I’m sorry, when I made this account there were basically no other instances, and now I don’t want to move and lose the early adopter bragging rights

Personally, I don’t think even Merz is at the point just yet to outright create a coalition with them. However, that they did push a directive and try to push an actual law through parliament with AfD votes already is a sign of the direction things may end up going. Who knows, in a few months or years, there might just end up something happening like trouble in the most likely coming coalition of CDU/SPD, where the CDU just says they “had no choice” but to introduce a proto-fascist law that they and the AfD support, but the actual ruling coalition did not, resulting in legitimising them more and paving the way for an actual coalition.

I unstuck him - I think the script sometimes gets caught up on one command (e.g. “right” in that case) - and it seems providing the same command again helps the script to get unstuck (just giving another single “right” command).

PS: Not responsible for the script or stream, I just switch into it every now and then when my ADHD brain can’t focus on what it is supposed to do and needs something else for a while before doing what it is supposed to be doing.

Yeah, sorry, but that is like looking at the map in 1930 from these ones and saying “the NSDAP voters come from East Prussia only, don’t complain about the Nazis in Germany!”

I heard that argument often, and it’s true that the same way and same “we essentially keep the old constitution alive completely and change laws in ways that were technically legal” as back then won’t work.

However, fascism - also in the 1930s already - also has strategies like: “Just doing illegal things and overstepping what your posts are allowed to do, knowing you can only be stopped by force, even if judges and your superiors disagree.” That one was a massive part of how Hitler quickly outmanoeuvred von Papen, even though Papen was chancellor and Hitler “just” vice chancellor. The NSDAP-adjacent ministers, police chiefs, judges, etc. simply did not report to Papen, no matter what the law and constitution said.

What I am getting at: One should never think the laws on paper are some kind of shield and holy fact, only the laws as the executive (cops and courts, essentially) protects and enacts are what really matters, and those are corruptible, no matter how good the constitution is. (Another often quoted example: The constitution of North Korea also guarantees a lot of freedoms and rights, but no one would say, that protects the people there.)

It really isn’t, but as long as those resources are distributed through a market, there are problems even if you add money. Say the billionaires truly are incorruptible angels and put all their money to providing food and shelter, the not-yet-billionaires in the market suddenly have incentives to raise prices, withhold food to the market while prices are rising as a speculative gambit, stuff like that.

That’s one of the mechanisms through which the system itself, that produces billionaires, makes it at least hard or - imo - even impossible to truly undo the damage it does to create such billionaires, even when you have those billions. Another example is corruption: As soon as you put a lot of money into an issue, it creates an incentive there to funnel money away in secret, to provide false solutions that don’t solve anything, to scam, etc. A friend of mine worked on projects providing water infrastructure in countries in Africa from philanthropic and international aid funds, and he did get often frustrated telling how some projects simply vanish halfway through, because someone down the line had basically run off with the money (not that the projects were wholly useless, either, but they failed to fundamentally solve things by just throwing money at them). Someone like Bill Gates, as another example, has been unironically doing a lot of good as a philanthropist, but all his money still wasn’t able to truly tackle the root causes of the problems in the countries where he supports healthcare and such things - and inevitably, some of the funds he provided were used on glamour projects or ineffectual, nice-sounding strategies, or ended up in outright corruption. And at the same time, the question remains, what the system that made him a billionaire caused in damages to begin with.

That’s why I still think you can’t really tackle all these problems without doing away with a market structure, exchange value, capital accumulation, etc. - i.e., why I remain a dirty commie, instead of just arguing for redistribution (redistribution and more social-democratic, beneficial investment is still good, but you gotta always aim for the abolition of private property and capital accumulation as an end goal, imo).

Oh, and I just realised my ramble kind of missed OP’s point, which is also important: All the money caught up in the three-digit multi-billionaires net worth? It’s not representative of true goods and labour, it is what Marx would have called “dead” capital. As soon as it is used for anything but as financial capital, it can drive inflation massively, which connects to part of my first point.

EDIT: Another example that just came to my mind for how this can impact things - Mansa Musa and the stories surrounding his lavish spending during his Hajj, basically crashing the local economies. So, even pre-capitalist systems had to deal with these dynamics.

This is an interesting conundrum, actually. The big question at its core being:

Can you ever do enough good through philanthropy, so that it offsets the damage you had to do, in order to become a billionaire? Can even all the billionaires in the world do enough good with their money, to offset the damage done by a system, that allowed for them to become billionaires?

I, personally, don’t think it is possible.

To give an actual answer: I think, the world would definitely be better, but unless those billionaires collectively used all the power their money provides, to do away with money and the possibility of billionaires altogether, I don’t think it would amount to all that much.

To anyone not wanting to give on Patreon, there is also: https://liberapay.com/PieFed/

All things considered, it’s not yet falling off as quickly as I would have expected, maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but I seem to remember Lemmy had a harder crash after the first reddit exodus, as did mastodon several times, when people fled xitter.

the sole dev of both of these apps doesn’t think he needs any help and refuses to open source them.

Oof, that sucks. Seems like someone else needs to create an open source alternative app. The platforms themselves are libre software, right? I couldn’t find a lot for loops on that, but Pixelfed itself seems to be.

Perfect moment to plug [email protected]

Growing steadily, and in my opinion, definitely a way to supplement (still far from replace) YT. There’s actually some neat content on there by now, from just good to fascinatingly bizarre - but almost always very genuine and authentic. Especially when comparing to some years back, it really has become a proper seed for a platform instead of a novel experiment - but more people interacting with the content and/or supporting the creators would be amazing as the next step.

It’s obviously because the internet is so daft, I heard they even upvoted beans.

Quite literally, what just happened to me while trying to get myself pumped up to go and vote in 30 mins. (Will still go)

Definitely, here’s hoping the accountability question will prevent that, but the incentive is there, especially in systems with for-profit healthcare.

Even if it were to do pattern recognition as well as or slightly worse than a human, it’s still worthwhile. As the article points out: It’s basically a non-tiring, always-ready second opinion. That alone helps a lot.

Ah, to me, it is important to consider where it comes to the US foreign policy going forward in their era of fascism. I live in the EU, and I guess that was the foremost issue on my own mind. And I am not expecting something like a Russia-US-alliance myself, because of that lack of mutual loyalty. Only cooperation of convenience.

Was there a contradiction? Point is, there is no loyalty beyond that. If the favours for Russia were to no longer serve his own, personal interests (or at least, for as long as he believes them to do so, let’s not forget he is also very much fallible), he’d not support them. There is no ideological solidarity, or alliance or higher loyalty is what I was getting at. Just his belief that the world is fundamentally strong people preying on and using the weak, and that he thinks that he can cooperate with Putin on that - conditionally.

There’s always people that need reminding, like, I am sure there’s at least some people thinking Trump has some sort of higher loyalty towards Russia besides agreeing with their new world order of every country acting as “fuck you, got mine”-imperialists.

Oh, thanks for the info, that is great to know!

As far as I know, from when this was discussed after the first Reddit exodus, only commenting and posting makes you an active user. So the number is somewhat deceivingly small, as the vast majority on platforms like this are lurkers who maybe post/comment every once in a while at most.