It’s truth, though. I don’t like it either, but we know the popular vote is currently meaningless. I’ll champion any cause that wants to change that, but there’s zero chance of that happening while the GOP controls the house, the senate, the courts, and the presidency.

There was only one, there are more seats than just the president up for vote on election day.

I don’t think there’s any contradiction there, though. The Dems aren’t rioting because they accept legitimate outcomes, while the Republicans are only accepting favorable outcomes. No one is rioting right now because the Dems accept Trump’s win as legitimate and the Republicans accept it as favorable.

Was that from an instance admin or an overzealous community mod? I am missing some context, but generally there is no bar for entry for who gets to be a moderator and they are allowed to run their communities however they want as long as their rules don’t contradict those of the instance. I could make a community that bans people for using the word “blanket” and that’s my prerogative as long as it doesn’t violate instance rules.

Well, both parties are also filled with money and other resources needed to ensure that only two parties can succeed.

We need alternative voices in office, but I don’t think that’s happening without some form of revolution. The best one can hope for in lieu of that is co-opting a party’s direction over a span of decades, like the fascists did to the GOP.

Not yet. Their AT protocol, similar to the Fediverse’s ActivityPub protocol, is open source and is supposedly working towards the goal of enabling federation, but presently Bluesky is centrally-hosted and run. In theory, one could use the existing AT protocol and spin up their own Bluesky alternative, but it would just make another “center” given that current lack of federation.

The optimist in me is hoping that this is just a temporary thing, to show users that the platform works before enabling federation, versus what has happened to the Fediverse early on where a lot of poorly-implemented/poorly-run instances that couldn’t handle any significant user load ended up buckling and gave early adopters a negative impression.

But the cynic in me (and the commonly-accepted conclusion others appear to have drawn) considers the possibility that Bluesky no longer cares about decentralization and would prefer to remain a centrally-hosted Twitter 2.0. But there is a push to transfer the governance of the AT protocol to a nonprofit to ensure that its original purpose is protected, so hopefully that or some other initiative like it ends up accomplishing their mission.

What?

What does this have to do with left or right? This is just plain and simple wage theft, which should never have occurred in the first place if the business was competent. They’re not, apparently, and it makes one wonder what other critical calculations they must be bullshitting.

A lot of the enlightenment was also about bullshitting science to justify past dogma. It can’t be said that it was a unified movement, so there will definitely be plenty of examples of people who were genuinely forward-thinking and had only good intentions. But pseudosciences like eugenics and phrenology were used to sell a narrative of European racial superiority, and even more legitimate ideas like evolution and psychology were twisted to fit this narrative that Europeans were somehow more evolved and developed. This in turn justified practices of colonialism, slavery, and segregation as somehow making the world a more enlightened place, under the stewardship of the enlightened peoples.

The enlightenment was like a metaphorical medicine that cured society of its superstitious past, but like many medicines, it could be poisonous if taken the wrong way.