At least it’s a little harder everywhere else because most people haven’t devolved into a political system of only A and B. That shouldn’t make people elsewhere feel safer. It just means you have more time.

I used to think the EU was pretty solid but I’ve been seeing the ratcheting effect over there in recent years. With one or two bad actors completely stalling out protections. They better watch out.

There are a lot of reasons, most of them suck.

Short answer is he’s just the front man for a much larger demographic and he’s got a lot of financial systems held hostage because of almost 100 years of the US working to make the dollar the global currency. He’s everyone’s problem.

Much like a more moderate controlling power in Gaza.

deleted by creator

imo, If you didn’t start the conflict you aren’t required to do or say anything. Fuck the aggressors and anyone that defends them. It’s a pretty simple rule.

I was pretty young at the time, but the thing that I always think about is the movie Enemy of the State when I think about 9/11. Because before the attack, the general narrative was that we need to be worried about what power we give our government and how much they spy on their people and how far they are willing to go to maintain power. I think about Tomorrow Never Dies a lot too, where a media mogul tries to control world governments and people by controlling the news. I was maybe 7 or 8 when the later came out, but I always remember them in terms of 9/11 because after that attack, both movies started to become prescient. The internet was the only thing that kept me informed on what was really going on in the world. Now even that’s changing.

It wasn’t just 9/11. There’s nuance to what they do that gets lost in translation. The most 1-to-1 for me would be Pearl Harbor.

No one from the US planned the Pearl Harbor attack, but it is believed by some that Roosevelt made policy decisions that goaded Japan into attacking the US as a means of gaining support for entering WWII.

No one in the US administration planned 9/11. What is today framed as incompetence was clearly stonewalling from people in key places of power to allow an attack to manifest. It’s been years and I don’t remember everything I’ve ever heard that’s been debunked. I do remember the head of the CIA refusing to send intel to the FBI was a big sticking point. I think I remember there being a drill going on that day about hijacked planes that made communication confused. I still don’t get why building 7 went down, or why some claimed it was almost totally empty that day.

So too with Israel. HAMAS has been allowed to fester in Palestine by the top Israeli officials, going so far as to assassinate more moderate candidates and even smuggle in money to fund the organization. Israel has for a long time had what is considered one of the most sophisticated and robust information networks in the world. There is no way that at least grumbles of this attack were unknown.

I grew up through 9/11. I saw what patriotism does to people and what leaders use it for.

I watched so much scifi on Netflix back in the day. It was really an end of an era moment when they lost Star Trek and Stargate.

It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.

The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.

It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.

Do they still put the latest releases in a .exe file?

Lemmy isn’t perfect, but it is more honest than Reddit.

Lemmy’s problems stem mostly from tribalism, as different instance admins ban and censor anyone they don’t like. That makes the environment hostile to users who came here expecting to be able to speak their minds like they did in the old days of the internet.

The tribalism causes the niche communities of Reddit to generally steer clear of Lemmy because, even if you have the technical knowledge to get here, you may find that your fandom or interest is fractured between six or more instances, with three of them being defederated from the other three or being moderated with such heavy bias that the community is almost unusable. You can be shadow banned, silenced, or just plain banned from an instance at the whims of a bad admin, which is really disheartening. Reddit is a mess, but it’s all in one place still. With Lemmy, you honestly need multiple accounts on different instances, or else you have to choose between your favorite crochet communities or your favorite tech communities. Say one wrong thing, and suddenly you are robbed of interaction.

I love Lemmy. It reminds me of the Reddit of old. It’s also broken and sick. I had to be in five different Star Trek communities because my instance got targeted by vindictive admins. I have to have multiple accounts because some fandoms are locked into highly toxic communities. Some of the best queer memes I’ve laughed at were in a community that is outright pro-Russia and pro-fascism.

Reddit felt like a grand bazaar for a long time. You could find a community for everything, and it would be active. While there was drama, it usually boiled down to you having a new sub added to your list to interact with. Lemmy is more like the high school cafeteria. Everyone is cliquish, and even if you have something to add to the discussion about Stargate or TTRPGs, if you voiced the wrong opinion in a completely different space, then you can find yourself a digital pariah.

At least with old Reddit, the Reddit of 2010, that didn’t happen. We were still a community trying to run things the way Aaron Swartz envisioned. Even if you said something that upset people, the upvote system often allowed that comment to be judged by the community and not one person with an agenda. That’s what I miss. Being able to say something or share something and have the community decide its worth rather than a minority voice deciding what people should see and think. It happens on Reddit, and it happens here on Lemmy, just for different reasons.

I was going to mention this. If for no other reason than to make up for the fact that I was too lazy to switch and it eventually lead to me getting the boot from the private torrent community I was in. I’ll be switching to AirVPN and doing it right again soon.