I’d honestly like to hear your take more broadly (what’s going on with the christians) on the topic if you were willing to share. I was brought up in the (babtist) church but no longer hold faith. Even still I like what JC had to say and have been appalled by what’s been going on because it is so far from what I was raised to understand. I’d be very curious to hear what someone with faith feels about the situation.

There are a lot of factors at play that make transness an easy target to be the scary other bigots rally around.

The simple truth is that unless you yourself are trans you cannot understand the trans experience. There is no way to explain the scope or impact it has on someone’s life. It’s automatically alien and provides essentially a permanent out group. Anyone who is uncomfortable with people who are different or that have different experiences than themselves are almost certainly transphobic to some degree. Right now to the best of my knowledge transphobia is the only thing all hate groups share.

Trans people are the current scapegoats because prior to the pandemic we had an explosion of trans people feeling safe enough to come out online (I blame Obama making us all feel safe). They are particularly effective because both white nationalists and evangelicals use queerness as a scapegoat all the time anyway so it was easy for them to rally around. Which is why conservative politicians fearmonger around trans people.

It’s not that simple, but it’s close enough for a lemmy comment.

To be fair they’re not actually lying, they are misrepresenting the truth. Facebook actually doesn’t sell your data to third parties because they lease temporary access to it instead. Selling the data would mean they couldn’t recapitalize it with the same customers.

Meta’s customers couldn’t use it to skip doing their own market research and need to already know who they want to advertise to before they buy ads with Facebook. (It does provide insights and analytics about demographics during a campaign as well)

In real terms, we still have a lot left to lose before things get so bad it’s time to take up arms. The left is losing because it has spent all of its time responding to what the right has been doing and not enough time working towards the things their constituents want.

It is time to organize and get directly involved if you care about keeping things from getting worse. I can’t say this with any authority but there are three problems we have to solve:

1. How can we reestablish a common reality with our neighbors? (Mis- and disinformation)
2. How can we pull our neighbors back from the influence of fascists?
3. How can we ensure that our children inherit better than what we have now and are about to go through?

The fight will come later, and it will come. Right now we have to prioritize supporting each other. We’re on our own for at least the next two years, we need to get creative and find ways to thrive in spite of the bullshit.

We’re in kind of a mess right now. The best way we can get out of it is if all of us little people stick together. I’m not a conservative but by Lemmy standards my politics and world view are alien. We all need to figure out a way to coexist and work together if we are ever going to have a chance to deprogram our MAGA neighbors and find a way forward together.

It seems productive to try to share my weird ass views and try to find common ground.

Any innocent death is unacceptable. If under Trump every single Palestinian in Gaza would be killed and under Kamala a single old man would die, I still would make the same choice.

That old man has just as much right to live as anyone else, just because he is the only casualty that doesn’t make his life any less valuable or gives someone any more right to kill him.

I am truly sorry this is the outcome we have gotten and that my actions have played a small part in how things have unfolded. But I do not regret my choice not to vote.

I accept my responsibility in how things have turned out. I would feel absolutely horrible and would be wrought with guilt for my entire life if it had come down to a single vote, but I would not have voted for either Kamala or Trump even if I had gone to the polls.

I understand that makes me responsible in a very small way for Trump winning and I don’t like it, but I accept that. It was a risk I was willing to take in February when I decided not to vote.

Gaza wasn’t why I decided not to vote at all, the disconnect between voter and politician and the way queer issues were completely abandoned this election were why I didn’t vote. If Kamala had said she would end our alliance with Israel if they didn’t stop killing civilians she still wouldn’t have gotten my vote because I wasn’t casting one to begin with.

To be fair he hadn’t outed himself as a racist asshat in 2016. He was just a narcissist I thought was funnier than Trump.

As to your point about my inaction contributing to more dead in Gaza, I am indifferent. Any blood on our hands in Gaza is unacceptable. Had Kamala been chosen in a primary I might have considered voting for her as a compromise candidate, but having her foisted on us after the other compromise candidate was too stubborn to step down before he got in the way is bullshit.

Gaza was what OP asked about, but it’s definitely not the only thing I care about at the polls. The main reason I decided not to vote at all is because the will of the people is not reflected by any politicians. There are a dozen issues most Americans agree on (legal weed, minimum wage) that our current politicians won’t address because they are at odds with donors. I decided it wasn’t worth participating in the political system again until our elected officials do what we want instead of their donors.

If the oligarchy wants to take over officially I can’t stop them, but I don’t have to participate either.

To the dead Palestinian children they are.

Do you feel like your inaction is fine because either way, the genocide doesn’t end?

Pretty much. Less genocide is not a compelling argument. The children who died with Kamala in the White House would be just as dead with Trump.

I can’t speak for others, but I can tell you why I didn’t vote for Harris.

