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Cake day: May 3rd, 2024

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  • We can only hope that literally being the ones to be involved in counting the votes and seeing the results for themselves first hand is enough to get them to accept reality.

    A long shot, but if these people genuinely believe that there was election interference and they aren’t simply looking to knowingly commit fraud, there’s a chance they might acknowledge the facts in the end if the results really are just undeniable.

    Edit: This American Life did an episode back before the 2020 election about an election administrator who basically made it his priority to make the process as transparent as possible so that election deniers could see under every stone and explore every nook of the process.

    And I think it both speaks to the power of transparency as an antidote, but is also a bit sad how this guy bends over backwards to accommodate these people and is still treated with suspicion. Really interesting listen and highlights how fair elections really do rest on the shoulders of these lower level workers.


  • This is illustrative of why I have no faith in Israel to actually behave as a liberal democracy the way its allies pretend it is.

    It’s not just that they temporarily have a far-right administration as part of some cycle between liberalism and conservativism, the population itself is overwhelmingly far right and supports apartheid. The only thing that upsets them about what’s happening in Gaza is that the Israeli government clearly doesn’t care about getting the hostages back. The wholesale slaughter of innocent people does not bother most Israelis in the least, many of them see it as a positive.

    There is no internal opposition to the far right in Israel, and the country should be geopolitically categorized the same as we categorize Russia, China or any other hardcore authoritarian state. It’s not a democracy.















  • Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps. If it were just a one-off event it might be able to be waved away, but a pattern of failure is emerging.

    Whether the storm was projected to hit as hard or not doesn’t really matter, tropical storms and hurricanes are not some new event in that area of Texas, yet the state and local governments seem utterly unprepared. It was only a year or two ago that basically the exact same thing happened, and apparently nothing was done about it to shore up their services. It’s an inefficiency of the private sector, they’re not capable of providing vital services because their primary motivation is not reliability and efficiency, it’s profit and cost cutting.

    You don’t see this happening in other states with the same frequency. I’ve never had the grid where I am fail, and we get both extreme heat and cold and occasional tropical storms.





  • I know some Irish Republicans, Spanish Catalonians, German anti-Zionist political prisoners, and … waves hand at Poland, Hungary, and Russia

    Quite a few native Europeans who would tell you differently.

    Europe has some authoritarian governments, not totalitarian dictatorships that approach anywhere near the all-encompassing control of the CCP. Hungary maybe I guess, which isn’t a country I’d recommend taking tech from either.

    Ireland is not comparable to China though, that’s an extreme reach. We’re not talking about right-wing groups seeking power within democracies, we’re talking about uni-party state control.

    I don’t think the folks on Lemmy are at any risk of that.

    Lemmy definitely has a tankie infestation already. I got banned from lemmy.ml for discussing Tiananmen and Hong Kong. Pointing out that the Great Leap Forward resulted in millions of deaths was labeled “cia misinformation” by the mods. It’s a throughly compromised instance.

    Lemmy users are not immune to tankie and Rusdian trolls, and thinking that they are is actually a weakness that gets exploited by those bad actors.

    Imagine thinking government should dictate the terms of business and not the other way around.

    Normal regulatory duties of a government are a far cry from the state having total ownership and control of business and using that control as part of a coercive campaign to suppress human rights, dissent and individual freedoms.

    Whatever authoritarianism is festering in other countries, China is still on an entirely different level, it’s not really a question.