I wish there were more people here, too. But I don’t think it can ever realistically be, nor does it need to be a competition. As long as there are a default millions of people willing to spend their valuable attention contributing to corporate ad-powered social media companies, the more socially responsible platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon will always be a niche corner of an aspirational web that at least attempts to trust and respect its users. I’d flip it around: the smallness of these mostly positive communities on Lemmy reflects how content the huge crowds at reddit, meta, twitter etc are at being surrounded by utter shit. If the last few years haven’t shown them that there are better places to spend their time online, I’m not sure what will. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m also starting to be okay with the size and scope of things over here.

Bret Stephens’ pieces often read like satire, but nope he’s just that out of touch. Such a shitty person.

This is the advice I usually give. I hate the concept of smart TVs, but I’m not willing to spend more when I can just ensure my Hisense U8K never connects to the internet. It’s a gorgeous and completely affordable display for the quality it provides, and there are no relevant features that are unavailable because it’s offline.

For me it’s because Newsweek has been terrible for quite some time, and AI crap is exhausting, so Newsweek + meaningless AI drivel = downvote.

That photo makes him look like a serial killer wearing someone else’s face as a mask.

I don’t usually comment on people’s looks, but this man is rotten on the inside and on the outside.

Holy shit that’s fascinating. This never would have crossed my mind unless I somehow found myself standing at the intersection of four square properties. Such a quintessentially American legal dispute.

That’s mostly right, but as with a lot of these kinds of things, it’s more complicated than that. Some of these checkerboard patterns were caused by systematic deforestation to help build the early railroads, but the checkerboard pattern itself comes from the way the federal government subdivided and sold Native American land to private individuals. It all goes back to the Dawes Act and our exploitation of indigenous tribes.

From a 2012 Democracy Now interview:

Eastern Navajo has a lot of—what we call the checkerboard area, and there’s these individual Indian allotments, which were created through the Dawes Act. And because of this individual ownership, Navajo allottees, they have the right to lease their land. And so, what the company does is they target individuals in our community, and they really, you know, use this divide-and-conquer tactic. And what they’re doing is basically promising all these riches and basically monetary gain for an already poor community that doesn’t even—a lot of our people don’t even have running water or electricity. And so, some of the individuals are dependent on this—on these promises of a false economy and jobs and all these good things that they—that they say they’re going to do.

It has caused a lot of problems for the tribes and their sovereignty.

Beginning with the Dawes Act of 1887, Native Americans, including the Navajo, were assigned plots of reservation land on which to practice subsistence farming. This was an attempt to assimilate Native Americans into Western European land use and domestication practices.

The checkerboard mix of lands owned by tribes, trust lands, fee lands, and privately-owned tracts severely impedes on the Navajo nation’s ability to farm, ranch, or utilize the land for other economic purposes. Problems of mixed jurisdiction (tribal, federal, state, or county) have also contributed to economic instability, as well as to racial tensions and community conflicts. Source

That makes a lot of sense, thanks!

I was actually wondering about this, since a close relative of mine probably won’t make it to election day: if you legally cast your ballot (mail in or absentee), but die before Election Day, does your vote still count?

I haven’t used Mojeek, so I can’t speak to that, but the UK has some of the worst privacy protections and mass-surveillance anywhere. They’re also part of the Five Eyes, so I wouldn’t count the fact that they’re UK-based as a point in their favor.

Reading comments like this is unbelievably frustrating, because you’re so close to being right, but you refuse to take that next tiny step, which makes you dangerously wrong.

Yes, both parties are lobbied out the ass, it’s bad and it’s wrong, but which party at least tries to mitigate the harm? Yes, there’s unproductive political theater that divides, but which party at least tries to talk about real issues that matter to everyday voters?

Your approach is akin to burning down the house instead of doing the hard work of fixing the roof. You will never get the outcome you imagine by voting for a third party, unless you do the hard work of improving our overall system, from inside the system. You play the game with the team you have, not the team you want.

Bret Stephens has been pissing me off since he started writing opinion pieces for the New York Times. He’s one of those conservatives who works incredibly hard to try to sound ‘reasonable,’ but if you pay attention to his language, he’s still just a warmongering piece of shit who pretends Israel can do no wrong. He has always believed that Israel is never the aggressor, despite the tens of thousands of innocent people they have indiscriminately murdered.

He has been on the wrong side of history for sooo many different conflicts and political issues, not just regarding Israel.

Yeah, he’s a never-Trumper, but that doesn’t make him a good person.

You can reliably find him justifying immoral and hateful uses of violence and destructive neoconservative policies. So I guess he fits right in at the New York Times.

I’m not sure how this post fits in the !humor@lemmy.world community. Not to be a downer, but you’re talking about what I consider to be two of the worst crimes a human being can commit, and you’re justifying one of them. That’s not right to me, and definitely isn’t funny. Raping a child is wrong and can never be justifiable. Murder is wrong, and can never be justifiable.

One awful act of savagery doesn’t make another awful act of savagery acceptable.

how do they know?

I have to know now, this is bugging the hell out of me. Is it an estimate based on daily downloads? Do they get a ping when you connect to the internet, and if so, why would they count that as a boot? If I boot this on an air gapped laptop, there’s no way they could ever know, right? So many questions. Regardless, this seems like a weird thing for them to brag about.

Right? Genuinely unbelievable.

I always have this link ready to go, because you would be totally reasonable in assuming it’s their main job, but our lovely Supreme Court says otherwise.

Edit: here’s a non-paywalled link

That’s a fair point, I appreciate it. Knives are a dangerous weapon, no doubt about it. They just don’t represent the same level of danger as a loaded gun. But your point is well taken.

Cops are too quick to use violence. That’s just a sad reality. Violence is not necessarily the correct response to a violent situation. There are ton of techniques to deescalate even the most violent and dangerous situations. Granted, the NYPD isn’t trained in those techniques, so that’s a big problem, but the cops put the public in more danger than the danger the cops faced by this one violent individual. Personally, I would rather the police put public safety above all else, including themselves. I know asking anyone to put themselves at risk to protect another person is a lot to ask, but if cops aren’t willing to do that, then it comes down to us. And in that case, what are the cops for?

I come from an over-policed city, where I am genuinely afraid of every cop I see, because of stories just like this.

So you don’t think cops should be required to gauge the risk to the public before they gauge the risk to themselves? They chose a dangerous career, and seem unwilling to accept the risks that come along with it. A knife is less dangerous than a loaded gun, I don’t think that’s a controversial thing to say.

Honestly? The guy had a knife, which might have injured one of the cops, maybe. US police are far too afraid for their own safety, and automatically reach for their gun when they think there might be the slightest minor chance that they could be in a little bit of danger.

If being in dangerous situations makes you open fire in a crowd of random innocent people, then you should not be a cop. Cops need to learn to accept the risks they signed up for, de-escalate, and protect the public before they obsess over protecting themselves. I know protecting the public is not technically their job, but opening fire in a crowded subway is laughably irresponsible, and should be an immediate fireable offense.