Ah, yes, that’s right.

canyon.mid is also a real classic, even if it’s not quite as funky.

He hides the pain for all of us.

/c/showerthoughts also has a “no politics” rule, which means that many topics are off-limits - and since this rule is worded very vaguely, the admins decide at their own discretion which topics are allowed.

Noice!

Because they are all the same kind of people, and age doesn’t really matter in itself - most of the people at the top are just white and old men because the system was set up by those very people.

And that is precisely the problem: this system of endless greed propels ruthless psychopaths to the top. It is sold as a performance-based society, even though performance has absolutely nothing to do with it - if that were the case, the problem wouldn’t exist in the first place.

I think similar mechanisms are at work there as well, though to a lesser extent: I think there’s hardly any country in the world where nationalism is as pronounced as it is in the U.S.

On the one hand, this has to do with cultural dominance, which is reflected, for example, in the global popularity of the U.S. entertainment industry and so on. On the other hand, however, it also has to do with the fact that the US has been placing nationalism at the center of its culture for decades, ranging from the pledge of allegiance in schools to the targeted promotion of sporting events, where not only are flags waved, but the desired, ruthless competitive mentality - which is essential to unbridled capitalism - is directly manifested in mass events with a participatory character. There are countless examples of how the image of the superior, righteous nation has been massively propagated over decades.

This illusion is now beginning to crumble, however, because unlike its predecessors, the current U.S. regime does not care about maintaining a respectable facade, which actually does not strike me as particularly clever: Apparently, these people are solely concerned with maximizing their own enrichment, even if it means risking the collapse of the entire system.

The reason for this seems simple to me: Even their first, rather pathetic coup attempt went unpunished - they therefore assume they can do whatever they please without being held accountable. And they seem to be right in this assessment: Millions of people do take to the streets on particular days, as they did just yesterday, but this has no serious consequences for the regime, especially since they largely control the media, so that despite the scope of the protests, there is hardly any reporting on these mass demonstrations.

And this is likely the crux of the matter: because public discourse takes place in the media, yet the media is controlled by the very same people on whose behalf the corrupt regime acts, many citizens still seem unaware of the extent of the misery in which the country finds itself.

Coupled with the fact that the U.S. has always heavily cultivated national pride, many citizens likely assume that things will sort themselves out as usual: Despite obvious corruption, they continue to trust the legal system, hope for the midterms, and believe that everything will get better again with the Democrats, and so on. In any case, a majority of U.S. citizens seem to assess the situation as such that it is not yet necessary to put their own comfortable way of life at risk, although this appears to be changing somewhat. If I understand correctly, there are now apparently efforts to organize a general strike, which seems to me to be the only peaceful means of forcing the regime to step down and, maybe, even pushing through long-overdue fundamental reforms.

Whether this will work, however, seems rather unlikely to me. I see it - also from the outside - exactly the same way you do: It also seems to me that the majority of U.S. citizens underestimate the gravity of the situation, or at least that they do not want to admit that their system has been so thoroughly infiltrated that it is beyond salvation - at least if the living conditions of citizens are ever to improve significantly.

As I said, I see the reason for this in a combination of self-deception and the fact that the media are controlled to an extreme degree by oligarchs.

I think it’s fair to say that, on the whole, many U.S. citizens haven’t woken up from the “American Dream,” even though it’s been an absolute nightmare for quite some time now.

I suppose many people don’t even want to wake up, because then they’d have to take charge of shaping their own day.

Yes, it’s really quite strange - especially in its extremest form among MAGA supporters: This “movement” clearly has much more in common with a cult than with a rational, political organization. I don’t necessarily think that the vast majority of people who feel they belong realize what they’re being used for. It’s interesting from a mass psychology perspective, but unfortunately disastrous for the US as well as for the entire world.

In a way, but then again, not really, because to feel shame, one must first acknowledge that one is responsible for something reprehensible. It seems to me rather that it is precisely the acceptance of responsibility for the collective actions of the US - which are, after all, manifested in the actions of elected representatives - that is being prevented by ignoring reality. It seems to be more of a defense mechanism to protect one’s own, believed-to-be-secure identity from collapse by fleeing from reality.

In this sense, it strikes me more as something like willful blindness, deliberate ignorance, or cognitive dissonance reduction - as psychologists would say. So some kind of self-deception designed to allow one to continue clinging to one’s established self-image, even when one is aware that it does not correspond to reality.

Shame, on the other hand, would be the next step - one would only feel that once they have realized that they have lived a lie for half their life.

