My groups usually think of them as a powerful fey creature who sometimes just whisks people away for an indeterminate amount of time, only to bring them back later.

A lot of cops are so high strung that you essentially have to pretend you're having the time of your life while interacting with them - any nervousness or annoyance is taken to mean that you're potentially a violent criminal who could kill them at any moment.

Just the realization that a woman holding a pot of hot water could hypothetically use it as a weapon, however unlikely it was in this scenario, was enough to make him instinctively shoot with only minor notice that still did nothing to prevent him from killing her even as she began cowering and apologizing.

This is the culture we've allowed the police to build in this country; the job is dangerous, and they're only human, so they believe they should be forgiven for being scared regardless of the situation, and should be forgiven for taking drastic measures while they're scared.

Yeah, people are acting like this is up to chance - rich people throw money at their problems, and so long as someone is willing to spend their time catching it instead of doing their job, it works. It's going to work. The 5 year sentence is for poor people they want to get rid of, not for rich people they want to profit from.

Most people know 2 things about Bill Gates - he's rich, and he donates a lot of money. They don't think about it any more than that, and they certainly aren't going to research anything about it, so they consider him "one of the good ones"

I lived in Minneapolis during the protests, and someone did light up a gas station just a block from my house, but I wasn't concerned - I'd already prepared to lose everything when I joined the protests. Fighting back against the government is going to take sacrifices, both from willing and unwilling participants; if we're too afraid of stepping on people's toes, then those in power will just use that angle to quash any up-and-coming resistances.

If protests are something people can just ignore until they're over, then that's what they'll do - they need to be polarizing in order to actually get people to make a change. The enemy of positive change isn't always negative change - it's often an apathetic population who would rather not put forth the effort to make any change at all. If people are pressured to take a side by a sufficiently disruptive protest, they'll usually join their fellow downtrodden, but you need to force them to make that decision.

The corporate news media doesn't exist to put the good of the country and public service first, it exists to make money, and it's making a lot of money; they're not about to fix what isn't broken just because the country - and the world as a whole - is falling apart.

The very belief that the decisions of the powerful few are a reflection of the opinions of the people as a whole is how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place...

Well, Bleem went down under the weight of Sony's lawsuits, just like Yuzu did with Nintendo's. Sony didn't even win any of their lawsuites against Bleem in the end, but constant legal trouble is usually too much for small startups to handle. The US's legal system essentially allows any company to duel any other, with legal funds as the weapon of choice, and the bigger weapon wins every time. Legality doesn't matter unless both companies can truly afford to fight the battle to the end, and emulators will likely never have that power. So all we can do as consumers looking for options is to try not to talk about the little guys so much that one of the big guys feels it's necessary to bury them to death with lawsuits.

My mom fell hard into Qanon in 2019, and it was crazy how she just flat-out stopped having any opinions of her own. We were never close, but we were at least able to have the occasional conversation before that, but now any attempt to talk to her immediately turns into her reciting something she saw on youtube. I can't remember the last time she said anything to anyone that didn't start with "So my videos said..."

This is the thing people don't seem to understand. It's not that we're failing to slow down fast enough to avoid the point of no return, it's that we're continuing to speed up on our way to the point of no return.

I'm hoping for Switch Advance. I'd love a throwback logo and that old "Bling!" startup sound.

Welp, this is the thing that got me to get rid of my lemmy.world account and move to lemm.ee. There were other issues I was able to overlook, but I need a community willing to stand up to laws that go against the interests of the people.