Another American here. Yeah, we’re not Europe’s friend anymore. I hate it, but it’s true. Dear Leader has made it abundantly clear that unless you are somehow enriching him and/or his billionaire cabinet, he’s not interested in being your friend. You can hold up as many past agreements and treaties his predecessors signed and it won’t mean jack shit to him. Putin is his daddy because Putin loves oligarchs, and wants to be an oligarch sooooooo bad.
TL;DR: Bad Shit that overshadows My Shit happens in the world. But My Shit happens to Me, and my not liking it doesn’t in any way negate the others’ Bad Shit (which they’re also fully allowed, encouraged even, to complain about).
People complain. It’s human nature. The happiest people in the world have complaints. If you feel like you’re seeing it too much, it could very well be a symptom of where you spend your time. Taking some of your points one-by-one:
“… at least from what I can tell on the internet”
This is your biggest problem. The Internet is hardly an accurate reflection of society. Half the people on social media work hard to project what they think is a “perfect life” to others. The other half pretty much do the opposite: complain.
“… other countries have wars… we complain that eggs are too expensive…”
You ever heard the saying “all politics are local?” This, right here, is that, 100%. We can all agree that what’s going on in war zones and third-world countries trumps any thing likely to happen to us in a “these western 1st world countries,” but does that mean I’m not allowed to be upset about the things negatively affecting me, or just that I’m not allowed to voice my frustrations? “Oh, I just got fired and will probably be evicted in a couple months, but people on the other side of the world don’t have food, so I should be happy.” Me being mad at something that angers me doesn’t lessen the tragedies of the world.
“Why do people waste all this time with complaining…”
If you’ve ever dated someone, or had a really close friend, you learn that sometimes when they complain to you, they don’t expect you to fix their problem. They just need an avenue to vent. The Internet is also used pretty widely for this. They’re not “destroying their own life,” they’re venting, or actually looking for help, which is actually pretty healthy!
It’s actually a very simple ploy they’ve used since before I was born (I’m not young). Anything they can paint as sexual, or that actually is out of the sexual “norm,” they will use as a scapegoat. They used it against blacks (coming after their white women), gays, and now trans. Pedophilia and rape are the two Worst Things, and if they can tie the Bad Guy du jour, that equals fear-votes. The best kind of right wing votes in all the land.
Forgot to add that I’m not saying Lemmy is perfect as is. For sure there are things that can be improved and tweaked. And by all means, people who want to contribute should be encouraged and applauded. I’m just saying that the community that’s grown here is pretty great, and growth coming from slow-ish trickle of new users probably wouldn’t threaten that. Right now, Lemmy has a good late-90s, early 00s community feeling, and I really enjoy it.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think the effort to make joining Lemmy easier has some downsides. One of the nicest things about these communities is how easy it is to have good conversations with internet strangers. I’ve grown to appreciate and hope for Lemmy not trying to be a Reddit replacement. In fact, I’m totally fine with “the masses” staying in Spez’s data harvesting machine. If, one day, Lemmy gets as popular as Reddit, I think it will inevitably have many of the same problems. It just theoretically won’t be selling your data for profit (one hopes, anyway). My wife isn’t super-techy, and I explained the concept of Lemmy to my wife in about 10 minutes. She set up an account in about 5.
To me, it’s not that using or joining Lemmy is hard. It’s that a lot of people have come to loathe change. They’re told that Lemmy is “like Reddit,” so why leave Reddit, all their accumulated Internet points, and their familiar communities/echo chambers? Pretty much all of them also use other data-harvesting social media sites, so they mostly don’t care about that aspect. When I tell my friends about Lemmy I talk about how the size of the communities is really conducive to good conversations from wide enough ranges of opinions and experiences, compared to Reddit’s too much of everything including trolls.
On the one hand, good for her. On the other, I’m certain FedSoc has a list of able-bodied, ambulance chasing yes-men ready to take up positions like this.
White Stripes are probably ok though. Stripes indicate diversity, right?
Agreed! I’m actually hoping no more people leave Reddit. I like the community here so much better. For sure, there’s some trolls and echo chambers, but it’s mostly a pretty good place.
This may be overthinking things a bit but…
I mod a desert of a sub for my alma mater, and I’m pretty sure the same person downvotes everything I post there. No comments, just a single downvote. As a mod I would love to be able to confirm my suspicions, but as a user, I like my votes to be anonymous.
As a middle ground, perhaps the software itself could auto-mod a bit. If a single user only ever downvotes content from a community, and crosses a certain threshold, they might be soft-banned for some number of days with a note in the mod log to the effect of “negative contribution.” After some amount of time, the ban is automatically lifted. If a community mod notices that the same user keeps getting soft-banned every 30-something days (the soft-ban limit plus some amount of time for it to kick back in), they can decide if they want to ban the user.
I don’t think it’s mean. There’s a reason we have a federal retirement age, and I think it’s stupid that we don’t apply it to elected and appointed officials.
He won’t have to. Musk will just buy it and make it WaPo 2.0
Yeah, either way, it was a pretty dumb thing to say. Court the guy’s endorsement or don’t, but don’t actively denigrate the guy. He represents a sizable group of voters, and as I reminded a friend today, one of the bedrock rules of running for election is never call voters stupid (similar to saying we don’t need you to win). Everybody might “know” it, but you never ever come right out and say it. Only one guy has somehow found success doing that.
Accurate. Glad to see someone is calling it like they see it.
I thought Harris’ tone-deaf moment was in response to him deciding not to endorse a candidate rather than the other way around. Maybe I’m confusing union bosses, but I didn’t think the guy who spoke at the RNC endorsed either ticket in the end.
Damn I’m really appreciating the cat pics lately!
RIGHT!? The treasury and HR! Why are Senators not screaming until they’re hoarse!? If this isn’t the worst Executive overreach in the history of this country I don’t know what is!
All I have to say, and I said it on that day of the RNC, but fuck that union guy for actually thinking the GOP gave 2 shots about unions after generations of fighting like Hell to gut them. Also fuck him for not endorsing the candidate who, while not necessarily a friend of unions, certainly wouldn’t have been actively working against them.
RIGHT!? I mean, ignore the lawsuits against his dad and him for discriminatory practices as landlords or the long-debunked shit he said about Saudis celebrating 911, or the constant categorizing immigrants as “murderers and rapists.” Seriously, short of wearing a fucking white hood, what more does a guy need to say or do to be universally seen as what he so clearly is? Burn a cross on the Elipse?
You know, when there’s a “Black People for the guy who has a extremely well-documented history of discriminatory behavior towards non-white people that he undoubtedly learned at a young age from his dad” group and they help you win elections, you can pretty much do and say whatever you want. Stockholm syndrome’s an especially vindictive bitch when a whole country has to deal with the repercussions!
American here. You are absolutely correct. Europeans need to be calling their government representatives en masse demanding they do everything in their power to disengage from the US. Including evicting the US military.