I’ve had pretty decent luck with Notesnook. I wish they’d give it the capability to open multiple windows, but at least it hasn’t lost me any writing like Notion and Obsidian did.

Too much hand wringing. We do better when we’re not tiptoeing around our own words and actions terrified to sneeze.

Next they’ll call hiding in the woods ecoterrorism.

This is what happens when people get to make decisions about things they know nothing about.

It’s like if a bunch of funding was allocated to studying harvestman venom on the basis of a Snapple cap claiming they’d be dangerous if they could bite us versus like, asking some actual entomologists.

I mean I seem to remember whole ass netbooks going for $50-80 a few years back.

Wasn’t the point of these low power computers to be cheap?

Somebody should really sweep in and snag that market position by not actually overcharging for it!

It’s pretty clear what’s going on when someone comes into every single thread and tries to encourage Democrats not to vote.

Let’s make sure we’re in every single thread counteracting that shit.

It’s absolutely ridiculous that we let this guy into the country at all. It’s also absolutely par for the course.

We have a fundamental conflict with doing what’s right as a country. It’s not because of individual Americans not knowing what’s going on, it’s because we let corporate power and monetary interests supersede doing the right thing at an institutional level and in our individual lives. The reason we’re continuing to fund bombing innocent civilians is the same reason we tolerate all the other horrendous shit that goes on in this country. From factory farming to stretching labor to its limit to price gouging on everything from food to clothes to housing. We’ve been lulled into complacency by people who care about nothing at all except quarterly profits and their own stock portfolios.

The cruelty will not end until we refocus our society on cultivating compassion and doing what’s right. We need to stop worshiping money and start giving a shit about one another and the world we share.

That means all of us. We need to stand up for ourselves and for one another. Stop sitting around politely when you see some shit. Ditch the deer in headlights bystander effect routine and do something. Speak up, even if it’s scary. Help people, even if it’s hard.

If we just sit here and coast by with the status quo, this will never end. We have to be willing to shake shit up regardless of the consequences because we know the consequences will be worse if we don’t. We have to stop playing it safe, because it’s not fucking safe.

Until we do, this is what we’re going to have.

Yeah, politicians are part of it. Voting is part of it (let Trump in and it’ll be worse). But the bigger component of it is individual decisions. We need a change in attitude. We need to ditch the whining and hopelessness and get fucking real.

Do something about it. Push back.

Yeah! Just let the fascists win! That’ll help!

If I were strategizing for the Trump campaign I would absolutely be trying to target smaller leftist-specific spaces to pull them away from the Democrats and inject talking points of benefit to the campaign. Beehaw has small numbers, but it has a very leftist and pretty vocal user-base. It’s a small pool that it wouldn’t be hard to change the narrative in by injecting the same opinions over and over again. Which is what we see.

It makes way more sense to focus on small communities like Beehaw where a small number of messages can have a larger impact on the thinking of people who use it regularly, than exclusively on huge social media spaces like Facebook and Twitter where they’re shouting into the void.

Get some talking points stuck in the minds of a small pool of people, get them to normalize it, and they’ll spread it for you.

Yeah, that could be. But it’s also worth remembering that disingenuousness is literally the conservative playbook right now. Sometimes a duck is actually Ed Gale in a costume being voiced by Chip Zien, but other times it’s just a duck.

ACA, energy subsidies, and food stamps are all related to federal funding.

Not a man.

It’s unfortunate that we have to take the time these days to consider whether the constant drum of gloom and doom is actually genuine concern or straight up astroturfing. It certainly does seem like the people who constantly spout this stuff and ignore all evidence that they’re completely off base are being a bit disingenuous for some reason, though.

Democrats never get anything done? Guess none of us have ACA insurance or subsidized energy bills. I guess I’m hallucinating the massive jump in food stamp funding a few years back. I must also be making up Massachusetts providing free access to community college for literally everyone over 25 who doesn’t have a degree.

I suppose it means literally nothing that Democrats have provided safe harbor for people seeking abortions from states that outlaw it. Bummer about all those marriages that didn’t happen because Democrats never secured marriage equality.

It’s cool, though. I’m sure the Republicans will actually go do all that stuff the Democrats totally haven’t done.

