Ok, first, LMAO that this is real.

Second, the entire political media apparatus in the US has completely lost grasp with reality. Conservative media has predictably reacted to this with faux outrage, but the fucking liberal response to the conservative response is hilariously combative:

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson, whom the Department of Justice recently alleged was unwittingly paid by Russian state media to produce Kremlin sympathetic content, reposted an image of Biden biting the baby in the turkey costume.

"Apparently Joe Biden is biting babies at The White House this evening," he wrote. His post had been viewed 740,000 times by Thursday morning.

Lol, like - sure - all objectively true. But throwing out 'he's a paid russian agent' accusations against a tweet that's pointing to something Biden actually did is batshit crazy lol. Is the implication that russia is paying Johnson to fabricate a story about Biden biting babies?

The US political media has become a parody of itself and all I can do is laugh at it.

The US has a growing fascism problem

It does not go away with Trump. I wish democrats would address it instead of pointing at Trump like he's an aberration

It just occurred to me that convincing someone of leaving a social media site is a lot like convincing someone to leave a big city.

They have friends there and have grown accustomed to the vibrant and diverse activities, but realistically nothing they do or have there can't be replicated in a smaller town, a smaller media site.

They're liable to put up with a lot of shit to stay with their community, but eventually people get pushed out and find greener pastures and a quiet space for themselves elsewhere. At least, that's what I attribute to what I perceive to be a higher average age on the fediverse.

I'm too old to find the constant stimulation and activity attractive anymore, and I much prefer the freedom to move around and be choosy about my media choices.

For those in here that take offense to this distinction:

2 party political systems function to collapse diverse political perspectives into one of two camps and normalize an 'average' view for both parties. Leftists take issue with this collapse because it erases dissenting views within each party in service of defeating an 'other' at the expense of pursuing our real political goals.

The label matters to those of us who want to make the point that the US democratic party does not really represent our interests; at-best they represent a less-objectionable flavor of the same ideological framework, but one that needs to be dismantled all the same.

"Stop trying to divide us!" is a refrain spoken by those who are better served by the party than we are.

Put another way: "We are not the same"

I will always point to mlk as a response to this question:

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Words cannot express how much I hate phone apps being normalized for every goddamn thing.

I'll personally donate $100 to the DNC (i'm poor leave me alone) if Hilary goes to every campaign stop chanting 'lock him up'

Fair point, Margot Robbie

I happen to really like District 9 for this reason

There's no malicious plot of aliens blowing up shit or invading to colonize: nope, aliens literally just crash-landed on accident and humanity was like "stay the fuck right there, we'll take all your shit until we figure out how to ~~deal with~~ exploit you"

Humanity is always its own worst-enemy

There's a lot of "AI is theft" comments in this thread, and I'd just like to take a moment to bring up the Luddite movement at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution: the point isn't that 'machines are theft', or 'machines are just a fad', or even 'machines are bad' - the point was that machines were the new and highly efficient way capital owners were undermining the security and material conditions of the working class.

Let's not confuse problems that are created by capitalistic systems for problems created by new technologies - and maybe we can learn something about radical political action from the Luddites.

A point of caution:

A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta's interest in joining the fediverse.

For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.