cosecantphi [he/him]

So how close to losing and being forced into an unconditional surrender does Ukraine need to be before Europe stops sending aid at their own huge expense?

And yet the United States continues to slide into fascism despite having elected Biden. What horrific Trump era policies did the Democrats even bother to repeal after they won in 2020 and held both the senate and the house?

They are still funding the construction of border wall segments. They never repealed the Republican tax cuts. They have done nothing about the concentration camps on the southern border for fuck’s sake. They never codified Roe v. Wade, we literally lost the right to abortions while Biden was in office. They could have stacked the supreme court but they didn’t.

The Democrats and the Republicans form an obfuscated one party system in the US. Republican leadership aggressively ramps up the oppression of marginalized people, then Democratic leadership does nothing to restore our rights nor proactively prevent the same thing from happening again. Instead they just use their time in office to suck all of the energy out of people’s movements that could actually effect change.

And much more importantly than all of that, Republicans and Democrats are virtually identically evil when it comes to foreign policy. When the US is dropping bombs on you and destroying your country, you’ll tend not to care whether it was a Red MAGA or Blue MAGA administration pulling the trigger.

In some specific cases it might be worthwhile to vote for Democrats in local elections where there exists much more leeway for politicians to stray from the party line, but voting for them in national elections is just lending your voice to legitimizing their bullshit good cop/bad cop routine they play with the Republicans.

Please walk into the sea.

I really wish I could have a permanent record of everything every liberal has ever said so I could easily demonstrate how full of shit they are in 10 to 20 years when they all collectively deny ever having supported Israel through the Palestinian genocide.

Earth is the most hospitable planet to human life in the entire universe, and we seemingly can’t even put in the meager effort to keep it habitable. What makes you think we’ll be any better at making Mars habitable? Not just keeping it habitable as we’ve failed to do on Earth, but making it habitable in the first place.

Are you familiar with the sheer scale of destruction and death the United States has wrought on the rest of the world in its imperialist adventures? Nothing anywhere else in the modern day even comes close.

Not defending cigarette companies, but it really actually does suck that meth is illegal in all 50 states. The United States has the world’s largest prison population, it’s the most authoritarian country on the planet, and that is heavily facilitated by throwing people into prison for using drugs.

The funny thing is, the bigger these threads get over on Hexbear federated instances, the more users from instances like .ca, .ee, or .ml show up complaining about the Hexbears. That stays small in proportion to the actual discussion in the thread, but eventually becomes large in proportion to the stunted version of the thread that .world sees. So despite being defederated with us, .world threads slowly fill up with spam from users complaining about “Hexbear brigaders” as it leaks in and piles up from discussions and dunkings outside of their federation network.

Lemmy.world seems to be the only instance that would have been big enough to downvote us down the thread as viewed from other instances, but they defederated so we can’t see them and they can’t see us at all.

The rest that are federated don’t have the numbers to do this, especially when you consider a large chunk of them are lemmygrad users who are posting side by side with us. So overall our higher posting activity (that is partially a result of the lack of downvotes changing how we interact) results in Hexbear user heavy discussions rising to the top of threads even as viewed from other instances.

To see the whole structure, go over to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad, find this thread there, then scroll. Toward the bottom you’ll find a sort of underworld in this thread of lemmy.world users downvoting lemmygrad users into oblivion.

394 from the perspective of Hexbear. The pre-emptive lemmy.world defederation with Hexbear effectively splits big threads like this into two sections. At the top is the much higher activity Hexbear posting, and at the bottom is the lower activity lemmy.world posting where instead of substantive discussion, people who are in support of China just get downvoted to oblivion.

Ironically, Hexbear’s total removal of downvotes on their end confers an advantage here. Discussions and dunkings involving a lot of Hexbear users tend to rise to the top of threads sorted by hot because the lack of downvotes promotes actual discussion upon disagreement. This results in higher activity levels than those produced by the passive downvoting behavior typical of more reddit-like instances.