OpenStars

I mean… sure, some of them, but definitely not all? After all, conservatives make up more than a third of the entire country? I think there’s room for nuances, particularly when the Democrats are roughly equally corrupt (defined as receiving money from special interest groups), and even more inept at politics (I’m not talking Bernie Sanders, I’m talking the rest of the party that threw him away).

It’s like the Linux vs. Windows debate - moral purity sounds high and mighty and all, but what about those of us forced to live in the real world who have to use Windows (even if rarely) for our jobs?

Particularly people outside of the USA like to look down and judge… as if nearly identical disinformation warfare campaigns are not hard at work there too. We in the USA knows what that feels like - “haha, but surely that will never happen HERE” (meanwhile, it was happening here for decades, under our very own noses, but like the analogy of a frog in a cooking pot, we did not jump out so long as it proceeded forward slowly). It CAN and it IS happening elsewhere - pretty much everywhere, just at a less advanced stage.

But maybe other nations political systems are more robust and can handle the onslaught better than we could?

Some are - as too are some on the other side as well (though not in equal proportions) - while some are strategic, looking to use him to accomplish their ends, and so on.

People always keep forgetting: more people voted against Hillary Clinton than for Trump, and then the same with Joe Biden, who only at the last moment swapped out with Kamala Harris, someone who was relatively unknown, and also widely unpopular (across both sides of the aisle).

Nobody has ever been able to tell me an example of a democracy that after devolving into a 2-party system, managed to survive. It seems a fatal wound for any democracy, when people are forced into voting against the other side, rather than for someone in particular? There is then no longer an incentive to “do better”, only to ever blame the other side for everything.

Sorry, I wish I knew of solutions, but instead I only see as far as problems. That said, educating people may still be the solution to move forward? Or at least that much seems true in the fight against misinformation. It’s sorta like doctors learning that they needed to wash their hands when moving between one patient and another, to avoid spreading contamination.

Now disinformation on the other hand… unfortunately that’s a whole other story, and affects all nations world-wide (to varying degrees). Continuing the medical analogy, that’s more akin to an infection, and to solve it we both need to fight against it, plus also then return to the misinformation aspect to avoid spreading unintentional falsehoods - either one alone is insufficient, though necessary.

In short, those who still have a democracy, maybe try to do whatever is needed to keep it?

Voting, the same as happened in the USA, where I would have said identically about it as well, 10 years ago.

There seem to be a lot of Trump supporters north of the USA border.

Upvoting. If only it were that simple, yeah!

It’s not “dumb” - some of those voters have advanced degrees like a PhD or MD - so much as it is an emotional preference for authority. I likewise take a lot on faith daily - like I am not personally an expert in nuclear physics, or economics, etc. - and in the same manner such voters have been shown to rely more upon what they are told by experts, like news media, than what they see with their own eyes.

Which in itself is not “wrong”, so much as it has been twisted (by corruption of the media).

Also, go back and watch that historic debate between Biden and Trump. Both are geriatric, but one could at the time at least form a coherent sentence. So based solely on that debate, how would you vote? Or should making oneself knowledge about matters have been made a prerequisite to vote?

It was democracy itself that led us to this point. It’s tough to implement properly.

Whereas on Lemmy the attitude that I see most prevalent is “they dumb”, ignoring the complexity of the various processes and making people feel superior (tribal), as if the same identical trends were not also happening in virtually every democracy world-wide. Failure to properly diagnose the true underlying causes is simply going to lead to the identical outcome everywhere else as well… Like in a few years Canada may not so much be conquered so much as literally ask for the USA to allow it to join?

So I would advise not to be so quick to turn to an answer that provides emotional satisfaction without the benefit of it (entirely on its own) being fully, genuinely the absolute underlying cause.

So if we pay for it, we’ll own the product… r-r-right?!

ChatGPT makes Sam Altman money.

Is something “worth” what someone will pay for it?

Things that used to be free: Google searches, YouTube, Android, Reddit - all have enshittified in different ways (e.g. Reddit is still free of direct monetary charge, but now restrictive rather than “free”).

AI is simply following this well-trodden path, or rather people are claiming that is what is happening.

Wait… who are cats again?

Could there be a translation issue - like “mayhem” rather?

Is that the right question? At this point it might have moved on to “How are cats?”

90% of the web is porn tho…

I mean, technically we are all traveling in time right now… forward, at a constant velocity (or at least it appears that way to us, locally in this part of our spacetime continuum).

These shoes just seemed to have a bit of a detour, before they finally arrived at this, their new destination:-).

Time travel 🧳 - it’s the only logical explanation!!

Perhaps it’s the calm just before the st… POUNCE OF DEATH ☠️💀⁉️

Cat did a cost to benefit ratio analysis and decided that being good just wasn’t worth it:-P

There is a simple solution: Musk will simply purchase the USA and use that military arsenal as a deterrent.

(/s… maybe)