Teddy Roosevelt never said “The only good indian is a dead indian.” That quote is typically associated with Philip Sheridan.

A number of sources claim a similar quote (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are…") alleged to be from an 1886 speech in New York, but this still goes against how he treated native americans generally and I can’t find the original speech so I’m a bit suspicious of this as well.

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Anyone who failed to beat Trump has to go away. No exceptions.

That’s not so much a murder stab as a flesh stab. To spell that out, it can be a metaphor for:

• “If you’re a trans woman you must use the mens room, or if you’re a trans man you must use the women’s room”
• “My trans child is dead to me”
• “We’re going to remove trans soldiers from the military”
• “We’re going to spend your taxpayer dollars to actively remove anything in government that recognizes the existence of trans people”
• “We’re going to spread hate against you to win elections”

He boycotted Bud Light because they did a promotional campaign that included a trans influencer on instagram. The stock fell 20% and basically made LGBTQ-related promotions a no-go for corporate America since.

That’s not true, companies are plenty worried about this sort of thing. Look at how Bud light panicked over the kid rock boycott. If he can do it, anyone can.

Ok. Make it a consistent thing then. Starting today.

I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion. Even if skipping corporate stuff for a day is only a mild inconvenience, that is still obviously not convenient. Second, there’s no reason to suspect convenience should strongly impact effectiveness. How much did it inconvenience anyone to boycott South Africa in the 80s?

Maximizing effectiveness for unit of effort is smart. And when a tiny change in share price can make a big difference in CEO compensation, we’d be complete masochists not to use that in our favor. But also even if you’re into maximizing pain, if we wanna talk about permanently going after these corporations then it’s gotta start somewhere. And it’s best to start with getting people to do what’s easy.

One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren’t being harsher on criminals. Society’s views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.

I think what we’re seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there’s basically a cultural luddite movement.

People are seriously acting like Bin Laden was bait and switched by the US. I somehow remember it differently…

And your evidence for the US installing this government is what exactly?

Let me say this as a westerner - if someone all of a sudden tried to put me in a Putinist puppet state, shit would burn. To the ground.

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We did something already. It didn’t work.

Because some people don’t know how to copy and paste text, and other people don’t discourage these posts by downvoting them.

In red districts, primary the Republicans for twice the effectiveness. Let’s be real the GOP is where the power is anyway. Kick the corporations out of the GOP and make them deal with being represented by weak democrats for a change.

There’s a lot of different people who vote for Trump.

In blue states, to like Trump you probably need to be drinking the kool aid to some degree. But in red states, there’s a lot of low-info voters who are just voting how their friends and relatives votes. Until it affects them.

It’s funny that the evidence of Trump being a Russian asset is always some rumored connection with a KGB person, not the fact that he extremely reliably and consistently acts exactly like a Russian asset.

Well Trump can say whatever he wants, whether he actually can do what he says is another matter. In this case for example, congestion pricing has simply continued as before because Trump doesn’t have power to change the laws of New York. When it comes to killing people, government employees are subject to the same rules as everyone else about unlawful killing, even if they were ordered by the president. Of course Trump can pardon his assassins for federal crimes, but states can still prosecute them and if nothing else the victims can still use deadly force to defend themselves without being guilty of a crime.

So legally speaking, Trump isn’t so much a king as just some fat, old, possibly mentally-challenged man who can’t be punished for things.

But in the technical sense, we’re all kings and can do whatever we want. We’ve just agreed as a society that if people do certain things we all unite to help put them in a cage or whatever.

Trumpism has significant control over large parts of the media from which millions of Americans get their information. Fox and Musk’s platform X, among others, are not normal media outlets. Their basic function is not to cover the “news” but to spread rightwing extremist ideology.

Trumpism is utilizing the concept of the “big lie” in a way that has never, in this country, been seen. Day after day, blatantly dishonest statements and conspiracy theories are propagated – and repeated over and over and over again.

What is the solution to this? Because from where I sit, it looks like the strategy of plutocrats buying media and using it to push dishonest narratives in their favor is extremely successful and does indeed make what Bernie’s asking for unachievable. And I don’t see anywhere in the article a way to solve that problem.

I don’t doubt the left can win on Lemmy. But the second Lemmy gets any actual power, watch out for the buyout.

Getting sick of all this observational humor.