keep an eye on what they’re doing with it until sometime when they’re a teenager. That just seems like the best way to not ostracize them from other kids while still making sure they’re being safe online. Even though in general things worked out fine for me with my parents letting me have my own laptop and iPod touch and eventually iPhone from a pretty young age without really watching what I did on them I definitely see a lot of times that I could have ended up being taken advantage of online if things had been slightly different. And the reason I say non-intrusive ways to keep track of what your kid is doing is because I knew kids who did have like parental restrictions on their phones and all of them knew ways to bypass them and do what they wanted to do anyways. So the only way you’re gonna successfully keep an eye on them is if they don’t know you are and you only interfere if it’s a genuine safety problem, and even then you make sure to not punish them for it as that will make them start hiding things from you actively, you treat it as a learning moment and help them understand why what they were doing wasn’t safe. I’m still very much figuring out what my exact views on this are but I think leaning too far in either direction of not letting them have social media or a smartphone at all even when they’re starting to reach middle school or letting them have unrestricted access to social media and a phone both have their problems and you have to find a good balance in the middle.

As someone who uses USPS to deliver mail or packages whenever I need to do that it definitely isn’t universally agreed on. It has reasonable prices compared to the other ones and I’ve never had issues with packages taking too long or getting lost.

I would also make an argument that the limited technology at the time led to different kinds of games versus what we see now. Sure there’s the obvious things like internet enabled games and being able to get updates but I think even the less thought about things like restrictions on RAM and the power of computers led to restrictions on what you could do which led to specific types of games which aren’t made that way anymore because they don’t have to work around those restrictions. And while in a lot of cases those restrictions going away has allowed for better mechanics and gameplay it also still makes the games different which to people who were used to and liked those games will feel not as good anymore.

That’s cause the business side keeps pushing for increasingly unrealistic deadlines and will only accept delaying so much before forcing it out.

I mean they basically already do this, my student loan was moved to a private servicer which basically is just a company that collects the money from my loans.

I mean the problem with your argument is then that there’s nothing we can do, as there isn’t really any pathway towards impeachment right now. As Republicans hold both houses and have pretty clearly shown their loyalty to Trump even with the fact that they’re getting so much backlash they won’t hold town halls anymore. So at this point these kinds of protests are one of the few ways to try and hurt the people in power, as well as to start building community that is needed for any kind of more direct action. It also gives Trump and Elon the opportunity to overreact against protests (like if they decide to follow through on the domestic terrorism thing) which will further galvanize people into action.

Yeah the problem here though is that Israel is the one with all the power here to stop the violence as they’re the ones forcing people out of their land. I view it in a similar way to what happened in Ireland, if you want to stop the violence you have to make efforts to negotiate a true lasting peace, then whatever groups that are left that still want to commit violence will slowly lose support as the people stop supporting violence with a good peace treaty in place. But instead of doing that Israel is basically using the same argument the US used for why freeing slaves would be bad as in their mind at the time if they freed them the slaves would kill all the white people.

I mean I think even the mass protests we did have are nothing compared to the size of protests in Europe. I think that’s a mix of general American attitudes both with people’s general apathy and the extremely individualistic ideals that Americans tend to have pushed on them from a young age. As well as a mix of the lack of worker protections like I mentioned before. I think if we could pull off the kind of numbers we see in Europe in even a couple of big American cities they would be very effective. Protests are the kinds of thing that can help build community since while you’re there you can talk to people and find groups to join to push for what you believe in. And I mean compared to the other forms of resistance you mentioned two of those, courts and town halls, effectively are protests as you’re going to a town hall to protest your representatives or you’re going out and protesting to tell the court to do more to stop this. That’s why I think we need to focus on building up communities to help breakthrough the apathy and the intensely individualistic attitude people here tend to have, as well as setting up things like mutual aid to provide more of those safety nets that the government is abdicating on right now to help those who normally can’t afford to come out and participate. So that when there’s a push against something it doesn’t just take the form of hundreds of people showing up at something but is thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people showing up like what you’ve seen in Europe. Of course that will take time and at least from what Ive seen the number of people being involved in community groups has gone up but definitely not as fast as the number of people angry at Trump and I think trying to funnel those people into groups to help organize is gonna be the big thing that actually lets us fight back and oppose what’s going on right now.

I mean I went to a protest today in my city, so I’m not making excuses, I’m just explaining why it’s hard for people to go out and protest especially in America. Some of it definitely is attitude and apathy that needs to change but there is a good amount of it that it down to either poverty or lack of real community in most places in America.

I mean the problem is the people who are being worst affected by Trump are the kind of people who genuinely can’t afford to take a day off work without being fired and being thrown into homelessness. There are protests in the US but due to the lackluster worker protections we have people generally either can’t make it to them or are well enough off that they just really don’t care enough to go out. So they end up being much smaller then the one in Europe. Also add to that fact that a bunch of people here are dumb enough to like Trump and what he’s doing and the result is much smaller protests.

Honestly when switching from Reddit to here that is the thing I missed the most. It was a lot better at serving you things you liked compared to here where you can only really sort by either what’s active or popular or what you’re subscribed to. I get some people really like that but a lot of people want it to be more personalized to them without having to go search for the things they want. It’s also great for discovering new things because sure I can setup my subscriptions to show what I like but then it won’t make connections and show me new things I might like. Combine that with there being less content and therefore certain areas of interest not being represented here at all makes mainstream social media better for most people.

I think that ended with the death of their fascist leader and then a peaceful transition towards democracy. So it can happen but only if your leader dies and the successor wants to reform the country back to democracy.

After 9/11 terrorism gained a much more negative connotation I think. Idk fully about what it was like before since I wasn’t alive but in Deep Space Nine you literally have a character who said she was a terrorist and that’s not really seen as like an inherently evil thing like it would be in the current day. I think people understood the nuance back then that sometimes terrorism ends up being justified when you’re fighting for freedom against an oppressor.