Lemmy technically doesn’t hide your likes - the interface might not show you, but all your likes are public in the Fediverse. Kbin, when I used it, would show which users upvoted/downvoted a post. That’s important because it means researchers and OSI people can still do fact finding - Twitter doesn’t like the idea of having to be open even if it’s a requirement (albeit to researchers specifically) in the EU now.
Allow me to gas Finland up a bit more. They’re higher than Germany in terms of innovation (triadic patents per capita), they have semi-democratically owned grocery stores with 90% of the country being a member/co-owner, they have 60% union density and a Ghent system (like Sweden, unlike Norway), their housing prices were among the few in Europe falling - after the government started their Housing First initiative and built social housing for the poor, their education system being so good (despite being relaxed unlike e.g. Singapore) and state-funded instead of private… life is pretty good in Finland.
Not just that, Nordic sex workers have a combination of problems in the various countries, like not being able to rent private housing because that’s seen as profiting off sex workers (pimping) and various other ancillary limitations surrounding that.
You’re better off fully decriminalizing first, and then later probably creating some sort of government sanctioned organization made up of sex workers and customers, to regulate the industry.
It’s a good reminder that collective/democratic bargaining works. It’s about time we bring back unions and cooperatives.
I feel like communism has been conflated with ‘tankie’ for a long while thanks to the red scares. “Tankie” seems to be a more recent (or at least, recently resurrected) term that is attempting to split the authoritarianism away from ‘communism’ and bring that latter term back to its roots as ‘classless, stateless, cashless society’.
But also, you can often avoid using loaded terms like communism. Personally I like to just double down on “democracy” since it literally means rule by people and has positive connotations. If you add more and more rule by people, eventually you get communism.
Under the (currently dominant) credit theory of money, the implication is that billionaires owe the government a lot of money… and it’s time to pay up.
communism-rebuild switch
Subsidies are an incredible tool when used well, like when they funded a bunch of utility cooperatives that electrified rural US. Maybe you’re asking why we should because propping up the car industry when public transit and bike infrastructure should be subsidized instead, rather than challenging subsidies, though.
But don’t services like Discord forbid third party clients?
Me waiting for inflation to slowly increase Discord’s yearly revenue until it tips into the legally defined Gatekeeper™ status under the EU Digital Markets Act so they’d be playing with fire if they banned people for using interoperability apps.
What’s your source there? I ask because I was curious and found the exact opposite (but I’ve not done any in-depth dive into this topic):
The scientists found no evidence that frequent ejaculations mark an increased risk of prostate cancer. In fact, the reverse was true: High ejaculation frequency was linked to a decreased risk. Compared to men who reported 4–7 ejaculations per month across their lifetimes, men who ejaculated 21 or more times a month enjoyed a 31% lower risk of prostate cancer. And the results held up to rigorous statistical evaluation even after other lifestyle factors and the frequency of PSA testing were taken into account.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mens-health/ejaculation_frequency_and_prostate_cancer
Freedom feels good and just so happens to, for the most part bring nations socially
This part I’d agree with
and economically, closer to the US
This part, much less so. The US has a pretty bad history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders and replacing them with US business friendly politicians, whether through hijacking the legal process as with delaying President Lula, or by backing a coup as with Pinochet.
Given the context of this conversation, I should probably note that I don’t support China taking over Taiwan, or meddling with our elections to sow instability either. I’m just challenging the point that the US is friendly to democracy - which has also had bad influence on European democracy (where I am).
(the UK hasn’t got free speech as an enshrined right)
In practice, does the US?
Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions
It seems to me there are a lot of exceptions to free speech in the land of free speech. I wouldn’t see any harm in adding hate speech to the list given how large it already is.
e.g. passing a nearly-identical law copying Thailand about the royal family and putting in prison anyone who calls Prince Andrew a pedophile.
That seems more of a problem with flawed democracy or autocracies, than to do with free speech. Any awful thing could become law under a flawed democracy/autocracy. The UK has plenty of undemocratic elements and they’re abused to pass horrible laws right now, and we need to fix those elements - the laws are just the end result.
radical feminism
Right wing feminism is a more apt way to describe it, I believe. Some would argue excluding people isn’t feminist at all, but we can at least clarify that it’s the right wing of feminism that focuses on things like excluding trans people and sex workers.
A lot of astroturfing bots are also really mad about it as you can see with the tens of “I’m going to use this to report Humza Yousaf for anti-white racism” highest top-level comments you can see in UK subreddits right now.
This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.
[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=boomer shooter,30 year old boomer&hl=en
The average politicians may not present themselves as being smart, but the lobbyists, think tanks, advisors that interact with them and influence their behaviour are not dumb. Rather than assuming it’s either malice or ignorance, we can instead opt for a more middle ground assumption: it’s both malice and ignorance, symbiotically feeding off each other.
There hasn’t been any scientific consensus change on whether porn is actually harmful to view for underage viewers, much less how much harm at various ages (i.e. should we lower it from 18, or raise it). Meaning, anyone who outright claims it is, is likely falling for populist rhetoric feeding off our cultural aversion to nudity and sex, not scientific truth.
It gets even worse when you consider how instrumental porn is to us queer folks who often learn more about their sexuality through the medium, esp. when you consider consumption rates of queer folks vs straight folks. Or when you consider the queer folks who use sex work to earn money because they’re treated worse in other jobs simply for being queer.
Let this sink in for a second: it took us less than a decade of anti-porn laws being proposed to being implemented without scientific consensus (in the UK, Germany, the EU now, Canada is currently doing the same…). Meanwhile we dragged our feet for decades on climate change and still are. That alone should make this whole trend smell fishy, like it’s being done with ulterior motives.
Ask yourself this: has Bitcoin had - or is it trending towards - a net positive impact on our world? In other words, is it worth investing in long term? If it isn’t you should treat it as a short term investment and get out as soon as you’ve made a profit - and you’ve literally 4x’d your investment. The fact that we’re talking about the price in c/News is already a bad bubble sign and reminiscent of all the other times we’ve had crypto bubbles.
How much electricity does the world banking system use? (Answer: a whole lot more)
Per capita or in total?
Will they really be more isolationist?
The current President of Brazil (Lula) was intentionally delayed the ability to run as president against the far-right Bolsonaro, with the help of the CIA under Trump’s years.[1] Another Coup attempt in 2020 partly by Silvercorp USA, which just happened to provide security for Trump a few years earlier while Trump put a $15 million bounty on the person (Maduro) who was targeted by the Coup.[2]
I’m not so sure we’ll see less political interference in the rest world the world.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Car_Wash#Leaked_conversations
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gideon_(2020)