They're returning next month on Crew-9, which I think has been the plan since September.

True that. I knew about the scandal and you are 100% right and the video is excellent. I was just briefly inhabiting a fantasy world where people are treating Trump with the laughter and dismissal that he deserves, and I guess which person holds which office wasn't a part of my imagining.

Yeah, I kind of knew that from glancing at the story. Just let me enjoy my fantasy where the US is not about to fracture and collapse into the sea, amid a big chorus of "But he's not allowed to do that!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOt03BNPExo&t=3510s

I mean, it kind of makes sense. If Trump can say "naw fuck your laws I am king" nothing is really to stop the (edit: mayor) governor of New York from saying "naw fuck you king, I run this place."

I don't think it is overall a good development. The breakdown of democracy is not a good thing, even if it is widespread instead of concentrated. But also, it feels like it's better, the more that people look at what the federal government in its current form has to say about anything and just kind of have a good belly laugh and go back to whatever they felt like doing before.

I mean all kinds of things can have an effect. A lot of totalitarian regimes were overthrown starting from a way worse position than "Trump and Musk are in the White House and a lot of people are doing what they say." But also, the US is sleeping right now, and a lot of what it takes is just a shitload of people to be on your side. Right now they are not.

Of course that can change.

those people could easily be said to include you and me

IDK about you, but it definitely includes me. Like you, I don't really know what to do.

I went to a protest. I talk about it online. Mostly it's just watching it all burning, though. I feel like I need to be doing way more.

There's this:

https://events.pol-rev.com/

Check the profile on their home instance, too. Both of these situations can happen: Either your admins have banned them from your instance specifically, or else their home instance's admins have banned them from everywhere.

Many too small boxes and Maru

We brought the rats with us to this place, we created them. They were happy in the woods living out their little lives start to finish unknown to the world. They are still there to this day, self-sufficient social animals. People keep them as pets.

Nothing in nature is malicious. Even with destruction or danger there is no malice, cruelty, self-deceptive excuse. There is horrible desperate suffering, of an indifferent starving-in-the-falling-snow kind, but no natural creature will deliberately enhance it. It simply is.

With intelligence, though, comes evil. Cats have a helping, and dolphins, and for us with these big healthy brains it is one of our signature features. From dirt we created filth. For population in balance, we created slums. From food we created a bloated mess of carbohydrates and sweeteners. Far more than we need and usually unhealthy, handled carelessly. Sewers and dumpsters from rivers and woods, overflowing. And so, the rat was born. A black-sheep cousin for those little social animals who raise up their babies in the woods.

Unknowing, they got pulled through into the nightmare of a niche we'd created for ourselves. Nature abhors a vacuum so they became something new. But they didn't want to. We did it on purpose. They did not. It's not their fault. It was us.

Admins can gift abandoned communities to new mods, though, and often do. It's one of the nice things about having smaller units of organization instead of massive monoliths.

They are not attempting to break the encryption. As is often the case, they're not doing that hard thing, just doing much easier things like sending malicious QR codes to Signal users wrapped up as announcements from trusted people. It's in the article.

It is not a problem if people are not posting to a community.

It's a slight problem, maybe, if that community is still showing up in lists of communities as if it were active, but there are enough places to find out about new or active communities that I think it is ok.

I actually think there is a community somewhere which is specifically for the purpose of "resurrecting" abandoned communities, but I'm not sure it's necessary, TBH. People are going to talk if they want to and not if they don't have something to say and I think it is ok.

I don't know the word any more than you do, but a lot of catastrophes in previously-comfortable societies were enabled by a large amount of indifference by the people who if they'd been spurred to action would have been able to stop it.

Solzhenitsyn said that so many times, in the Gulag, he played it over in his head what he and people he knew should have done to resist, but they didn't do much of anything.

I think, also, what gives the trolls power is everyone getting upset about it. If it was 50% of the office saying "Is ChristmasTreeSelf coming to the party?" and 50% saying "Bro I'm not saying that it is stupid", but neither one really treating it as any different than any other Tuesday, then it's fine. But because people have this deeply held impassion about the whole issue (which exists for a valid reason of course), it means they feel like they need to set these super-rigid rules about what is "allowed" and "not allowed" out of those outcomes, and then other people get upset about having things they are thinking inside their head that they will get banned if they say out loud, and it just becomes a situation of upset-ness instead of anything like positive communication between people. And then there are people who like to be performatively upset because someone violated the rules and now they're all excited to correct them, which just compounds the problem which was already an upset situation.

It is okay if people think different from you. I feel like a lot of modern society involves people needing the debate to continue until their own particular viewpoint is "proven right" and becomes the law of the land, so they won't have to deal with any enemy viewpoints anywhere within the kingdom without someone coming in to correct them, forcibly if necessary, which isn't really how it works.

I think that's probably the instigating factor. He saw on Twitter that the ISS has a big crack and the government is covering it up, he decided it's true because in his mind trolls on the internet have a higher level of authority than any expert or scientist, and now he has to insist on deorbiting it to prove himself right instead of backing down or listening to any reason to the contrary.

Blahaj said you have to respect everyone's pronouns, even if you think they are trolling, because it's not up for debate and you don't get to set conditions before you start calling someone by the right appelations. Fair enough.

A user figured out that meant they could identify as a dragon, tell everyone their pronouns were "drag," and get people banned from blahaj for not saying "drag," or trying to tell this person that drag weren't actually a dragon. Blahaj, in the mode of overly well-intentioned leftists throughout all history, bought into it hard and obediently virtue-signaled by banning anyone who pointed out that drag was taking the piss. Presumably, drag laughed dragself out of dragr chair every time it happened. Drag also tended to display other fun behavior like encouraging other users to commit suicide, if I remember right.

Apparently, blahaj has finally figured it out. I eagerly await whatever overcorrection or other type of continuingly-counterproductive drama is going to ensue now. Presumably, some new user will emerge with some other type of bizarre edge case in the "official correct morality" that everyone is required to agree on, to instigate everyone to get into slap fights over.

"Gulf of Go Fuck Yourself" has a really unexpected poetry to it.