In one single election, yes. It means nothing, especially when you understand that his job is not to generate an accurate prediction, it’s to energize core supporters into donating to the campaign.

By the way, you can make the same argument in reverse—Trump always overperforms his polling right? If that prediction is accurate then Biden is absolutely going to get trounced. Now I don’t necessarily think this is correct, but it’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the fallacy you are falling prey to here.

Lol no that’s not how any of this works. If I flip a coin and correctly pick the outcome in 2024 will you start paying me to forecast elections?

Party strategists always say their party is going to do well. It’s part of their job. I don’t think this is particularly meaningful, unless you think there’s some particular methodology he has access to that’s better than Silver’s.

I don’t know what to tell you. I am fully aware of the history and difficulties in migration out of authoritarian governments. Sometimes situations that are quite different in some ways nonetheless share common features. That is all I’m saying, but you seem to be too emotionally triggered by the differences to acknowledge the similarities. Maybe take a step back and think on it and you will see them.

As far as your second point… yes… that’s exactly the problem I am outlining. The current system will almost inevitably lead to non-democratically managed instances, regardless of intent. In order to change that, we need to change the underlying system. I mentioned democratic decision-making around defederation but it’s likely other changes will be needed as well.

I’m not sure why you’re giving a history lesson when I already acknowledged that point in the comment you are replying to. Again, ease of migration has an effect on the severity of the problem, but not the underlying dynamic itself.

Sure, I theoretically could create my own instance, but then I would have the same problem as current instance admins, even those who are sympathetic to these ideas, as I suspect Lemmy.world and my own are. That there is no structure within Lemmy to enable collective decisions to be made or executed, and I would need to build them from scratch. Fundamentally, I lack the expertise to do so, though I’d be interested in a community discussion on how this could work.

This is very similar to telling people being exploited at work to get a better job or start their own business. Sure, theoretically, this might sometimes solve the problem, but it’s going to be a much better solution if we change the underlying system that creates these problems in the first place.

One could also simply move to another country if desired. I think there is a parallel. Obviously that’s much simpler with instances than countries but there is still a commonality here.

The fact that there I can choose which authoritarian system I want to be under means little when they are all quite similar. I don’t know of any instances that have such democratic governance. They are all run by their admins as they see fit. It would be like choosing if I want to live in North Korea or Nazi Germany. Sure, they might be different in some ways, but I don’t have a real voice in decisions either way.

Again, I have acknowledged the problem is far less severe with instances compared to countries. But the power structures involved are quite similar.

I think you have a point here, although I think the issue is less with defederation itself, which is an important tool to manage conflict between instances, but rather with the lack of democratic governance in instances themselves.

So, you are right that admins imposing defederation unilaterally is an authoritarian action in line with things the North Korea or other repressive governments have done, though obviously far less severe due to the lack of violent enforcement behind it.

In a shallow analysis, one could blame admins for not implementing democratic governance (as you claim LemmyGrad has done). But you need to remember that running an instance is typically an unpaid act of mutual aid done for the community—blaming admins for not doing more work to make a better system seems a bit harsh when it would take substantially more work to set up such a system.

A better solution would be to build democratic mechanisms into a social media platform itself. This would allow democratic decision-making in defederation and other issues by default, rather than forcing admins to create such a system from scratch. I actually think both Reddit and Lemmy were steps in this direction, with Reddit adding upvotes and downvotes to democratize content curation, and with Lemmy’s federated nature at least allowing user choice in which admins they want to be subordinated by.

However, both of these platforms were created by people who believe in authoritarian ideologies. These democratic elements were added individually to solve specific problems—neither Lemmy nor Reddit had an explicit goal of making a more democratic platform in all respects.

I am hoping that the online space will continue to evolve in this direction. Since I doubt Lemmy developers share this vision, there may come a time when people who want this will need to migrate to another platform, or create a fork of the current software. Since I’m not a developer, can’t contribute myself, but I will keep my eyes open for good ideas in this vein.

Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.

You truly can never predict what he will say next.

I am somewhat undecided about this action. It gets people talking (as we’re doing now) but it may also risk turning people away from the cause, especially those who are only casually interested or aware of the facts or issues.

But my point was your suggestion that everyone is already aware of climate change is absurd. Especially the follow up that no one can do anything about it. Sure, they’ve heard of it, but everyone is continuing to behave as if it doesn’t exist. There needs to be much greater awareness, discussion, and then action on this topic, and until such time we will need to do disruptive things to get people’s attention. I do prefer to disrupt the people most responsible, personally.

There is much work to be done and not all of it is physical. I don’t know the specifics of your condition but you are here posting on social media. At minimum, there is likely a need for similar work to be done in support of your local orgs.

Again, if you find some local folks doing such work, I am sure they would help you find your niche.

Lots of things but the easiest would be to find local orgs that have already developed political strategies relevant to your local political context and work with them. They can fill you in on the rest.

Climate change won’t be addressed until there is a much larger movement that can flex serious political power. Think civil rights movement—that’s the kind of organizing we need.

and there’s fuck all I can do about it.

Sounds like maybe you are lacking some awareness around this issue.

I’m not aware of any left vs right definition that would place the kkk on the left. Can you provide one?

Where did you get the idea that the KKK was left wing from?

Basically all of them.

I’m sorry, the entire coastal waters? Fuck no, this is absolutely unheard of and insane.

Yup that’s what I was talking about.

Maybe if you have an electric car you could hack in and replace the space ship sounds with your preferred space ship sounds. Might be illegal though.

You can’t be a good president if you’re over 65.

You can’t be a good president if you’re under 65.

You can’t be a good president.