Tiresia
Hope and positivity are two different things. Hope dissociates from the present and the future, externalizing your care into an imagined future you can not affect. Empirically, people with hope fare worse psychologically than those without hope, because those with hope have no coping mechanisms when their hopes get dashed.
What we need is not positive news, but a positive life. Sit in a meadow, share meals with friends, be kind and generous, work at things that mean something to you, make art with passion, and rage during political protests.
When so much of the world’s news and media are pushing a narrative of unending consumerism and growth, it is good to keep reminding ourselves with factual news that this world will collapse sooner rather than later.
If it helps, all life ends in misery, be it decreptitude, disease, ecosystems collapse, or all of the above. Life has never been about how it ends, it is about what we do while delaying the end. Everything we do for the future, we do for the future that will actually be, not for the future that gives us comfort to imagine.
Which revolutions were inaccessible to the poor?
And honestly, yeah, revolutions like the American one where a bunch of rich people used propaganda, money, and threats to secede so they and an oligarchic “democracy” of white male land owners could pay lower taxes and privatize public land weren’t as radical or revolutionary as subsequent propaganda made them out to be.
Administrative organizations with finite spatial scope make sense, though. It makes sense for each watershed to have its own water management committee, for cities and towns to have charters for political experimentation or even just cultural uniqueness, for different biomes to have different building codes and even different urban planning guidelines, etc.
You can make the borders fuzzy, or focus on more general rules so the border is implicit in law rather than explicit, but there should always be contour lines where one set of laws and agreements transitions to other neighboring ones.
So that’s a no? If Trump is people breaking from mainstream 2000s Republicanism, and Harris is mainstream 2000s Republicanism, then Trump and Harris must be different, right?
Anyway, more on the content: You seem to seriously underestimate how bad the USA can get. There are limits to how much you can brutalize people politely, so “brutalizing politely” also means brutalizing less.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not being transgender in public carries the death penalty (project 2025 says trans = pedo and pedo = death).
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether or not people with an ectopic pregnancy will bleed to death.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the library has books written by feminists and Marxists or not.
The difference between Harris and Trump is whether the internet lets you access lemmy and wikipedia or whether it only gives you access to a ChatGPT-generated world of lies engineered to drive people towards fascism.
Harris means oppression, Trump means a suicidally fascist doomspiral.
First off, no rules in a centralized system can survive corrupt admins/moderators. At best, the rules can make it difficult for the admins/mods to hide their malfeisance. If we don’t assume good faith from the admins, this discussion is pointless because we should just leave this instance.
Second, upvotes and downvotes already moderate discussion. The default comment sorting algorithm prioritizes upvoted comments and hides downvoted comments, and people do tend to treat downvoted comments negatively. Popularity already matters, it’s just a matter to what extent each thread gets you a fresh start.
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Right now, slrpnk account generation is gatekept by the mods. You have to pass a Turing test to be let in. This makes it difficult to amass a sufficient army of bots without mod assistance. It’s worth looking out for, but not expected by any means.
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Agreement and dislike are different things. Empirically, people can become more hardened in their opinions if they see crappy disagreement - that’s why organizations like FOX NEWS show a constant cavalcade of liberals and leftists being stupid. As long as people upvote well-formulated disagreement, this could actually improve discussion because it filters out the comments that would never have convinced anyone anyway. That’s a big “as long as”, so it’s worth seeing in practice whether or not it holds.
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Lemmy instances have admins and moderators with absolute unaccountable power over bannings. It has never been decentralized or pro-free speech in the ways santabot might have destroyed in a more fundamentally anarchic social media. If you want to make use of Lemmy’s decentralization, make your own instance and see who wants to let you crosspost. If you want more, make your own social media platform that is (more) fully decentralized.
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Yes. Bad actors gonna act bad. Stay away from places that give them authority.
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Not very well. You’re leaving it up to the whims of the voting public. It would be easier to write a bot that asks ChatGPT whether a user holds certain opinions and ban them if it says yes. Or deputize more (informal) mods to ban people based on their personal opinion.
It is natural that an object can be used for bad in more ways than it can be used for good. ‘Good’ is a fragile concept, while ‘bad’ is everything else. A kitchen knife can be used for bad more easily and in more different ways than it can be used for good. So can a brick or a water bottle. The question is whether its use here pumps towards good, both now and in the future.
I understand expecting this experiment to go poorly, but I think it’s excessive to say the experiment should not be run at all.
Excuse me, it’s called a flail.
(Also, while there are larp-safe flails, the ‘chain’ on those is short enough not to wrap around any limbs, because that can create hazards, so the one depicted here is unsafe)