As intended. The wealthy few don’t buy Supreme Court justices for no reason.

The decisions aren’t just about undermining climate policies - they’re more broadly about eliminating any impediments to the wealthy and empowered few raping and pillaging to their hearts’ content, entirely free of any threat of consequences. But that’s ncessarily largely about climate, since that’s one of the most notable areas in which the wealthy few are causing significant direct and measurable harm and thus are most eager to avoid the consequences they so richly deserve.

Should they be? Yes.

Will they be? No.

It really doesn’t matter what should happen, because the simple fact of the matter is that the fossil fuel companies own enough corrupt politicians to successfully avoid the wholly deserved consequences for their overtly malicious acts.

Of course it does.

The broad point of Project 2025 is to eliminate anything and everything that provides any measurable benefit to the common people and/or in any way impedes the wealthy and the corporations doing absolutely whatever they want to do, no matter how much harm it might cause to people. That’s the exact reason that so much of it focuses on eliminating or at least neutering government agencies - the goal is to make it so that corporations and the wealthy few face no constraints and no consequences - so that they have free rein to rob and pillage and rape and destroy.

And it’s not only the playbook Trimp will follow, but the reason that billionaires like Musk and Thiel are backing Trump. They aren’t really backing Trump per se - they’re backing Project 2025.

Mmm…no

It’s “some random guy with a working moral framework, the ability to feel empathy, and some measure of respect for the rights of other humans and simple human decency calling a bunch of murderous xenophobic psychopaths murderous xenophobic psychopaths.” So it’s in fact nothing like that.

No - probably not.

Religion, just in and of itself, isn’t really the problem. It’s just the most notable example of the underlying problem, which is probably best summed up as aggressive tribalism.

People have a compulsive desire for self-affirmation - for assurance that they embody whatever qualities they consider the indicators of “good” people. And by far the easiest way for people to assure themselves of that is to associate those qualities with a label and self-apply that label. That gives them a fellowship of label-wearers who are invested in the same belief, which establishes a feedback loop in which they all assure each other of how [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] they are, and a ready-made set of outsiders they can individually and collectively condemn. And that last is the real problem - since few if any people truly embody the qualities they wish to believe they do, the easiest and most effective way to assure themselves they do is to focus on some designated set of others and on the assertion that they fail to possess those qualities. That allows people to assure themselves that they are at least more [good/right/strong/smart/etc.] than these other people over there.

That’s clearly a toxic and antagonistic dynamic that really just serves to divide people up into warring factions, and since it’s at least somewhat irrational yet crucial to people’s self-affirming self-images, it’s a thing that easily gets entrenched and, whenever possible, codified, so that it can be forcibly imposed.

Again, religion is certainly the most common and historically destructive vehicle for that, but it’s far from the only one. Most notably, it’s also the dynamic underlying virtually all ideology and a great deal of philosophy, not to mention a great many less significant distinctions, ranging from sexual preference to diet to sports fandom.

Now - in the first place, I would say that it would not have been possible to have a world without religion, since the practical purpose of religion is to provide answers to questions for which there’s insufficient evidence or knowledge to support nominally legitimate answers, and that lack of evidence and knowledge was an unavoidable part of our history. From the moment that somebody wondered what that big bright thing up in the sky was and somebody else made up an answer for them, religion was inevitable.

Beyond that though - if we were to imagine a world in which religion somehow never came to be, we’d just have had a world in which people would’ve focused that much more on the other ways in which they divide themselves against themselves, since that desire for self-affirmation exists anyway.

And truth be told, I actually think that’s part of the problem with our current world - that a great many people have just shifted from what would in the past been a self-affirming faith in a religion to a self-affirming faith in an ideology or philosophy or political affiliation or some other tribal distinction - that much of what we’re seeing today is the same toxicity just based on more secular divisions.

Not that religion has become less of a problem - what it’s lost in overall market share, it’s undeniably gained in the fervor and aggression of its remaining adherents, but it’s also been joined by a wide range of other divisions, each destructive in the same general ways, even if not necessarily to the same degree.

No - it’s actually not like that at all.

