It seems unlikely that all the people failing to understand international policy in obvious ways, would have stocks and shares in the armaments sector. It’s more likely that they’re clueless. :)

We should defederate from everything which does not agree with my .world view

I will try to formulate this as well as I can:

“One should not give a platform to instances which don’t give a platform to others.”

Examples (based on hexbear):

• in some communities you get banned for voting the wrong way --> other instances don’t practise banning for votes

• in some communities you get banned for being “reactionary” (that is, factual - Wikipedia would get banned just as quick) --> other instances only ban bigots, not people who politely disagree with locals

• in some communities, there is no obvious recourse to get a ban reviewed and reversed --> on other instances, there is a metacommunity about management or instructions about how to challenge a ban

The result: certain instances are granted a platform by others, but aren’t granting a platform to “foreigners” in return. And management habits in some places are straight from North Korea.

Defederating from an echo chamber doesn’t make your instance an echo chamber, unless you follow up by adopting the policies of the echo chamber you defederated from.

Quick analysis: the US flushed itself down the toilet.

• Likely fact: Republicans now control all 4 towers of the castle (president, senate, house of representatives and surpreme court).

• Conclusion: the situation allows Republicans to steamroll legislation into force.

• Further conclusion: US voters really don’t understand what they are doing.

Climate: it’s bad, but one president’s rule is short. Trump will withdraw from the Paris treaty and sabotage domestic attempts to curb emissions. Europe and China will continue their attempts because they haven’t changed, and they want energy independence. Climate is a system with great inertia. We are beaten by the mistakes of previous decades, new generations will be beaten by our mistakes. Increasingly hard.

Ukraine: the situation is very bad. The Biden administration won approval for 60 billion of support in spring, but according to Zelensky, only 10% has been delivered so far. Unless the DoD hurries the hell out of itself, Trump will close the tap on aid that Biden secured. Trump will try diplomacy, but Putin’s administration is made of a different sort of people. They are running for life while Trumpists are running for lunch. Putin will politely send him where sun doesn’t shine and continue grinding meat, now with an added flavour of North Korean. Ukraine faces a very difficult choice: fight a retreating war in conditions of decreasing aid, hoping that revolutionary conditions arise in Russia… or make peace with the attacker, giving them territory. Ukraine will need all the assistance it can get from anywhere. Knowing this, and knowing the risk of a Trump re-election, I started developing a drone system 6 months ago. It has gone through many iterations and might be capable of combat in the coming month. I didn’t sign up to live in a world like this, but hey, you take what you’re given. :(

If the war in Ukraine gives Putin territory and peace as a result, Putin and his heirs know that you can get territory and peace with war: any place in Eastern Europe could be next.

In summer, Congress locked away the keys for leaving NATO, but Republicans now control both houses and Trump has cleansed the party of dissenters. Trump can credibly threaten to withdraw from NATO or actually do it.

Taiwan needs to find more alliances, because the US might become unreliable, and China knows this. The rest of the world needs to think if they can do without electronics during a Chinese attempt to conquer Taiwan.

Democracy in the US: will be dismantled in favour of something like Hungary. We will see ministers who are oligarchs like Musk or irresponsible liars like Kennedy. Since the storm is near-perfect, I predict that democracy will give way to oligarchy. Risk of disturbances, repressions and internal conflict will grow.

Until now, only unstable people wanted to assassinate Trump. Given these conditions, I predict that stable but ruthless people who see a danger to their future will join the game. They will reason as follows: “risk has reached certainty and there is still time to prevent outcomes”. If I was working in the Secret Service, I would increase protection on Trump 10 times (unless I hated him).

I live in Eastern Europe, and seriously recommend your people start researching nuclear weapons. :(

If conservative means “cautious and wary of unexpected results”, “disillusioned with methods that we tried and failed with” or maybe even “equipped with experience of successful and failed cooperation with various sorts of people”, then yes. Already before age 50, I’m spoiled with various good and bad experiences. I cannot exclude that as my tendency to explore decreases (psychology tends to affirm this trend), I may get prejudiced too. I may have to figure out something to counter it.

But if conservative means that I suddenly don’t want a society with equality and without hierarchy, then - nope.

it’s probably talking about YOU

Seems very unlikely. Suppose that global population is 7 billion. One percent is 70 million then. Neither “you and me” or “EU and me” are good analogies. The population of the EU is ~450 million, the population of the US is 330 million - with a bunch of additional “western” countries lumped in, let’s say - one billion. That is 14% of the global population, far above 1%.

The examined 1% includes people who are better not characterized as “being able to afford browsing Lemmy”, but rather being able to afford multiple households in a developed country (or more in an under-developed country). More or less: “people who can come up with one megabuck if they badly want”.

Some informative graphics, which by the way contradict the title claim of the post. I don’t know which one is right, the title says 1% = 95%, but Wikipedia says 1% = 46%. And it looks bad the other way too, since 55% = 1%…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth

As a happy user of Signal (no bugs or incidents from my viewpoint), I regardless chime in to say a word for decentralization. :)

Signal is centralized:

• there is a single Signal implementation, with a single developing entity
• you have to install its mobile version before you may run the desktop version

There exist protocols like Tox which go a step beyond Signal and offer more freedom -> have multiple clients from diverse makers (some of them unstable), don’t have centralized registration, and don’t rely on servers to distribute messages - only to distribute contact information.

In the grand comparison table of protocols (not clients), Tox is among the few lines that’s all green (Signal has one red square).