Why would you want people to stop talking about disenfranchisement? States deciding to take the vote away from their citizens after they’ve been convicted is something we should absolutely be highlighting. You’ll even notice there’s a significant correlation between which states are consistently redder and which have greater rates of voter disenfranchisement.

Maybe what we need is clarification about what disenfranchisement is, because it’s not just people deciding not to vote. It’s people having their ability to vote taken away.

Its failure to what, though, exactly? Go by the popular vote?

There are definitely problems with our democracy, but I don’t think an electoral college automatically disqualifies it. I’d love to see it gone, because I don’t think it’s representative, but the argument behind it is one of broader representation rather than narrow representation.

The idea is that life in the population centers of the US and life in rural areas is very different. We’ve got a fair chunk of our population living in the middle of nowhere, but they’re dwarfed by the population of our cities. By dividing votes by state, it keeps the most populous states from constantly determining the course of the less populous states on a federal level.

The alleged intent is to give those less populous states an opportunity to be involved in the discussion of our federal government. As you’ve probably noticed, laws vary wildly from state to state in the US. Instead of one consensus on law in general, we have 50 mini-consensuses. There are states that literally will refuse to enforce certain federal laws, or that will refuse to honor the laws of other states.

So our presidential electoral process looks very similar. It’s not one consensus, it’s 50 mini-consensuses. Because the votes happen at the state level, you can win a popular vote and still lose the state-by-state vote. That’s not it being broken, that’s it functioning as intended.

This model of state and federal government honestly works pretty well for us in a lot of cases. It allows states like Massachusetts, California, or Washington to go ahead and try some new stuff that other states are hesitant about. It’s why we’ve got things like ACA, marriage equality and other protections for queer folks in some states, and it’s why marijuana has been legalized in a lot of places. Unfortunately it’s also why Texas and Florida are dystopian hellscapes, but it does insulate the people in these more progressive states from a bit of their nonsense.

Unfortunately we also have a lot of jerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement going on that makes the situation worse. But even in a really bad situation, you’re going to have states that protect people from some of the worst of it.

It’s democracy, it’s just not direct democracy at a federal level. It’s representative democracy that focuses on an alliance of 50 states rather than running it like one big thing.

I’m not sure that the electoral college precludes qualifying as a democracy. Voter disenfranchisement certainly seems to put a wrench in the idea though.

Eggs and coffee? Guess I’m gonna be building my cells out of PFAS.

Yeah. We probably should.

Changing our behaviors isn’t a binary, though. It takes effort. Sometimes it takes changing the world around us first to accommodate new behaviors, or waiting for the right opportunity. And given all the other things we should also be changing, prioritizing matters.

Finding a Lemmy alternative is somewhere on that list. Is it anywhere remotely near the top? No. There are a great many other things to do. It’s probably closer to the top of alyzaya or Chris’s lists than mine; close enough, it seems, to be carried out even.

But it isn’t about trying to figure out who’s a shit and point fingers at them while loudly demonstrating non-shit behaviors. If we actually want to make the world better, we need to figure out how to work together rather than just glue everything in place.

People are so defensive about being wrong. And why wouldn’t they be? Whether you look at how things are set up in school or the cruelty and corruption of the prison system, or the poverty-reinforcing measures set about in our banking and credit rating systems, the elements that we need to grow past push this tendency to categorize people and sort of socially compartmentalize their various experiences.

End up in the right categories and you don’t really have to worry. Companies will throw free cellphones at you just for breathing. End up in the wrong categories, and you’re going to have to struggle against a system that’s built to keep you from getting back up.

We can spend eternity playing with the categories, moving around between them or building or diminishing their relative social power. We can change the criteria that we categorize people by, or try to keep them the same. But in the end we’re not really going to make much forward progress until we let go of thinking we know the potential of every human being at a glance. We don’t.

What we can do though is be patient, speak our minds honestly, set boundaries, allow others their own autonomy, and try to help ourselves and other humans open up and grow rather than close off and shrink.

In any case, the world is complex. It’s silly to try to boil it down into absolutist binaries. It’s also probably really bad for your cortisol levels.