This is ludicrously alarmist. I mean, archive whatever you want (it’s good practice to back up things you think are important), but the United States is hardly a fascist dictatorship anymore than it was in 2017 (or 2021 or 2013…). The opposing party wins sometimes, and it hasn’t ended the republic yet. Federal funding might be cut to new gender research, but nobody’s going to go around to universities, confiscating copies of existing studies to be burned.

Lemmy is one of the most intense echo chambers out there. It’s very funny that a self-professed anti-hierarchical, decentralized message board site like this falls in line so neatly behind whatever candidates the corporate media tells them to and then browbeats anyone who dares to consider alternatives. Americans’ refusal to vote third party plays a big role in why the two major parties are so completely unresponsive to the public’s interests and desires. They won’t win, of course, thanks to FPTP, but voting for them pressures the two parties to change their platform to win over their voters.

This is precisely why the corporate media is so invested in vilifying third party voters. Every election from now until the end of recorded history will be “the most important election ever” (or “the last election ever,” as they’ve been painting it recently) and anyone who refuses to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils candidate is a willful apostate who’s worse than a Trump voter. And the masses buy into it, and then it’s naked tribalism and hysteria from there.

Fair points. Yeah, I hope it was clear that that last bit wasn’t addressed to you, but rather the person reporting me. I appreciate your actually being civil and responding to the points I’m making. I wish that was more the norm.

Yes, you’re absolutely right that the right wing does this, too, and it’s just as foolish. The antiwoke culture war has been a massive failure for the American GOP and very likely cost them seats in the midterms. It absolutely affects elections. Trying to police speech is a bad idea in general, regardless of ideology. Threats, defamation, and harrassment are already illegal. New laws like these do not meaningfully protect anyone from those, but they do erode protections for free speech and also piss off vast swathes of the general population, who will usually manifest some political backlash against the party that implemented them. I’m a leftist and I’d prefer not to have Brazil slide back into Bolsanarismo before actually meaningful reforms can be implemented.

As an aside, Lemmy is becoming even worse than Reddit for people being totally unwilling to entertain alternate analyses of politics. Protip: just because someone isn’t parroting the same virtue-signaling talking points over and over again, it doesn’t make them a Nazi. My account was apparently reported over this conversation, so to whomever did that, good job trying to run me off rather than engage with my arguments, I guess. Enjoy your circle jerk.

Yes, clearly believing that hearing certain words and phrases is so injurious to human wellbeing that their use needs to be criminalized is the position of the utmost resilience and bravery. How silly of me. These sorts of wokescold laws contribute effectively nothing to the material wellbeing of any kind of marginalized group, and if you honestly believe that there won’t be political blowback from this, I think you’re out of touch with the general public. Even if the law itself is toothless and cannot be applied maliciously by the other side, the right wing media is going to make hay out of it, riling up millions of blue collar, conservative voters against the perceived excesses of Lula’s administration. It blows a lot of a new and somewhat fragile administration’s political capital for effectively no material benefit.

Nice to see the pendulum swing to an opposite extreme from Bolsanaro… Creating laws to make certain kinds of speech punishable by law certainly won’t blow up in the progressive camp’s face once another right-wing demagogue is elected, no sir.

I thought the Kansas side was cute, but I also only didn’t leave my car except to go into my hotel.

Düsseldorf is ugly and boring. Lots of big companies are there, so there are good jobs, but it’s a cultural and aesthetic wasteland. Sorry, Kraftwerk.

Shhhh, this is the internet and only tribalistic partisan analyses are allowed. Why don’t you shut up and move to a brutally fascist country like checks notepad Norway, Finland, or Sweden, you bigot?

