Lemmy is one of the most intense echo chambers out there. It’s very funny that a self-professed anti-hierarchical, decentralized message board site like this falls in line so neatly behind whatever candidates the corporate media tells them to and then browbeats anyone who dares to consider alternatives. Americans’ refusal to vote third party plays a big role in why the two major parties are so completely unresponsive to the public’s interests and desires. They won’t win, of course, thanks to FPTP, but voting for them pressures the two parties to change their platform to win over their voters.

This is precisely why the corporate media is so invested in vilifying third party voters. Every election from now until the end of recorded history will be “the most important election ever” (or “the last election ever,” as they’ve been painting it recently) and anyone who refuses to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils candidate is a willful apostate who’s worse than a Trump voter. And the masses buy into it, and then it’s naked tribalism and hysteria from there.

Fair points. Yeah, I hope it was clear that that last bit wasn’t addressed to you, but rather the person reporting me. I appreciate your actually being civil and responding to the points I’m making. I wish that was more the norm.

Yes, you’re absolutely right that the right wing does this, too, and it’s just as foolish. The antiwoke culture war has been a massive failure for the American GOP and very likely cost them seats in the midterms. It absolutely affects elections. Trying to police speech is a bad idea in general, regardless of ideology. Threats, defamation, and harrassment are already illegal. New laws like these do not meaningfully protect anyone from those, but they do erode protections for free speech and also piss off vast swathes of the general population, who will usually manifest some political backlash against the party that implemented them. I’m a leftist and I’d prefer not to have Brazil slide back into Bolsanarismo before actually meaningful reforms can be implemented.

As an aside, Lemmy is becoming even worse than Reddit for people being totally unwilling to entertain alternate analyses of politics. Protip: just because someone isn’t parroting the same virtue-signaling talking points over and over again, it doesn’t make them a Nazi. My account was apparently reported over this conversation, so to whomever did that, good job trying to run me off rather than engage with my arguments, I guess. Enjoy your circle jerk.

Yes, clearly believing that hearing certain words and phrases is so injurious to human wellbeing that their use needs to be criminalized is the position of the utmost resilience and bravery. How silly of me. These sorts of wokescold laws contribute effectively nothing to the material wellbeing of any kind of marginalized group, and if you honestly believe that there won’t be political blowback from this, I think you’re out of touch with the general public. Even if the law itself is toothless and cannot be applied maliciously by the other side, the right wing media is going to make hay out of it, riling up millions of blue collar, conservative voters against the perceived excesses of Lula’s administration. It blows a lot of a new and somewhat fragile administration’s political capital for effectively no material benefit.

Nice to see the pendulum swing to an opposite extreme from Bolsanaro… Creating laws to make certain kinds of speech punishable by law certainly won’t blow up in the progressive camp’s face once another right-wing demagogue is elected, no sir.

Shhhh, this is the internet and only tribalistic partisan analyses are allowed. Why don’t you shut up and move to a brutally fascist country like checks notepad Norway, Finland, or Sweden, you bigot?

Hey, the corporations have spent tens of billions of dollars over decades to make damned sure the American public focuses exclusively on the most obscure and irrelevant issues. It’s very invalidating to all that effort to point out that issues that affect less than 0.5% of the population are very obvious wedges to ensure that the blue-hair city libs and good ol’ boy hicks are unable to ever come together to advocate for their shared material self interest.

Yeah, I’ve no doubt that Höcke is pursuing this for extremely cynical and gross reasons, but the broken clock is right twice a day. “Inclusion" is one of those policies that sounds so self-evidently positive and reasonable at a glance, that people’s brains shut down and nobody thinks of potential downsides to it as a universal policy. A majority of kids who require special education fare much, much better in smaller classes taught by a special education teacher who can move through material more slowly and boil it down to easier-to-grasp concepts. Sticking them in a large classroom with 20-30 non-disabled peers, even with a SpEd teacher present, rarely has a positive effect, and more often than not leads to worse outcomes for all students present. Inclusion is at its core a cost-saving measure (it’s cheaper to stick the SpEd kids in a GenEd classroom than making a dedicated class for them), but it wraps itself in progressive ideology so well that it’s almost impossible for parents or teachers to argue against.

It’s fine. Websites break on it less often than I would have expected and the “nuke your cookies and history" button is a fun feature. I’ve mostly moved to Firefox, though, just to get away from Chromium (although I realize the irony in that; my fingerprint is almost assuredly far more unique than if I stuck to Chromium).

The Demi Lovato talk was hilarious to watch. She’s an utterly charmless narcissist and literally asked a guest the question, “How bad would you have felt if I really had killed myself?”. It’s incredible no executive pulled the plug on it at any point during its production.