• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 29th, 2023
  • WideEyedStupid@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.world•Trump Plans $92 Million Military Parade—Honoring Himself | Donald Trump is pulling straight from the dictator’s playbook.
    0·
    2 months ago

    Yeah, you know, I’m not actually American and I don’t pay homage to any army. And I hope you didn’t truly conclude from my post that this parade bullshit is the only thing I dislike about Trump, or that due to a lack thereof somehow I approved of Bush? Come on, even you know that’s just a poor straw man.

    That said, I don’t disagree at all with the other stuff you’re saying, you are absolutely right. I’m just telling you that no normal (and by normal, I don’t necessarily mean good!) leader (i.e. one who is not a megalomaniac, a narcissist or a (wannabe) dictator) would demand a military parade for their birthday. Honestly not. And even if you don’t care because it’s “symbolic,” you should still care because it shows you the type of person he is. The fact that it’s “also the army’s 250th birthday” is irrelevant, because it’s irrelevant to Trump. HE wants a birthday parade for HIS birthday. He thinks he deserves it. He thinks his birthday is worth a 100 million dollars and he doesn’t give a fuck that the tax payers are footing the bill.

    Trump sees himself as the institution. That’s the whole point. The U.S., that’s him. The government, it’s him. L’État, c’est moi.

    Now if it were me I’d abolish military parades completely, because imo it’s just a waste of money. But the fact that Trump wants one for himself is just another page out of his Dictator handbook.

  • WideEyedStupid@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Across America, clean energy plants are being banned faster than they're being builtEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    The total death toll and the number of people suffering health issues (past and present) due to coal are orders of magnitude larger than those due to nuclear power (not to even mention the damage to the environment!). The problem is that people respond more to one-time big disasters than to numbers over time. Something like Chornobyl is terrifying and a big deal, so people remember it. They don’t remember every Tom, Dick and Harry that’s died over the years due to black lung or accidents or other stuff from coal.

    You can even see this attitude in other ways too. It seems like a lot of Americans are still suffering mass trauma from 9/11 and accept the most horrific Patriot Act-type shit because of it. But in the end, it was less than 3000 people who died in the attack (and don’t get me wrong, it was terrible!), but waaaaaaay more people die (and have died) from lack of (access to) healthcare, and it seems that still barely anyone is actually trying to fix that. Or a mass shooting that kills 11 people, that’s a big deal, right? But the fact that over a million Americans died due to Covid didn’t really register as a disaster for a lot of people.

    Nuclear power is such a no-brainer to me, but it sounds ‘scary’ and lots of people don’t understand it, which makes it even more scary. Plus, of course the fossil fuel industry propaganda and lobbying, and the memory of people who know other people who used to work in coal towns and had pretty decent lives. Or the “what about nuclear waste!”-crap that always comes up. Yes, nuclear waste is a thing, but let’s put it next to all the damaging crap that coal mines produce, accumulated. It’s way worse.

    Anyway. It’s hard to fight all that, even when rationally, statistically, nuclear power should be a no-brainer. Edit: and there is no political will either, it seems. Whether it’s because they love their fossil fuel bribes or because they’re too scared to lose some voters… they’ll never do good things just to do good.

    Edit: just to be clear, it’s definitely not a USA-exclusive problem. I currently live in Germany and their weird relationship to nuclear power is also batshit. All based on fear and bullshit.

  • WideEyedStupid@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Desperate or just business as normal?English
    581·
    2 years ago

    How would this even work? How are they going to stop brigading, bots, low effort spam crap for upvotes, massive reposting, etc? How will this actually increase quality of content?

    Also: this would mean giving reddit your actual information, right? How else are they going to pay you? Or are they going to try using crypto and nfts?

    It sounds like a terrible idea to me, tbh. Maybe they should start with paid moderators to deal with all the extra spam, crossposting, brigading and bots that will result from this move.

  • WideEyedStupid@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.world•Facebook turns over mother and daughter’s chat history to police resulting in abortion chargesEnglish
    1·
    2 years ago

    You can think the mother and daughter should face consequences AND at the same time think it’s beyond disgusting that facebook even has this info to begin with AND that they handed it over so easily.

    The problem isn’t that “facebook followed the law” – it’s that they knowingly created a situation where they could follow the law to begin with. If they would stop collecting so much data and just encrypt their chats, there would already be less of an issue.

    I think people have the tendency to think like “well I have nothing to hide, so who cares?” or “well in this case I agree with what happened, so it’s fine.” But laws get changed all the time, government changes all the time. And when a dictator at some point changes some laws, suddenly facebook is ‘following the law’ by giving law enforcement information on who is atheist, or gay, or what books you like, what your political opinions are, etc. They’d still be “following the law” – but just because something is law doesn’t make it right and imo it’s terrifying that companies who have so much money and power (and with it you would hope: responsibility) don’t seem to have any scrupules regarding working with government/LE.