Yeah, I’ve no doubt that Höcke is pursuing this for extremely cynical and gross reasons, but the broken clock is right twice a day. “Inclusion" is one of those policies that sounds so self-evidently positive and reasonable at a glance, that people’s brains shut down and nobody thinks of potential downsides to it as a universal policy. A majority of kids who require special education fare much, much better in smaller classes taught by a special education teacher who can move through material more slowly and boil it down to easier-to-grasp concepts. Sticking them in a large classroom with 20-30 non-disabled peers, even with a SpEd teacher present, rarely has a positive effect, and more often than not leads to worse outcomes for all students present. Inclusion is at its core a cost-saving measure (it’s cheaper to stick the SpEd kids in a GenEd classroom than making a dedicated class for them), but it wraps itself in progressive ideology so well that it’s almost impossible for parents or teachers to argue against.

It’s fine. Websites break on it less often than I would have expected and the “nuke your cookies and history" button is a fun feature. I’ve mostly moved to Firefox, though, just to get away from Chromium (although I realize the irony in that; my fingerprint is almost assuredly far more unique than if I stuck to Chromium).

Your explanation makes sense, but I disagree that banning a product from sale is a good approach to phasing out the use of inefficient technologies. The curmudgeons are a small minority and probably can’t be convinced to change over anyway. The bigger demographic to convert are, as you mentioned, penny-wise, dollar-foolish folks who don’t understand that an LED bulb will save far more money over time than the price differential between it and the incandescent bulb. Subsidies to lower the cost of the LED bulbs to match the prices of incandescent ones would be effective, as would education campaigns about cost savings. Neither of these options would restrict citizens’ rights the way the proposed ban would, nor would they feed culture war blowback.

Why not just subsidize LED bulbs to make them cheaper? Banning Americans’ rights to buy things as innocuous as certain kinds of light bulbs is petty government overreach.

Townsends is phenomenal!

Yeah, it’s been a real pain for a while. All my media drives are external WDs connected directly to the laptop running the server over USB 3.0. It’s a fairly beefy Win10 machine with an i7-7700HQ and a GTX 1070M. I’m running it on bare metal and the computer is set up to never suspend\go to sleep. I also disabled the power-saving USB suspend settings, and the drives stay accessible over file explorer and Jellyfin, so it seems like a Plex issue.

I occasionally run into the issue where I try to play a file, but after some buffering, I get the message “please make sure the drive is mounted.” The drive with the file is still connected to the server and is accessible through file explorer, so it’s not that the drive is asleep or anything. I usually have to completely uninstall Plex and reinstall it in order to fix this, and it often coincides with the bug where the languages of my libraries are totally blank. I’ve actually started to use Jellyfin most of the time because Plex has become so unreliable. Any ideas as to what’s going on?

The Demi Lovato talk was hilarious to watch. She’s an utterly charmless narcissist and literally asked a guest the question, “How bad would you have felt if I really had killed myself?”. It’s incredible no executive pulled the plug on it at any point during its production.

This is art.

Starcade absolutely rules. Protip: don’t watch the first season; the host didn’t give a toss about video games and it’s pretty hard to watch. In seasons 2+, he was replaced by the utterly fantastic Mr. Jeff Edwards, who is proof that no one is ever too old to be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about an exciting new technology. He’s seriously the best game show host I’ve ever seen, and he makes the episodes feel really wholesome and fun, even when contestants are mismatched in terms of age or ability. The whole series is available online, but please don’t slam their servers; it’s a one-person passion project from somebody who used to work on the show.

The 125 can figure came from the methodology used in some of the low quality rat studies frequently cited to demonstrate the dangers of aspartame back in the day. I’ll see if I can find the specific studies.

This page by the National Cancer Institute provides a pretty decent overview of research on a variety of artificial sweeteners. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/diet/artificial-sweeteners-fact-sheet

One very recent study (Debras et al., 2022) suggested a link between aspartame consumption and cancer, which I suspect is behind the recent hysteria. Pretty much every other high quality study over the past 50 years found no correlation. If aspartame is indeed a dangerous carcinogen, that fact should be clear through epidemiological data alone, like the 2013 study by Marinovich et al. cited in the article. I lend that study and those like it much greater credibility than one-off cohort studies like Debras.