“buh buh buh the government deserves to die and everyone living in the country must suffer because my feelings are hurt”

Yeah, I know you have a lot more to say than that, but the caustic and reductionist debating angle cuts in both directions. A very merry fuck you as well, sir.

Realistically, the US Government is going to continue supporting Israel no matter what happens until the US has meaningful voting reform. Israel is an entrenched interest due to the amount of money changing hands in Washington. (defense contracts, etc.) This is not helped by the social stigma of the average American not differentiating between Israel as a political entity and Jewish people as a demographic. It’s one of those “broken by design” social constructs.

The logical fallacy that I largely see in play is the assumption that the Republicans would have handled this any differently. While I agree that Biden’s stance is noteworthy, as a reminder that the parties are more alike than they are different on certain topics, it doesn’t change the landscape of the two leading presidential candidates. One of them is in bed with Putin and appears to have a vested interest in entrenching himself as a leader who can never lose an election. (i.e. an aspiring president for life) The other candidate is still flawed, but doesn’t represent an existential threat to the political institution itself.

I’d much rather have an option other than Trump or Biden, but until more states enact voting reform at a local level we’re stuck with a choice of which decrepit old man is least likely to be disruptive to the entire system of government. The Republican party needs to continue its losing streak until it decides the populist authoritarian movement is a failed strategy.

Vote for useful things and voting reform at the local level.

Vote for whatever keeps the system itself functioning at the federal level. If one party’s leaders are in bed with “presidents for life” or the authoritarian governments that were ratfucked to make them presidents for life, you are going to end up with a president for life.

Important to note: If enough states enact voting reform at the local level, you no longer need a constitutional amendment to have voting reform that influences the federal level. If you are looking for real change, this is where it is. It is slow and unsexy, but don’t bitch about your federal vote meaning nothing if you’re not doing anything with your local elections.

The people that cancel good people are shitbags.

Relativity remains a factor. One mob’s shitbag is another mob’s hero. One mob’s wish for freedom of thought is another mob’s moral depravity.

Cancelling is just an added nuance on gossip and dogpiling, and those have been around since we’ve been knocking rocks together. It happens whenever a person publicly acknowledges an opinion that angers a tribe enough to single someone out. It doesn’t matter whether that person is a long-time resident or a passing visitor. The more it goes against their social values, the more popular it becomes in the gossip, and the more people share it with each other as the story takes on a life of its own. Details get changed. Maybe it started with a lie or misconception to begin with and grew from there. None of that matters when people start shunning you in public or knocking on your door with torches in hand.

The only added nuance of cancelling over traditional gossip is the pervasiveness of the internet, and the distance at which people can socially band together to shun you. Most importantly, gossip has never required someone to be a good or bad person. It just needs someone to be the target of a rumor (truthful or otherwise) that pisses a lot of people off.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ceiling+cat&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images

As others have already covered, everything we do comes with risk. Some people go through life without spending much thought on those risks, and if they’re lucky they never have to deal with these things. Others let it weigh upon them heavily, and it’s fairly evident that you fall into the latter camp.

You’ve caught on to the general theme though, which is that the more of yourself you put out there needlessly, the greater a possibility for negative things to happen as a result of that. I’m not going to ask you to wave a magic wand and become the type of person who doesn’t worry about those things, so here are the best compromises:

• Quality over quantity with your friends. Find some good people you can be yourself around, and don’t stress over having fewer people that you hang out with than others. It’s not a competition and it doesn’t make you an inferior person.

• Minimize how much you “put yourself out there”. The internet wasn’t around 25 years ago, and when it was young it was common sense to use an alias on the internet wherever possible. Use different nicknames on different websites to minimize the ability of casual bad actors to link your identities between different social forums. The possibility of database leaks doxxing the e-mail address you signed up with is still there, but thwarting the low effort attempts does a lot on its own. You can go through the effort of registering with different e-mail addresses as well, but there is a point of diminishing returns here and you need to decide where to draw the line for yourself.

• Remove yourself from online discussions when it’s healthy to do so. Assert your opinion, clarify your points if they need clarifying, and move on. Turn off notifications once you’re past that point. Winning arguments on the internet is not realistically a thing that happens, and notifications on your mobile device from an argument will needlessly pull you back into a place of anxiety. Considering how little those mobile notifications contribute to your positive frame of mind, it’s best to be rid of them completely if you ever find them having a negative impact on your day to day life.

Edit:

• Put yourself out there when you feel strongly that it is important to do so. Some causes are worth weathering the consequences, and you shouldn’t let a fear of consequences completely cripple you when you feel strongly enough about something. Will your friends have your back if you stick your foot into it? Then go for it.

It means you aren’t suited to run a public facing business. There’s nothing wrong with that, but speaking as someone with a lot of social anxiety baggage there are things I’m equipped to do well and things that I’m not. I shouldn’t let that stop me from opening a business if I really want to, but if I simply don’t want to deal with the social rejection elements I have to accept that I’m better off letting someone else run that side of a business.

As for the non-business elements of your question, all you can really do is conduct yourself in a way that you don’t believe you’ll find yourself regretting later. If you say something in a public place, especially online, consider it part of the public record. It can and will come back to bite you later. Assume your [morally positive family member here] is always watching.

A friend of mine does too.

I’m ready to form a supervillain league with the sole motivation of performing unethical research experiments on your kind. This power must be brought to the masses!

Ok but to balance it: it forces you to confront your own on the topic as well.

I was actually tempted to include that in the original, but I didn’t want to belabor it. :)

I’m fine with this, and would prefer it that way.

Ability to force anyone to objectively confront their own cognitive dissonance by maintaining eye contact.

Possibly too powerful. Some heads may spontaneously combust from a lifetime of preferring their own reality.

It is possible, but a major US election requires a massive burst of popularity to avoid splitting the vote of the majority candidate having “less shitty than the other guy” policy positions. Failure to breach that threshold hands the victory to the majority candidate with the shittiest position on policies.

The simple test is this: has your third-party candidate achieved a realistically high margin of popular opinion behind them? I’m not saying be a slave to polling, but it isn’t rocket science either. You will know if a third-party candidate has momentum behind them. They have charisma that sucks people in. They are somehow getting attention regularly driven to them despite the majority candidates pumping much more money into the news media.

If the third-party candidate doesn’t have something bordering on a revolutionary ideological movement backing them, they aren’t going to make that cut in a nationwide race.

Edit: I’m not saying give up. Donate to causes you honestly believe in. Volunteer. Do what you can to make a difference. Support local government efforts to implement ranked choice voting in your state, which can and will break this system. (look at Alaska) But when it comes to casting that final vote, be realistic, even if it means voting against all the hard work you just put in. Sunk cost fallacy at the expense of giving away victory doesn’t help anyone.

Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.

The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.

Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.

——

Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse

Would you and your BF enjoy shooting at alien scum while your characters scream DEMOCRACY!! and HAVE A NICE CUP OF LIBERTEA!! at the top of their lungs? Would you be entertained by accidentally killing each other in the heat of battle when you radio for an ammo drop?

Then Helldivers would be for you. Join the forces of Super Earth and spread Managed Democracy throughout the universe!

PROTIP: If you want to assert dominance in your relationship, find a gun with a bayonet attachment. You will mix up the melee and interact buttons on at least one occasion.