It also goes along with their mentality that trans men are simply poor, defenseless women who have been brainwashed into wanting to become strong, powerful men. And also how trans women must be mentally ill. Because how could anyone not want to be a man? Women who want to be men are understandable but misguided, and men who want to be women are sick and to be both pitied and hated - but especially hated.

The Republican party is a cult - especially the cult of Trump. All these grifters selling hate to conservatives have made it that much harder to convince them when they’re wrong, and the odds of them doubling down on those beliefs when they are challenged get more and more likely the deeper in they are. There’s a point where it becomes almost impossible to pull people out of a cult and there’s largely no line that they won’t convince themselves that it’s okay to cross.

I think that’s where we’re at and have been at for quite a while. Republicans convince themselves that they’re the good guys fighting the good fight against whatever the party tells them is bad, and believe that their bigotry and hate is justified.

A lot of these minorities also always think that they’re different because they’re “one of the good ones” and will reap the same benefits.

My friend told me once about how people in cults have a sunk-cost fallacy to the cult’s beliefs that makes it harder to get them out the longer they’ve been in.

People are more likely to double down on their beliefs when proven wrong because they’d have to admit that they were wrong and so were all the things that they did following those beliefs. And nobody likes to admit when they’re wrong, because nobody wants to believe that they’re the bad guy.

See also: anything that challenges the status quo and/or my worldviews.

Because they think that one day soon, they’ll own the boot and be the ones doing the stomping.

Republicans never consider themselves to be poor, they’re just “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” who are gonna make it any day now. Just you wait, any day now they’ll win the lottery, or get an inheritance, or…

What the fuck are you on about? I never said that they started street brawls with the church. I agreed with you about them hating and attacking socialists, added that they only kept the name for the party because of the recognition factor/popularity of socialist policy at that time in Germany, and then said that if I remember correctly, Hitler made agreements with the church for funding and support despite his personal feelings on the matter. Nowhere did I say the Nazis beat up Christians or members of the Church.

Yep. Hitler also hated Christianity IIRC, but allied with the church for their financial aid and the support of religious voters. They definitely weren’t above using the name of something that they hated and actively attacked to allow them to grab more power, and it makes them neither socialist nor Christian to have done so.

Socialism was also popular at the time and they were using that to increase their appeal.

Unfortunately, the “used intelligently and responsibly” part is why people dislike AI - they don’t trust companies or people to use it that way (and for good reason based on the results so far).

Plus, it’s not gonna put everything back into Pandora’s Box. What we’re in is a societal and cultural arms race where AI is just another escalation that’s being used by both sides.

Also, resistance to air pollution isn’t as crucial as it once was due to better emissions technologies.

Tell that to the recently defunded EPA…

Everyone who disagrees with you is a bot, probably from Russia. You are very smart.

Where did they say that? They just said bots in general. It’s well known that Russia has been running a propaganda campaign across social media platforms since at least the 2016 elections (just like the US is doing on Russian and Chinese social media, I’m sure. They do it on Americans as well. We’re probably the most propangandized country on the planet), but there’s plenty of incentive for corpo bots to be running their own campaigns as well.

Or are you projecting for some reason? What do you get from defending Putin?

They have very long necks. The rest of it is still standing in the lobby, where a nice old lady with poor eyesight is telling one of its legs about her grandson.

Because Bluesky is centralised.

You say that like that isn’t exactly what the majority of people want. When I first left Reddit, I was trying to explain Lemmy and federated services to some friends and one of them immediately replied with “why would you want that?” And this was from a guy who owned and operated his own TeamSpeak server just for his friends to use.

The average person wants a service that’s easy to use first and foremost, and that is always going to be easier to do with a big centralized one owned and operated by a large company. They just want to be able to make an account and connect with friends and content. They don’t care about things like privacy until it actively harms them.

The short of it is that he was an entry point for the MAGA pipeline years back. I don’t know if he still schills for white supremacist podcasts and the like anymore, though.

I mean, he did a little more than “one too many Nazi jokes.” Including, but not limited to, supporting white supremacists and advertising their social media and books on his channel and social media platforms.

The number of people that I’ve heard (especially teenagers) arguing that “it’s normal over there” was honestly disheartening. He was a major component of the MAGA pipeline in the years leading up to Trump’s first presidency.

People are emotionally driven animals at the end of the day. As much as we try to argue otherwise, it’s our default state. It’s not conditioning, it’s nature. If you believe yourself to be otherwise, then you’re susceptible to being emotionally exploited without even realizing it. I had a coworker rant in circles for 2 hours the other week about how he’s very rational and how people need to stop reacting emotionally to things, while also going on about how Democrats are snowflakes and Republicans use facts and logic in their arguments, and how despite having trans friends, he’ll never see them as their actual gender because “basic biology” and people shouldn’t expect others to accommodate things like calling them by the right name.

That said, how you frame a problem can vastly affect how people consider solving it. A great example is one that somebody else posted in this thread talking about how sime companies that see electricity as an expense rather than something that reduces profits are actually moving towards building their own renewable energy infrastructure because it’ll drive their expenses down in the long run.

This is some real “basic biology” level thinking here. Even if it were as simple as “Pull the lever Krunk!” then you’ve just turned all that solar infrastructure into junk for the majority of the time that we need power.

People use the vast majority of electricity in a day in the afternoon and at night - times that are noticeably after the peak solar production time. So you have all that energy going into the system with nowhere to go because battery technology and infrastructure isn’t there, and then no energy to fulfill the peak demand. This is an issue nuclear runs into as well because a nuclear plant is either on or off and isn’t capable of scaling its power to the current demand.

There are times where power companies have to pay industrial manufacturing facilities to run their most energy consuming machines just to bleed extra energy out of the grid to keep it from overloading and turning into a multi-million dollar disaster that could take years to get people back on the grid.

This is like the defining case of “just because it’s legal doesn’t make it okay.” An 18 year old and a 16 year old is one thing. It’s very different when it’s a 30-something year old and a 16 year old. That’s like a high school senior trying to get with a 12 year old.

There’s a massive power imbalance in a relationship like that where the 30-something has basically total control. Even a 30-something with a college kid has issues imo, let alone a kid who’s a sophomore or junior in high school. That’s some Quamire from Family Guy shit. “I love high school girls. I get older, they stay the same age.”

Half your age plus seven is the rule of thumb that I’ve heard. At 18, that means the lowest you should be dating is 16. At 32, it’s 23. Etc.

Also, echo chambers are good, actually, and you can’t change my mind. Life isn’t supposed to be a constant argument, and the criticism of surrounding yourself with people who generally agree with you is a tactic that’s been used to prevent people from simply cutting toxicity out on social media platforms.