And yet the United States continues to slide into fascism despite having elected Biden. What horrific Trump era policies did the Democrats even bother to repeal after they won in 2020 and held both the senate and the house?

They are still funding the construction of border wall segments. They never repealed the Republican tax cuts. They have done nothing about the concentration camps on the southern border for fuck's sake. They never codified Roe v. Wade, we literally lost the right to abortions while Biden was in office. They could have stacked the supreme court but they didn't.

The Democrats and the Republicans form an obfuscated one party system in the US. Republican leadership aggressively ramps up the oppression of marginalized people, then Democratic leadership does nothing to restore our rights nor proactively prevent the same thing from happening again. Instead they just use their time in office to suck all of the energy out of people's movements that could actually effect change.

And much more importantly than all of that, Republicans and Democrats are virtually identically evil when it comes to foreign policy. When the US is dropping bombs on you and destroying your country, you'll tend not to care whether it was a Red MAGA or Blue MAGA administration pulling the trigger.

In some specific cases it might be worthwhile to vote for Democrats in local elections where there exists much more leeway for politicians to stray from the party line, but voting for them in national elections is just lending your voice to legitimizing their bullshit good cop/bad cop routine they play with the Republicans.

Hard embedding ads works for live streams since you can't know when exactly any given ad will start or end. If Youtube were to do this, it would be very trivial for sponsorblock to simply take on the role of adblocker since the community would be able to report the location of the ads.

I really wish I could have a permanent record of everything every liberal has ever said so I could easily demonstrate how full of shit they are in 10 to 20 years when they all collectively deny ever having supported Israel through the Palestinian genocide.

Someone on Hexbear once called this phenomenon "liberal solipsism". I don't remember who originally said it, but it's a very apt description of the way western liberals seem to believe that their particular understanding of politics is secretly universal.

Hexbear is literally the only place on the entirety of the internet where I can be vulnerable in my posts without worry it's going to be used in harassment against me by some reactionary freak.

r/chapotraphouse was one of the most accepting and inclusive subreddits of all time on reddit when it came to not punching down, and Hexbear is orders of magnitude better than even that.

I think it's most to do with exactly how much wealth a person was born into.

Someone who is constantly on the verge of being homeless, possibly even starving, will very soon get desperate enough to do things they aren't proud of to survive.

On the other hand, someone born into immense wealth will have very little understanding of people who are struggling. That'll make it very hard for them to empathize. And with all that power, their sheer indifference will have them crushing the poor under their boots like ants. This is highly exacerbated by the fact that it is in their best interest to support policy that transfers wealth upwards.

My thoughts exactly when it comes to people who don't seem to mind advertising in general. They come in a couple varieties. On the one hand you have all the "i just tune out the ads" or the "im too smart to be influenced by marketing" types. The cope involved in these cases is sad more than anything else. On the other hand, you have the truly deranged who find advertisements useful. The kind of people who somehow appreciate trackers and spyware because it means they get advertisements "more relevant to their interests" as if that's a good thing. Those types fucking scare the shit out of me.

I have ads so thoroughly purged out of my life that it is legitimately fucking mind blowing to me whenever I visit someone who watches tv. Every single time I'm just repeatedly blindsided by the fact that this atrocity is the norm. They are bombarded with the same annoying-ass commercials every five to ten minutes continuously, 24/7. It's as if they have an IV setup pushing pure corporate propaganda straight into their veins. They can't watch a single episode of a tv show without incessantly being interrupted by a dozen car insurance ads per hour. Worse yet are the fucking prescription drug advertisements.

In a just world this type of shit would be thoroughly outlawed. Anyone involved in creating ads should be charged with crimes against humanity. They are doing actual mass brainwashing. There is no way sitting through this day in and day out doesn't cause significant psychological damage.

I was somewhat against removing downvotes when we initially did that, but wow was I wrong. Terrible reddit-tier feature that needs to be trashed.

Youtube's use of A/B testing is very smart in that it's actually nothing about testing user response and all about limiting the number of people they piss off at once with their god awful changes.

The day I can't block ads on the internet is the day I stop using the internet.

The funny thing is, the bigger these threads get over on Hexbear federated instances, the more users from instances like .ca, .ee, or .ml show up complaining about the Hexbears. That stays small in proportion to the actual discussion in the thread, but eventually becomes large in proportion to the stunted version of the thread that .world sees. So despite being defederated with us, .world threads slowly fill up with spam from users complaining about "Hexbear brigaders" as it leaks in and piles up from discussions and dunkings outside of their federation network.

Lemmy.world seems to be the only instance that would have been big enough to downvote us down the thread as viewed from other instances, but they defederated so we can't see them and they can't see us at all.

The rest that are federated don't have the numbers to do this, especially when you consider a large chunk of them are lemmygrad users who are posting side by side with us. So overall our higher posting activity (that is partially a result of the lack of downvotes changing how we interact) results in Hexbear user heavy discussions rising to the top of threads even as viewed from other instances.

To see the whole structure, go over to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad, find this thread there, then scroll. Toward the bottom you'll find a sort of underworld in this thread of lemmy.world users downvoting lemmygrad users into oblivion.

394 from the perspective of Hexbear. The pre-emptive lemmy.world defederation with Hexbear effectively splits big threads like this into two sections. At the top is the much higher activity Hexbear posting, and at the bottom is the lower activity lemmy.world posting where instead of substantive discussion, people who are in support of China just get downvoted to oblivion.

Ironically, Hexbear's total removal of downvotes on their end confers an advantage here. Discussions and dunkings involving a lot of Hexbear users tend to rise to the top of threads sorted by hot because the lack of downvotes promotes actual discussion upon disagreement. This results in higher activity levels than those produced by the passive downvoting behavior typical of more reddit-like instances.