Google didn’t pay that money just to bypass the formalities along the way to paying a fixed fine - they paid it in order to head off the possibility that they were going to face a jury trial instead of a bench trial, since juries are far more likely to vote in favor of much bigger fines than judges are.

Mm… no. It’s really not.

The specific point of all of this was that Google wanted to avoid a jury trial, and the specific reason that they wanted to avoid a jury trial is because a jury trial is much more likely to end up with a much bigger judgment against them. A judge in a bench trial will follow established precedent to arrive at a reasonable penalty, while a jury can and often will essentially arbitrarily decide that they should be fined eleventy bajillion dollars for being assholes.

So their goal with this payment was pretty much exactly the same as the goal of the motorist who slips a traffic cop a bribe to get out of a ticket - to entice someone with immediate cash in order to avoid potentially having to pay much more somewhere down the line.

So basically the corporate equivalent of slipping a traffic cop a $100, then him conveniently deciding that you’re free to go.

Best of luck to them.

It’s true in essentially all industries, but it’s especially obvious in rideshare that there’s a layer of parasites who get paid far too much money for nothing beyond the fact that they won the fight for the position of “parasite who gets paid far too much money for doing nothing.”

Anything that might even just decrease the number of overpaid parasites would be a benefit not just to the concerned industry, but to society as a whole.

A white cat to go with the blue horses…

I’d never seen this before - thanks.

I never really liked Reddit. I avoided it for a long time, but finally relented and grudgingly signed up in 2011.

I was always on the lookout for a new home, and would follow links to any place that looked promising, but none of them ever panned out - they were always too dead or too narrowly focused or too shitty or behind a paywall or something. And I’d go back to Reddit.

Immediately after Spez’s petulant AMA, I happened on a link to join-lemmy.org. I was especially eager to find a different forum then, just because Reddit was set to get much worse much more quickly and the CEO is a twat, but I really didn’t expect anything of lemmy. I assumed that, just as with all the others over the years, I’d browse around a bit, be unimpressed, and leave.

Instead, I looked around and liked what I saw. And the more I looked, the more I liked it. And I just never went back, and have been here ever since.

I don’t think we can gatekeep it either.

But we can, or not, encourage it. I’d rather not. I’ve never - not even once in more than 30 years online - seen a forum get notably popular without it also, and obviously as a direct result, going to shit.

The great thing about the fediverse is that people have control over which instances they are around, and there will always be some more isolated ones if that’s what you prefer.

If the masses discover the fediverse and move here, that’s not going to remain the case, guaranteed.

They’ll bitch and moan because content isn’t centralized (we’ve already seen that), and the rent-seeking fuckwads will, one way or another, rearrange things so that it is centralized, and specifically so that they can then squat on top of it and suck profit out of it, and it’ll end up just another facebook/twitter/instagram/reddit.

Count on it.

Why on Earth would we want to do that?

The last thing in the world the fediverse needs is a bunch of idiots blundering around in it.

Everybody else doing it.

Right-wing political elites strongly believe in personal freedom and states’ rights. Right-wing regular folks believe strong in personal freedom.

Curiously, this is demonstrably false.

At this point virtually every time one sees somebody call on the government to step in and interfere in something, it’s a right-winger.

As with so many things, they actually are exactly what they claim to oppose - fragile babies who constantly cry for mommy and daddy government to protect them

Bluntly?

This is the dumbest variation I’ve ever seen on the already dumb idea of trying to compensate for a perceived lack of content on Lemmy by just cribbing stiff from Reddit.

It doesn’t matter if it’s Reddit, Lemmy or anywhere else - if the username checks out, then the username checks out, and that’s an amusing tidbit worth mentioning.

And this is definitely a case in which the username checks out.

And I stand by everything I said there.

And I also believe that the threadiverse will continue to grow overall.

And I don’t believe that those two things are in any way contradictory.

And like virtually every one of the similar complaints, this comes from someone who isn’t otherwise active, so basically boils down to “I’ve noticed that other people aren’t providing me with enough content. What can we do to get other people to provide me with more content?”

If you want to get more activity in niche communities, POST! And not just once - do it again and again, day in and day out.

The communities that you appreciate didn’t just spring into being - they grew, over time, because people did exactly that.

SOS Pads and Scotch Tape