Let’s do a thought experiment here.

Pretend that the answer is no - they do not have that right.

Okay - now what? If they don’t have the right to do that, then that means… what exactly? Are they to be arrested if they try? Are you somehow granted the right to kill them if they try? Is there any reasonable method by which they can actually be denied that right?

Yes - all people have a right to feel however they feel and to voice their feelings. Or more precisely, nobody can possibly have the right to stop them.

The thing they don’t have a right to is your attention, concern, sympathy etc. You’re entirely free to grant or withhold those things as you prefer.

By design.

Those anti-features don’t exist in Lemmy

No, it in fact hasn’t. If anything, it’s been verified by them, because they generally start off by admitting that everything I said is true. It’s just that they then go on to say that it somehow doesn’t count because it’s possible to opt out of those anti-features.

Which misses both the point that the anti-features do exist (as opposed to Lemmy) and do exist because rimu stuck them in there, and that most of the reason it’s possible to opt out of them is because other people - notably wjs018 - added that functionality.

Gonna have to disagree with you on this one.

Much though one might criticize the lemmy devs for their politics, at least they keep it to their instance. They don’t bake it into the software.

And that’s very much as opposed to rimu, whose opinions are at the heart of Piefed and forced into virtually everything the software does from the moment you sign up for a piefed instance, from the preset subscriptions to the reputation tags and default hiding of downvoted content to the list of prohibited sources and banned domains.

All you have to do to avoid Dessalines and Nutonic’s opinions is to avoid their instance and federated ones. But it’s impossible to use Piefed and avoid rimu’s opinions, because they’re baked into the software.

Okay - here’s the moment again.

Frey could go down in history as a hero. All he needs to do is call a press conference and give a speech with a bit of background, then say something like, “So I would like to take this opportunity to, on behalf of the fine people of Minneapolis, say to Donald Trump (look straight at camera) ‘Go fuck yourself.’ Thank you very much.”

Somebody needs to do it, and very publicly. And the moment that someone does, the dam is going to break and "Go fuck yourself"s are going to start rolling in from all over the world.

The fact that he won’t be has no bearing at all on the fact that he should be.

The President of the United States is a deranged lunatic and needs to be removed from office per the 25th Amendment.

It would almost be better of Trump was a conscious agent deliberately working for the benefit of China, but he’s just an angry, petulant, bigoted moron whose rage and greed and stupidity have pretty much guaranteed that China is going to lead the world in pretty much everything in the coming years while the US clings increasingly desperately to a mostly illusory past.

I think it’s mostly pavlovian.

It’s not that they follow some chain of reasoning to arrive at opposition to bike infrastructure, but that the mere idea triggers anger, and the position follows the mindless emotional response

See also: pretty much everything that they consider “woke.”

Yes - this is not Reddit.

Which is exactly why I’m not going to stand for a poster trying to saddle me with some asinine strawman version of my actual points.

The other poster self-evidently believed that I was either so stupid that I actually believed that “this is all the fault of the Democrats” or that I was so stupid that I’d let that ridiculous strawman slide. And in either case fully deserved a verbal smack upside the head, and that specifically because this isn’t Reddit. Leave that sort of cheap, intellectually dishonest bullshit there.

I hesitate to post this, but…

I actually have experience with that.

And unfortunately, nothing I did worked, and ultimately I had to get away to save my own sanity

The problem was that she had effectively perfect defenses. In most cases, she could twist whatever I said to further “prove” that she was right and I was wrong, and in the rare cases in which I managed to say something that finally backed her into a corner from which she couldn’t spin it back against me, that, to her, just “proved” that I (or, often, “everybody”) hated her / wanted to hurt her / didn’t care about her / wanted to see her suffer / etc.

I never once, as far as I could tell, actually got through to her.

The media was making the democrats out to be the ones shutting down the nations airports.

So?

Exactly as I already said:

no matter how much they tried to dodge the responsibility, the majority of people blamed Republican intransigence for the shutdown

That’s what the polls consistently showed, and notably that was in spite of the fact that so much of the media tried to pin the blame on the Democrats.

So your claim here isn’t just irrelevant - it’s actually part of the support for my position. Yes - the captive media tried to blame the Democrats. But the people weren’t buying it.

But Schumer and the Democrats folded anyway.

and further empower the republicans

Nobody is empowering the Republicans more than Schumer and Jeffries and the rest of the establishment Democrats, who can’t even be arsed to do their jobs

You might be a russian troll…

lol

Of course not. Don’t be a simpleton.

The Republicans rather obviously bear the lion’s share of the blame.

However, that was the Republicans’ designated role from the start. Their job was to represent the interests of their plutocratic cronies and patrons by killing a program that spent money to benefit poor people, so they were just doing what they were meant to do and what they were expected to do.

On the other hand, the Democrats’ job was to protect a program that benefitted poor people, and they miserably failed at that job. In fact, they didn’t even simply fail - they forfeited. They gave up even trying.

And they very much deserve condemnation for that.

Remember when the government was shut down specifically because the Democrats refused to go along with a bill that ended the health insurance subsidies, and they had the Republicans up against the ropes because no matter how much they tried to dodge the responsibility, the majority of people blamed Republican intransigence for the shutdown?

Then remember how the Schumer-led Democrats just completely folded, passed the bill, then stood idly by as the chance to extend the subsidies vanished?

Every single one of those stinking traitorous shitbags needs to be primaried.

I’ll go one better - if the DNC hadn’t interfered and fucked us over, the people would have elected Sanders in 2016 and we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.

Actually, we got fascism by constantly moving towards it over a span of at least 60 years, with the only difference being that we sometimes moved more quickly towards it and sometimes more slowly.

We moved towards it under Biden too, and would’ve continued moving towards it under either him or Harris.

The only thing that’s notable about Trump as far as that goes is how much he moved us and how quickly. But this was always the destination.

The only way we could’ve moved away from fascism rather than towards it would’ve been to elect federal politicians who were actually good instead of just less bad. But we not only haven’t been given that choice, but have been indoctrinated into treating less bad as a virtue

And what you just described is the exact process by which governments descend into tyranny.

The much better way to deal with the issue, if you actually do care about your fellow humans, is to refuse to support a toxic candidate even if they are somewhat less toxic than the alternative, and make sure at every single turn that the blame is placed squarely where it should be - on the foul, loathsome, corrupt and compromised scumbags who arranged for the nomination of a toxic piece of shit candidate in the first place.

Less bad is still bad. If you settle for less bad, the best you’ll ever get is that things woll potentially get worse somewhat more slowly than they would otherwise. They’ll still inevitably get worse.

If you want things to actually get better, then you have to hold the scumbags’ feet to the fire. You have to make sure that it’s widely understood that they and they alone are the reason that the best we can hope for is somewhat less bad and things getting worse somewhat more slowly. And you can’t do that by meekly going along with them.

Oh and…

The fact that this whole norion of a lack of lefty unity is complete bullshit was neatly demonstrated by leftist voters coming together to overwhelmingly support Zohran Mamdani.

And who didn’t support him? The fucking establishment neolib hacks - the exact same people who keep fucking us over by putting up shitty candidates then trying to guilt trip leftists into voting for them. We finally got a candidate we wanted and they couldn’t even be arsed to endorse him.

Supporting genocide is not fucking “minutia.”