iie [they/them, he/him]

$30.50 seems inaccurate. If you’re tipping 20% then you ordered at least $150 worth of food lol.

that’s stupid, then, why would you bother to make a comment like that. Who gives a shit?

hexbears are abrasive because we expect most liberals to be venomous and dismissive toward us and not listen to anything we say, even if we operate in good faith. so instead of wasting a lot of energy on a response that will be thrown back at us like dogshit, we’re flippant and cursory. for my part, I actually still respond in good faith most of the time, but I pick my battles.

what the fuck does that even mean, “left wing version of /r/TheDonald”

like the donald but believing the exact opposite things?

I have a different answer than blakeus12

the two factors are

1. An ambient sense of how unreceptive the instance is toward us. If the distribution of responses we get is skewed too far toward “I don’t give a fuck what you have to say, I’m not reading that, fuck you you disgusting tankie,” that’s a reason to not federate. And I mean… I’ll be the first one to admit hexbears can be annoying and too eager to dunk on people, but on the flip side I also think our views are often misrepresented and demonized, and it’s frustrating when people won’t even bother to understand what we actually think or why.

2. If any of our users feel harrassed or unsafe, even if the culprits are a small minority of the instance, we are liable to defederate. And this shouldn’t be taken personally! We all know lemmy still has limited mod tools. But we prioritize each other over federation, we’re a close-knit community who have been together for years.

when a majority white community mocks a chinese man by comparing his appearance to a yellow bear, it’s a little weird

I think competition — actual competition, not “5 megacorps own everything” competition — can be useful in some cases, but keep in mind that competition does not necessarily incentivize good products. With food, for example, competition incentivizes addictive, unhealthy shit. With social media, same thing. With labor, it incentivizes exploitation, because whichever company squeezes the most work out of people for the lowest pay outcompetes everyone else. You can ameliorate these shitty incentive structures by putting workers and communities in charge of production, rather than owners and shareholders who want to maximize profit at the expense of any other metric.

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i mean it’s basically a trolley problem. whether or not we blame someone who was born into naziism, at some point we have to stop them before they hurt others. and if the nazis are armed and organized, we start running out of peaceful ways to stop them.

one of the features rich capitalist countries share is extracting trillions of dollars out of poorer countries every year lol

the best time to treat cancer is early, before it metastasizes and becomes inoperable

“the Ukrainians” are not a monolith. You may be aware that a civil war raged for 8 years before Russia invaded?

Study: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

From the abstract:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

further down:

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

What is it, like, 70% of Americans want single payer healthcare?

I mean Reddit’s director of policy, Jessica Ashooh, is former Deputy Director of the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Strategy Task Force — she’s literally a state department plant.