And yet the United States continues to slide into fascism despite having elected Biden. What horrific Trump era policies did the Democrats even bother to repeal after they won in 2020 and held both the senate and the house?

They are still funding the construction of border wall segments. They never repealed the Republican tax cuts. They have done nothing about the concentration camps on the southern border for fuck’s sake. They never codified Roe v. Wade, we literally lost the right to abortions while Biden was in office. They could have stacked the supreme court but they didn’t.

The Democrats and the Republicans form an obfuscated one party system in the US. Republican leadership aggressively ramps up the oppression of marginalized people, then Democratic leadership does nothing to restore our rights nor proactively prevent the same thing from happening again. Instead they just use their time in office to suck all of the energy out of people’s movements that could actually effect change.

And much more importantly than all of that, Republicans and Democrats are virtually identically evil when it comes to foreign policy. When the US is dropping bombs on you and destroying your country, you’ll tend not to care whether it was a Red MAGA or Blue MAGA administration pulling the trigger.

In some specific cases it might be worthwhile to vote for Democrats in local elections where there exists much more leeway for politicians to stray from the party line, but voting for them in national elections is just lending your voice to legitimizing their bullshit good cop/bad cop routine they play with the Republicans.

Veritasium

Sucks about this guy, he used to actually make interesting pop-sci videos without mangling the concepts and conclusions too badly. It was a breath of fresh air compared to the bullshit other science popularizers like Michio Kaku were dreaming up at the time. But nowadays his videos all have these extremely vague clickbait titles. And much worse than that: he clearly shills tech from sponsored companies. Not with marked sponsorship segments, but with entire videos that are essentially long form advertisements with all of the disinformation marketing entails. Other than the word sponsor being highlighted and placed before the title, there is no indication for his audience that they shouldn’t view such sponsored videos as normal Veritasium videos.

The most blatant example of this was when he shilled for Waymo self driving ride share cars in an 18 minute video they sponsored. It was about two years ago, the title:

Why You Should Want Driverless Cars On Roads Now

Here’s a video detailing the ways in which Veritasium misleads his audience to produce corporate propaganda using the driverless car video as its main example. It’s an hour long, but I still recommend giving it a watch because it’s so thorough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CM0aohBfUTc

I’m sure Veritasium does still make good, well researched and well intentioned videos, but after seeing the way he intentionally manipulates his audience in certain videos, I can’t help but be distrustful of everything he says elsewhere.

Yep, and it’s a lot more successful than you’d think. I’ve been using it for over a year now and I literally have not come across a sponsored video yet that hasn’t had its sponsored segments reported. Not even on videos that were uploaded literally 10 minutes ago. Highly recommend

Congrats, that already exists as a browser addon and it’s free. Look up sponsorblock.

Hard embedding ads works for live streams since you can’t know when exactly any given ad will start or end. If Youtube were to do this, it would be very trivial for sponsorblock to simply take on the role of adblocker since the community would be able to report the location of the ads.

It’s based, actually. So is stealing from businesses. In fact, if piracy really was the same as stealing, I’d definitely make a point of pirating more often

Tbh, I lose some amount of respect for anyone who mentions they pay for media that is easily accessed through piracy, netflix included

I really wish I could have a permanent record of everything every liberal has ever said so I could easily demonstrate how full of shit they are in 10 to 20 years when they all collectively deny ever having supported Israel through the Palestinian genocide.

The funny thing is, the bigger these threads get over on Hexbear federated instances, the more users from instances like .ca, .ee, or .ml show up complaining about the Hexbears. That stays small in proportion to the actual discussion in the thread, but eventually becomes large in proportion to the stunted version of the thread that .world sees. So despite being defederated with us, .world threads slowly fill up with spam from users complaining about “Hexbear brigaders” as it leaks in and piles up from discussions and dunkings outside of their federation network.

Lemmy.world seems to be the only instance that would have been big enough to downvote us down the thread as viewed from other instances, but they defederated so we can’t see them and they can’t see us at all.

The rest that are federated don’t have the numbers to do this, especially when you consider a large chunk of them are lemmygrad users who are posting side by side with us. So overall our higher posting activity (that is partially a result of the lack of downvotes changing how we interact) results in Hexbear user heavy discussions rising to the top of threads even as viewed from other instances.

To see the whole structure, go over to lemmy.ml or lemmygrad, find this thread there, then scroll. Toward the bottom you’ll find a sort of underworld in this thread of lemmy.world users downvoting lemmygrad users into oblivion.

394 from the perspective of Hexbear. The pre-emptive lemmy.world defederation with Hexbear effectively splits big threads like this into two sections. At the top is the much higher activity Hexbear posting, and at the bottom is the lower activity lemmy.world posting where instead of substantive discussion, people who are in support of China just get downvoted to oblivion.

Ironically, Hexbear’s total removal of downvotes on their end confers an advantage here. Discussions and dunkings involving a lot of Hexbear users tend to rise to the top of threads sorted by hot because the lack of downvotes promotes actual discussion upon disagreement. This results in higher activity levels than those produced by the passive downvoting behavior typical of more reddit-like instances.