With the electoral college and FPTP, even opting in is of dubious benefit.

If Nato fails and Russia attacks

That already happened back in 2022 (arguably all the way back to '08). NATO didn’t do shit because it’s just the US military wearing a dozen different European baseball caps. And after the US finished scrubbing out of both Iraq and Afghanistan, it didn’t have the logistics to launch another Asiatic land war (while keeping China at gunpoint in the Pacific and Iran in check in the Middle East).

American slippage is already apparent across Latin America, Africa, and the South Pacific. Things are only going to get worse for DC going forward.

You would have to be suicidal to stick your neck into that mess, at this stage of the game.

Dems have to deliver on those policies when given the opportunity. If all they can deliver are excuses, they won’t have a base that trusts them.

Go down to Mexico and see how this is done. AMLO and Sheinbaum have been on a historic electoral tear, in large part because they’ve been so effective at delivering their reforms. They’re crazy popular right now.

If you can buy a ten and one works, you’ve saved money. Two work and you’re making money. The only question is whether the tenth card really will work or not.

I’ve been hearing about the imminent crash for the last two years. New money keeps getting injected into the system. The bubble can’t deflate while both the public and private sector have an unlimited lung capacity to keep puffing into it. FFS, bitcoin is on a tear right now, just because Trump won the election.

This bullshit isn’t going away. Its only going to get forced down our throats harder and harder, until we swallow or choke on it.

It doesn’t need to be effective, because the pendulum of politics always swings back in the end. Trump will become the next scapegoat of American politics just like he was back in 2018 and then 2020. If the economy tops itself (as is increasingly likely), they’ll be facing even bigger headwinds. Even if it doesn’t, inflation and sky high rents aren’t going away. Consumer debt isn’t getting any lighter. The Trump Admin isn’t going to be nice to people.

That’s the electoral strategy at the end of the day. Just to keep being the Other Option and wait for people to come around. Wait as long as it takes. Maybe it’ll take twenty years, like in Arizona. Maybe forty years, like in Georgia. Maybe it’ll be over 60, like in Utah. Doesn’t matter. Just keep squatting on the Other Option until the day comes.

Things were better before they got worse, sure.

But the problem in these systems is the trade off between centralization (consolidated control and monolithic content) and federation (poor navigation/petty administrative feuds/less quality content). Switching from Twitter to BlueSky relieves you from the current admin’s fuckups, but you’re still stuck in a flawed system.

Not everyone subscribes to your ideology of lesser evilism

If they don’t subscribe to my ideology, they must be a greater evil.

if I was a German citizen who hated Nazi Germany and wanted it to fail, would that make me worse than the Nazis?

It would make you a Communist Fifth Columnist Jew-Loving Traitor and earn you a ticket straight to the camps.

The Nazis would absolutely say you were worse than them.

The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over.

Dorsey is just as emotionally stunted and socially reactionary as Musk. He simply isn’t as wealthy.

BlueSky has thrived not because Dorsey crafted it into a purer vision, but because he’s neglected it and allowed the user base to have their way.

Hillary again with Bill not at all anti war–>

Directly responsible for escalation in Libya, as Sec State, and the deaths of tens of thousands as a result.

it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party

The only reflection I am able to accomplish is to look at the GOP and say “Worse, tho”.

If you aren’t voting for the lesser evil, I have to assume you hate America and want it to fail. And that’s worse than genocide.

refuse investment from undemocratic nations like GCC or China

:-/

I mean, this is one of the central pitches behind Web3.0/Crypto. Everything has a digital tag and its all going to be portable between platforms.

Did it come to fruition? No, of course not. Its all a pile of scams. But then so was Web2.0 and Web1.0 during their heydays.

Put enough zeros on the end of a check and it will be.

Mastodon is more of a protocol than a single service. It succeeds/fails on those terms, in the same way the old Web1.0 protocols did. Which is to say, you can’t enshitify a thousand micro-sites at once like you can enshittify one big site that’s under central control. But you also can’t do things like navigate, search, and socialize efficiently.

Mastodon is successful in large part because it isn’t. When you let a single cartel of corporate psychos run a Mastodon account like they would a Twitter or Facebook, you end up with Truth Social (literally just a Mastodon branch instance).

The key factor in Digg’s demise was a flawed design that was too easily abused by users. Digg had no controls over user verification, so individuals could game the system by creating multiple accounts to artificially inflate the number of votes for their own content. Because Digg displayed content in order of popularity, most visitors saw and voted only on content that was already popular. This system created a vicious cycle in which a small number of dedicated users could push their own content to the front page and thereby gain more followers, allowing them to more easily repeat the process. As Digg grew, so too did its problems related to power-hungry users cheating and gaining undue influence over content.

Sounds like the same problem that every centralized social media ecosystem suffers from. The big difference between Digg and Reddit was that Reddit successfully monetized the “push me to the front of the queue” algorithm rather than engineering around it.

The great thing about BlueSky is how under-the-radar its flown for the last few years. Virtually no advertising. No legions of bot accounts spamming with invites and generic attention baiting posts. No |>u33y N |3io blowing up my mentions. No enshittification, because its just a primitive clone of the original Bird Site.

The more popular it gets, the less likely that’ll last. BlueSky won’t defeat Twitter until it becomes Twitter.

Smart

I spend so much money on Patreon and I never regret a penny of it

Why would you pay for YouTube and then get an ad blocker? Seems redundant.

Also, YouTube has begun integrating ads server side, making them more difficult to parse out.