If you want to insure yourself against capital flight go for a Land Value Tax. Let 'em shove a hectare of land in their luggage.

This here is a picture of Stephen Luntz (writer of this piece) for comparison.

Wouldn't catch me holding on to any animal with that look on its face.

What even am i?

We need a normie.world

It's called reddit and that's why I left. Fuck the normies. They'll import fascism.

That sounds unnecessarily combative so let me expand my argument.

There's a book called The Authoritarians by a man called Bob Altermyer. Altermyer is now retired but he was a professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. During his career he did a lot of research into authoritarians, both followers and leaders. In the book he describes for laypeople the experiments and the findings. If you want to do a deep dive into his statistical analysis you can because the whole thing is fully referenced but for people who just want an easy to read description that is also easy to understand then this is the book for you.

After reading the book redditors behaviour became a lot more easy to understand. I was less upset by what was going on but I stopped engaging because I now understood that reddit wasn't a site for me anymore. It was a site for people that enjoyed being normal and doing normal things. And that's ok, why shouldn't they be catered for?

I use reddit and lemmy exclusively on desktop or laptop. So when the app business came up I didn't regard it as my fight, however I thought that if I expected people to stand up for my interests if they are challenged I should show a bit of solidarity with them. So I didn't visit reddit at all for the days it was blacked out. I didn't like how spez reacted. I saw that people were crossing to the fediverse and I took a look for myself. I liked it. I posted. I wasn't attacked for having a non-normie viewpoint. I liked that a lot.

The thing about normies is they don't read scientific studies for fun, they don't like long winded explanations about why the world is the way it is. They think they can see something in the street and extrapolate an entire social policy from it and there are chancers that will tell them, 'You know what? You're right. We don't need experts telling you that you're wrong, what do they know?'

So your Jordan Petersons and your Nigel Farages and Alex whatever his nameis, these people and reddit's normie audience are made for each other. I'll even go as far as to say this extends to the people that think the Democrats or the Labour Party are going to fix their problems, Team Liberal aren't doing themselves any favours but my point is that if your goal is a massive website that caters to the largest part of the reddit audience you're going to end up swimming in cryptofascist and sometimes outright fascist content. Been there, seen that, got the t-shirt.

No one cares

You don't care that people are going bankrupt because they get cancer? You don't care your police are running wild and killing innocent civilians? You don't care that people are still defending slavery?

OK. I think I have explained myself in full and I don't get what extra chromosomes have to do with any of it. I'm done. Thank you for your time.

The reason he's judging you harshly is not because of what you're doing, it's because all that time is wasted not pandering to their every whim.

I don't believe in hanging people, we should expropriate all but a basic living pensions and exile them to equatorial countries.

You're technically correct about the distinction in law but I think the point still easily stands. Unless you can find me five women taxi drivers charged with sexually assaulting their passengers.

Like avoiding mobile phones for as long as I could was doing something to myself rather than doing something for myself. Also, I ain't getting out of here with my brain plasticity argument because if I am going to be mindful of PTSD and autism and all the other conditions that I am going to be mindful of then people can be mindful of my ageing brain and more recently the very real brain fog that can be the result of Covid (my memory has gone to shit since I had it.)

As I have said elsewhere if there's a genuinely good reason for not phoning then I won't but the one condition I'm not respecting is a chronic fear that one day they might do something that is convenient to someone else.

Sure there are ways to do it without massive bloodshed and I would hope that's the way that everyone decides to do it in the coming years as large populations from the global south are forced to migrate to the new temperate zones.

But the white wing in the US are in their endgame now. They were able to nobble democracy in their favour in the most grotesque ways while they were a majority and very soon they are not going to be and so, in a farcical echo of the 1860s, it seems their plan is to secede by making states with a higher degree of common sense kick them out of the federation by making ever more deranged legislation.

Agreed. There is a problem we have about where to put the fission waste but the actual generation process is cleaner than carbon.