I suspect this is because the U.S.’s ruthless actions contradict the country’s self-image, which has been cemented by decades of propaganda: the narrative that the U.S. is the good guy, spreading freedom and democracy wherever it intervenes, the proud nation that protects the world and punishes dictators for their cruelty - all that bogus.

Reality simply doesn’t fit this propagandistic narrative: after all, in violation of international law, the U.S. is waging a war of aggression alongside genocidal mass murders and committing the most heinous war crimes in the process - crimes so repugnant that they immediately expose the fairy tales of the freedom-loving, friendly world police as obvious lies.

So I consider this to be denial of reality. People simply prefer to live in a flattering lie rather than face reality: for many, their misguided pride in their nation is apparently so important that they refuse to acknowledge that there is absolutely nothing to be proud of anymore - on the contrary, they should be ashamed of their country, but they simply won’t accept that, which is why they prefer to close their eyes to reality.

Printer cartridges and razor blades

FOSS

What I find most absurd about LLMs is the providers’ business model, since it fundamentally cannot function without stealing the work of others.

In that case, the orange mob boss has nothing to worry about…

Lately, I’ve been wondering more and more often what it would take for the American people to oust this regime from office.

Yes, it is unfortunately becoming increasingly clear that even in the EU, billionaires and their companies are above the law. The legal situation should be clear here and there should be consequences - but there apparently aren’t any.

Unfortunately, this applies not only to Twitter, but to most US tech giants in particular, to meta, for example. I have already stopped counting the massive violations of the GDPR that meta and others are constantly committing, because nothing happens anyway. If anything, the fines are so low that violating the law brings these companies far more revenue than it costs them.

So unfortunately, the same major issue that brought the US to the brink of a straight up dictatorship also applies in Europe: even the most blatant violations of the law have no serious consequences for the richest of the rich – and that is why billionaires are becoming more and more powerful.

The situation may be better in the EU for now than in the US, whose legal system obviously no longer even maintains the appearance of fairness, but even in the EU, the enforcement of the law is miles away from anything that could even remotely be called justice.

The reason seems to me to be the same as in the US: concentration of power in a tiny billionaire class that asserts its influence through corruption.

I think that if things continue like this, and I see no indicators that they will not, it will not be long before even the appearance of justice is abandoned in the EU as well.

Edit: Here is an example of how this is possible - it’s just plain old corruption, but in the highest ranks of our institutions: From Meta to the EU Parliament: Former chief lobbyist negotiates data protection (German article)

Aura Salla was Meta’s chief lobbyist in Brussels for many years. Her task: to convince politicians to weaken EU digital rules such as data protection in order to generate even higher profits with Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms.

I didn’t want to start a discussion about the pros and cons of megathreads, I just wanted to ask whether this is common practice in the Fediverse. That doesn’t seem to be the case - and for good reason, given the decentralized nature of the network. For the sake of simplicity, it would be welcome for some topics, but I’m sure we’ll manage just fine without it.

I’m on Piefed(.social). However, the discussion is still mainly taking place on Lemmy. If there is such a megathread on the war in Iran on .world, for example, I can’t find it.

Thanks for pointing that out. I’ll definitely take a look at that. It’s remarkable how the US has managed to maintain an image of “freedom” for years, even though it uses autocratic surveillance methods not only only on any other country but on its own citizens - and also for years and years. You almost have to be grateful to Trump for revealing all this in such an incredibly stupid way, just to enrich himself.

In 2020, the European Court of Justice declared the Privacy Shield agreement, an agreement on data exchange with the US, incompatible with European law and thus effectively terminated it, not because of the activities of any corporations, but because data stored on US servers is not sufficiently protected from access by the US government (Schrems II ruling). The reason for this is the absurd legislation in the US, such as the Patriot Act, which, although it has been weakened, still allows the state to force any company or private individual to hand over all data processed on servers physically located on US soil, even without any suspicion or a court order.

As a result, all US companies doing business in the EU were forced to operate servers on European soil in order to continue their activities legally. European companies that used US providers that did not comply had to switch to providers that do not operate servers in the US.

Unfortunately, it took only 21 months for US lobbying to undermine the European Court of Justice’s decision: in 2022, a follow-up agreement was adopted, the “EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework,” which is no different from its predecessor at all. The legal situation remains the same in the US, and once again there is no protection of data from the US government.

In short, anyone who uses services that are processed on US servers is not protected from arbitrary access by the US - and this also applies to EU citizens.