queermunist she/her

Elon Musk is the one running things.

I’m trans. How long until they decide my ID is fake and that means I’m here illegally and come to disappear me too?

Well when the choice is dying in a firefight with the gICEtapo or being tortured to death in an El Salvadoran prison…

I’m open to the possibility that Chinese law enforcement has some kind of racial/ethnic bias against a minority group or that the anti-extremism campaign has had excesses, but comparing that to the systematic campaign of starvation and slaughter being carried out by Israel is absurd. I say “whatever you think China is doing” because you seem to think you can compare it to the modern Holocaust happening right now. Is China butchering people by the thousands? Are they starving a million children to death?

Comparing what Israel is doing with whatever you think China is doing makes it clear which one is worse.

If ICE agents showed up to arrest you and refused to present a warrant would you be legally justified in shooting them?

Look on the bright side: when the economy crashes you’ll be able to sell your car for more!

Socks? Check. Skirt? Check. Vape pen? Check.

It’s study time.

Impossible. A dog would immediately eat the ham. QED

They’re nasty pieces of shit when they don’t have to look at the person they’re hurting or putting in danger, but that only supports my theory. There’s an empathy disconnect that’s created when there isn’t a human face or voice immediately in front of them. Once they aren’t in danger of an in-person interaction all the venom comes out. Online, that’s basically all of our interactions.

I should point out the phenomenon where a minority in a community will magically become “one of the good ones” so that the bigots can continue hating minorities while empathizing with their neighbor. This is also becoming less common as we grow more isolated from each other and everyone moves online, destroying the potential for that face-to-face interaction.

But people are polite to your face. On the internet there’s no face, so that goes away.

I think part of that comes from empathy, though obviously part also comes from fear of confrontation and habit. It all adds up to offline interactions being far less hostile than on the Internet because they’re not face-to-face.

This is also known as Internet Fuckwad Theory.

Chatrooms might be different. In a chatroom you get to know different users, even if you never know them as anything other than BigBallz420

On message boards or comments sections, though, there’s too many people to keep track of. You might never hear from me again. That makes it a lot harder, I think.

But yeah, mileage may vary.

Also this isn’t really a super fleshed out theory based on actual evidence. Just vibes.

I think you can overcome the empathy gap caused by the anonymous text format if you make the effort to empathize with people on the internet, but it requires you to want to make the effort in the first place.

Empathy offline or over video or on the phone is much more instinctual - in fact, it requires effort to resist empathy.

Why are people so vindictive and personal, and why do they double down so enthusiastically about taking it to this personal place where this person involved is being bad on purpose and needs to be attacked for being horrible, instead of just being a normal person with a variety of normal human failings as we all have?

I have a pet theory about this!

Humans can’t easily empathize with strings of text the way they do with voices and faces. When you read my posts you read it in your voice; I might as well be a figment of your imagination. As far as your subconscious is concerned, I am not actually a person. I’m an imaginary friend at best and an imaginary enemy at worst.

When someone beats up on me it’s because they’re imagining me as an enemy NPC, not a person with thoughts and feelings.

This is why arguing on the internet is basically pointless. We’re all just random encounters in the posting RPG.

Imagine playing Dwarf Fortress in a recliner with a pair of these.

To pretend Trump is changing the game, you need to ignore how its historically been played.

Right, he’s just reviving older parts of the playbook. Very few of the things he’s done are actually new, they’re just things the US isn’t used to anymore or things that haven’t been done on a massive scale.

But it wasn’t voting that made those older practices fall out of favor, it was more direct actions: labor militancy, mass protests, and radical organizing. What your examples demonstrate is that Trump is defeatable even if he revives every authoritarian trick in the US playbook, but none of that proves voting specifically still matters.

I’ll be watching the 2026 elections to see if we can still vote our way out of this, or if we simply need to do something else.

Okay but this demonstrates why defaulting to federation is a bad idea, doesn’t it?

The “voting no longer matters” crowd is going to assert that these will be landslides for heavy MAGA conservatives, I’m presuming?

Or votes being thrown out due to “fraud” or the election being cancelled or certain voters being rounded up by cops so they can’t cast ballots or any other number of ways elections can be meddled with.

And don’t be too triumphalist just because the election goes off without any problems and Democrats win, this isn’t really The Big One. The House and Senate races in 2026 will tell us what the future of elections will be.

Wait, are new instances federated by default?

I thought admins had to choose who they were federated with.

TBF I think they’re saying liberals are only mad because Trump’s genocide is incompetent. Like, liberals aren’t mad about the actual content of the messages, they’re mad that Trump broke the law.