Hopefully more hosts follow and point out the major hypocrisy from MAGA.

That will do nothing. They enjoy their own hypocrisy. They don’t care about consistency of principles and are quite happy to just want everything their way while no one else gets anything. They’re quite happy to abuse language by saying whatever suits them in the moment. It drives their opponents crazy as they try to point out how inconsistent and irrational they’re being. The fascists don’t care, but they do love to see you get frustrated. It’s just part of their sadistic fun: messing with people, playing with their prey until they are ready to exterminate them.

To complain that fascists are hypocritical or inconsistent is to miss the point of fascism, at least if your hope is to shock them into being more reasonable. I know this quote from Sartre is everywhere but he said it so well:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

Now all that’s needed is redefining having a different opinion as being political violence, and America’s transformation into a fascist dictatorship will be complete.

How about declaring opposition to fascism to be terrorism?

Trump says he will label antifa as a terrorist organization

Some people seem to have misinterpreted your previous comment as expressing approval. But this disregard for the usual rules and standards is certainly part of the fascist playbook. It and the constant lying and goalpost-shifting are how they toy with their opponents and demonstrate that they just don’t care. That’s why the far right always speaks in bad faith. They enjoy the sport and it buys them time to load their guns.

When have war crimes ever come back to bite a US President? Getting away with it is a long tradition.

These people suffer from a severe lack of imagination. Raised to pursue success along a solitary economic metric, they ignore all arts and sciences extraneous to that pursuit. They treat the world outside their interests like a children’s game they’re not really into. Their wealth insulates them from friction so effectively there’s no incentive or pressure for them to develop an imagination, or diversify their knowledge to the point where an imagination might emerge on its own.

That’s the startling thing about these tech guys: they are utterly oblivious to life outside of their extremely narrow little domain, and they occupy that domain largely because they never had the imagination or curiosity to look past it. The Silicon Valley milieu they grew up in told them that success consisted in this one thing, and they just swallowed the story and dedicated their lives to it without ever pausing to question, investigate or think for themselves. They buy into ideologies without ever exploring alternatives. They condemn the humanities with no understanding of them, and no interest in learning. They constantly attempt to solve philosophical, existential or cultural problems with technology, because they don’t even notice that they’re not engineering problems. These are dull people, the sort who’d stockpile art as an investment and status symbol without ever looking at it for more than a few seconds. They’re rich financially but in other ways everyone can see how impoverished they are except them.

Of course. It’s just crazy that this “antifascism is bad” line gets any traction at all, and that the media don’t call it out.

All the tech CEOs are playing this game, even in the established companies. When was the last time Satya Nadella or Sundar Pichai spoke non-bullshit?

US culture conflates money with all kinds of things: intelligence, importance, respectability, work ethic, maturity, creativity, “good genes”, even godliness. Many people just can’t see the very clear truth that to be super-rich you usually just need to be a lucky asshole.

“As of this time, there’s no evidence of foul play,” Peeler said, adding that the Bolivar County Coroner’s Office retrieved Reed’s body for further examination. Deputy Coroner Murray Roark, who assisted in the medical review, stated there were no signs of broken limbs and suggested the case pointed toward self-harm, though the investigation remains active.

Kind of comes over like “We can tell this isn’t a lynching because we always break the victim’s legs.”

And all for what? So a few can profit before the bubble bursts?

They can go after the admins of individual instances. These are not usually people with a whole lot of money for legal defense. They may even go after the hosting providers, who will prefer to shut down the instances rather than pay penalties. Lots of countries are working on this kind of law at the same time, so it may become a legal hazard to run a Lemmy instance anywhere.

For a while that might be nice, but if “age” verification (actually ID verification) as a legal requirement catches on, Lemmy’s days may be numbered.

It’s shocking how the media just repeat the statements of this government without any questions asked. They’re really functioning as propaganda distributors rather than journalists these days. We’re seeing it also with them repeating uncritically the FBI’s claims about the Charlie Kirk shooting suspect.

Well if they had done that they could say they had done that. But the more likely hypothesis given who we’re dealing with here is that it’s bullshit and there was no letter.

I remember when antifascist was a good thing to be. Like all the time from the 1930s to the 2010s.

I guess I’m just touchy given that the whole tenor of their media communications these days seems designed to forge an association in the public’s mind between violent crime and trans people.

Keystone Kash.

It it just me or is there a rather important “Kash Patel says” missing from the headline?

And this right-wing policy of finding someone trans to mention in every report of a shooting, no matter how tangential or irrelevant their transness may be, just so the public can make a good solid mental association between trans people and dangerous violence, is absolutely disgusting.

“The roommate was a romantic partner, a male transitioning to female,” Cox said. “I can say that he has been incredibly cooperative, this partner has been very cooperative, had no idea that this was happening.”

I think that would he she, you misgendering motherfucker.

The MAGA solution to bad economic figures. And if you don’t record the numbers of COVID and measles infections, and cancel every program monitoring climate change, those problems magically go away too.