I see it the same way I see the lead-up to the holocaust: an effort to scapegoat a minority group and divert the outrage of a downwardly mobile middle class away from wealthy capitalists

From the article:

Most people aren’t aware of Project 2025, or its playbook, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—but you need to be. In stark terms, Project 2025 reveals the conservatives’ plan to enact a sweeping “Don’t Say Gay” policy that will effectively blot out all LGBTQ content on the internet as well as any published material with LGBTQ content, no matter how benign.

Project 2025 is a coalition of prominent conservative organizations that includes the Claremont Institute, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Hillsdale College, Heritage Foundation, Freedom Works, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Principles Project, and dozens of others. The organization’s goal is to lay out a “first 180 days” agenda for the next administration, and to recruit conservatives to fill positions within the federal government appointed by the executive branch.

The Heritage Foundation alone is a massive, well-connected think tank with an annual budget of $38 million. Mike Pence joined in 2021. They were instrumental in staffing the Trump administration and directing his policies, with at least 66 Heritage Foundation employees and alumni given positions in the administration.

This is not a fringe effort.

I know I'm dreaming here, but central internet services like google search and youtube should be utilities controlled by the public.

The video pool that Youtube draws from, generated by the public, should be public property, hosted on public servers, internationalized somehow, with an opensource market of frontend interfaces and algorithms to deliver that content to people, instead of one youtube algorithm and one interface designed to meet the profit incentives of google. People should be free to use the algorithm and interface they find most useful.

not only is the shorts UI shitty but the shorts themselves are often shitty imo, or at least the "scroll through shorts one at a time" linear format means you see a lot more videos you wouldn't click on intentionally.

Another quote from the article, emphasis mine:

Most people aren’t aware of Project 2025, or its playbook, “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”—but you need to be. In stark terms, Project 2025 reveals the conservatives’ plan to enact a sweeping “Don’t Say Gay” policy that will effectively blot out all LGBTQ content on the internet as well as any published material with LGBTQ content, no matter how benign.

Project 2025 is a coalition of prominent conservative organizations that includes the Claremont Institute, Alliance Defending Freedom, Family Research Council, Hillsdale College, Heritage Foundation, Freedom Works, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Principles Project, and dozens of others. The organization’s goal is to lay out a “first 180 days” agenda for the next administration, and to recruit conservatives to fill positions within the federal government appointed by the executive branch.

The Heritage Foundation alone is a massive, well-connected think tank with an annual budget of $38 million. Mike Pence joined in 2021. They were instrumental in staffing the Trump administration and directing his policies, with at least 66 Heritage Foundation employees and alumni given positions in the administration.

what democracy?

https://www.cambridge.org/...

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

[...]

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

something like 70% of Americans want universal healthcare and yet it remains politically impossible.

"We'll give you this money if you cut all your social safety nets, depress wages, and hand your resources over to foreign companies."

"Fuck, who could have predicted that our stipulations would stunt your economy and impoverish your workers? Welp... guess you'll have to stay poor and keep offering cheap sweatshop labor so we can sell the products at 10x the price overseas. Oh woe is us! Next time, we'd better do the exact same thing over again, proving that we learned from our innocent mistake!"

I'm heading out to meet friends. Don't take my silence for defeat lol. Hopefully someone picks this up where I leave off.

God-tier title

transphobia and an adult abusing his position of power to hurt a kid, two berserk buttons in one headline

“If Nixon wins again, we’re in real trouble.” He picked up his drink, then saw it was empty and put it down again. “That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon. It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”

I nodded. The argument was familiar. I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it. How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking, double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?

. . .

Now, with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer. I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing, this year, is Beating Nixon. But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960—and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same.

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail

1. The Heritage Foundation was one dozens of right wing think tanks involved in writing this.
2. The Heritage Foundation is extremely influential and well-connected in the American right wing political sphere. They wrote hundreds of Trump's policies, picked a lot of his cabinet, and had 66 staffers in his administration. Pence joined in 2021.

The obvious context of this meme is articles that express the "consensus opinion of the international community" on some foreign issue. Like "international community condemns antisemetic criticism of Israel." Or "international community condemns Niger coup, calls for original government to be reinstated so France can keep buying cheap Uranium from the second poorest country on the planet."

Suddenly switching to papyrus font at the bottom lol

Everyone on hexbear and lemmygrad is already a communist, so they don't spend a lot of time trying to convince each other that communism is good and capitalism is bad, although they do post specific examples. It's mostly current events, venting, and shitposting. A lot of the serious discussion is either in the weekly news megathread or buried in the comments under some shitpost begging xi jinping to nuke the white house.

A visibly armed LGBTQ community is a good way to counter right wing intimidation.

Also, cops aren't the only people to worry about. RIP Laura Carleton.

Crazy idea, let's also embargo the shit out of one of them.

The US doesn't enjoy a true representative democracy at all

Pretty much. A 2014 study put it like this

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

and later, more bluntly,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

Something like 70% of Americans want singlepayer healthcare, 75% want Citizen's United repealed, and iirc 90% of Americans want universal background checks for firearm purchases.

I vote but it really feels like a pitiful stalling measure against the one-way ratchet of American politics.

We didn't vote the Civil Rights Act into existence. We got it only because the Civil Rights Movement — and massive, widespread urban violence — pushed the government to act. We got LGBTQ rights, tenuous as they are, because LGBTQ people fought and died for them. Labor rights, same thing, militant labor organizers fought and died for all the precarious protections we enjoy today, protections that are rolled back and eroded year after year, decade after decade, as the blue and red wheel turns.

We'll never halt climate change by voting, we'll never bring down housing costs by voting, we'll never raise wages by voting, we'll never gain universal healthcare (which 70% of Americans support) by voting, and we'll never secure LGBTQ rights or abortion rights by voting. The parties and the think tanks and the media and the politicians themselves will never let it happen. Both parties benefit from keeping those and other rights precarious. When our basic rights are at stake, we have no leverage to demand progress.

I vote, but I have no illusions about it.

hexbear had an entire thread with hundreds of comments where they all agreed they hated trump and viewed him as an odious fascist

https://lemmy.ml/...

The closest thing you find to support for trump in there is some of them thinking he is a less effective imperialist.

you're "not even remotely worried" about the fact that one of the two parties that rules the country just wrote a 920-page plan to "eradicate LGBTQ people from public life"? Whether or not they manage to actually do it — and I don't find it as far-fetched as you do — they want to do it. They wrote a serious plan to do it. Maybe it won't be you getting criminalized, but it will be someone. Florida already passed a bill allowed the state to seize trans children from their parents. You're not even remotely worried?