I am a lifelong independent voter. In 2016 I wrote in Kanye West, in 2020 I wrote in Nobody, this year I didn’t even vote. (I also voted Bush in '04, Ron Paul in '08, and Obama in '12) I go to the polls even if I am planning to writing in a presidential pick because there are usually ballot issues or other races I care about.

I decided not to vote when the DNC opted to not hold a primary even though absolutely no one wanted a Biden second term and the deal was elect Biden in 2020 and they’d find someone good for '24. After Biden’s disastrous debate and he dropped out, I was angry because everyone said no to Kamala already in 2020, but they still ran her.

On the issues, Kamala is too centrist for me and Gaza is a deal breaker. Most Palestinian casualties have been civilians and waaaaay too many children. Using my tax dollars to kill foreign children is not acceptable. I don’t care that Israel is our ally or they they provide us an important strategic resource in the region. I honestly don’t care if Israel wants to do a genocide or if Palestine wants to do a bunch or terrorism, that’s on them. But we don’t have to support it and I won’t vote for anyone who will.

It already is friend.

I set my mom (62) up an old laptop running Ubuntu last year when her laptop was stolen out of my sister’s car. She’s adjusted fairly well to it. She needed a lot of hands on support at first and any time she uses her printer, but she has figured out how to do a lot of things on it on her own.

She makes papercraft activities in inkscape for a weekly storytime she hosts at a bookstore and has gotten very proficient, but still needs some hand holding when printing errors crop up.

I couldn’t tell you specifically why, but I would question the value of such a project. Project 2025 undermines the foundations of the United States and moves the US towards authoritarianism.

Red versus Blue was an entertaining web series, but not an effective system of governance. Things like project 2025 are symptoms of a deeper sickness in the United States. Democrats shouldn’t be playing the same game as fascists, once you play by their rules, you’ve already lost.

The United States is an Oligarchy, the will of the people is almost entirely eclipsed by the interests of capital. Democrats don’t need their own project 2025, the people need representation in government regardless of what color flag their elected officials fly.

I don’t get everyone’s obsession with cybernetic implants. If I needed a replacement, sure. But could you imagine today’s enshittified corporate structure making a cyberlimb? 100% a massive up front purchase and a hefty subscription, especially if it’s not a functional replacement.

Personally I want a functional metaverse. Full dive computing.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

Npp can be replaced by several different linux tools. You just have to like using the terminal a bit. Personally I get it. I know awk and sed and all those crunchy tools the olds made exist, but it’s not a crime to have it all in one place in a gui. That said it npp 1000% works under wine. Sublime Text has a linux version and all the plugins you could ever want if you’re willing to learn new ways of doing stuff you’ve already figured out. Vscodium is also a decent npp replacement. It’s fast, has a cli, and a great plugin ecosystem.

Excel is all hype. Unless you’re a data analyst or numbers nerd LibreOffice Calc has all the things. It’s not as performant as excel with large datasets, but it has formulas, pivot tables (though somewhat weird), and macros. It’s just ugly installed from the debian repo. Also if you’re paying for office you can probably still use excel in the browser.

OneDrive sucks, unless you are committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. If you find a suitable replacement for excel, you could always cancel your office subscription and setup a nextcloud instance. You can have it all hosted for you through nextcloud and they have web based office tools using LibreOffice. Their syncing app works on everything so you’ve got options. Or you can try to self-host it. I have a raspberry pi with an external hard drive attached running nextcloud, and a vpn. Reasonably stable, if slow.

I hope that outside of Visual Studio, you can completely free yourself of the windows ecosystem.

Eh, technical merit is only one of many factors that determine what language is the “best”. Best is inherently a subjective assessment. Rust’s safety and performance is the conceptual bible rustacians use to justify thier faith.

I also know religious people who have written books about their faith too (my uncle is a preacher and my ex-spouse was getting their doctorate in theology). Rust has the same reality-blind, proselytizing zealots.

The needs of the project being planning and the technical abilities of the developers building it are more important that what language is superior.

I like rust. I own a physical copy of the book and donated money to the rust foundation. I have written a few utilities and programs in rust. The runtime performance and safety is paid for in dev time. I would argue that for most software projects, especially small ones, Rust adds too much complexity for maintainability and ease of development.

I know religious people who could not explain their faith so specifically.

Is it really just old men saying stuff should remain in C/C++ to preserve their nostalgia? What a bunch of petty bullsh!t.

There aren’t many ways to organize raising the money required to build a better youtube or reddit. You could kickstart it, but you’d better hope whoever does the dev doesn’t sell. Another option would be a large open source ngo funding the development, but you’re still talking long timelines to completion.

There definitely is room for a more pro-social social media platform that isn’t a clone of something else. Paying for it is another matter.