These are not good boys

There is a big difference between voting/supporting them and following them on social media. I encourage everyone, Left as well as Right, to follow people, pages and communities of the other side. You should know the story the other side tells itself. Even if you don’t agree with it - it’s better to not agree with the real thing than to fight straw men in echo chambers.

You are being excommunicated for resisting excommunication!

That’s the beauty of religion - if our gods and prophets did not materialize to contradict what we are saying in their name, that means they approve.

Placing exceptions on the freedom of speech does not mean that lies will get silenced. It means that whatever the government wants to censor will get silenced. Because the government will be the one who does the censoring. Or, if the censoring is not done by the government directly - the government will still be the one appointing the organization who does the censoring.

The freedom of speech must be protected - even if it means letting bad agents spread their lies uncensored. Because if you try to give the government the power to censor them, you’ll end up with a new Department of Truth led by Alex Jones (who is now unoccupied)

This is a terrible, horrible idea. It would give the government the power to censor anyone and anything, and all they have to do is claim that the thing they are censoring is a lie.

Just because you refuse to learn anything from this doesn’t mean there is nothing to be learned. I, for one, have got one important actionable insight from these replies: they prioritize having a strong president more than having a president that aligns with their values.

Trump radiates strength. You may say it’s fake strength, that it’s just the aggressiveness of his narcissism, but it doesn’t matter - he is perceived as strong, and that’s his main weapon, his number one selling point. Look at his his announcements and listen to what his supporters say - the main focus is on depicting him as strong and his opponents as weak. Policies are an afterthought.

Republican voters wanting a strong Republican president is a no-brainer, but the thing that really surprised me is Democrat leaning voters (Democrat enough to vote for AOC, at least) preferring a strong Republican president because he’s strong. I find it counterintuitive - if you’re going to have to live under the opponent party’s rule, shouldn’t you prefer a weak president that would be less forceful when implementing these policies that you disagree with?

This insight does shine a new light on some well known points. For example - Biden and Harris received lots of fire for supporting Israel. This always seemed weird to me - wouldn’t Trump, if elected, support Israel so much harder? But this new insight make it all make (twisted) sense. If - or, actually, now we can say “when” - Trump as a president will support Israel it will be an act of strength because it aligns with the Republican values he represents. When Biden did it, it was against Democratic values and therefore perceived as weakness - as surrendering to pressure.

Or, more importantly - I keep seeing (mainly here on Lemmy) claims that the Democratic party lost these elections because they did not go left enough. With this new insight, I think the problem is not that they didn’t go left enough, but that they didn’t go hard enough. It doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you are aiming to be - you should be as forceful and as assertive as possible when going there. This is something Obama had in spades. This is what the Democrats need if they want to win the next elections.

Understanding why something is broken is a crucial prerequisite for fixing it. If you don’t care why it didn’t work, then you don’t care about making it work - you only care about being angry.

Small comfort: they still can’t physically force you like they can with biometrics.

When you run over a child, there won’t be blood stains on the hood.

So that whole anti-masking thing was also metaphoric?

That’s far too subtle even for people with fully functional brains. No way Internet commenters are going to let go of their holy rage long enough to entertain that interpretation.

This slogan sounds so much like a parody on Rightist ideology that despite all evidence I’m still struggling to believe it’s an actual Rightist slogan

He’s the punishment America deserves, but not the one it needs right now.

You wouldn’t download a book?

The point is not to reduce the amount of war crimes? Right. I forgot. The point is to signal as much virtue as possible.

This is not about “exercising choice”. This is about affecting the outcome.

To me, at least, it seems like they were fired not as a punishment for Russia’s war crimes but because their Russian citizenship made them compromised - at least in the eyes of their employer. But for the sake of the argument I’m willing to go with your interpretation.

The article doesn’t say who these Russian employees voted for. And it doesn’t matter - I doubt ABBYY knew how each of them voted when deciding to fire them. The question of whether or not they were held accountable had nothing to do with how they voted - only with what Russia ended up doing and with the fact they had a Russian citizenship.

Not voting for Putin, even voting against him, did not help the employees that did so to avoid being fired. The only thing that would have done that was if Russia didn’t invade Ukraine (which would have also had the nice little bonus of not having about a million casualties and not making the lives of many times that number a living hell. But we don’t care about such trivialities. We only care about the virtue that gets signaled)

But no vote they’d have cast could change that. Because Russia is a one-party system - Putin gets elected no matter what.

The USA is a two-party system. Either the Democrats get elected, or the Republicans. A third option is not more realistic than someone defeating Putin in the Russian elections. An American voter that cares about being associated with war crimes (I’m not even talking about whether the war crimes will happen or not. Nobody cares about that - only about being liable to them) can not take comfort in voting for a losing candidate that did not contribute to any war crimes (and never had the chance to). They’ll still be associated with these war crimes simply for being American, just like these Russians are being associated with Putin’s action simply for being Russian.

If war crimes are the main issue you care about in these elections, then the only scenario when you should not vote Democrat is if you think the Republicans are going to do better on that front.

So… do you think Trump, if elected, will commit less war crimes, or less horrible war crimes, than Harris?

Can you elaborate on these Russians? Are you referring to the ones that got conscripted to invade Ukraine?

The unwashed masses dare to think that we are the elites? Clearly a result of their inadequate education…