The Dems have been “reaching across the aisle” since before I was born. How’s that working out? 20 years ago, racism was couched under the guise of “it’s just a joke.” 10 years ago, the racists and transphobes were screaming about how they were getting canceled for their views on their TV specials. Today, members of the incoming administration have openly called for the genocide of trans people (their words, not mine).

America has always been deeply bigoted. It’s just out in the open now. And with my life on the line, the only thing I’m reaching across the aisle with is a loaded gun. The time for reconciliation is past. It’s time to make Nazis afraid again.

If we’re talking specifically about art, historically, there was the patronage system where wealthy people would pay artists that they liked to largely just spend their days painting whatever they liked. It wasn’t something every artist could take advantage of (Van Gogh died a poor pauper because his paintings basically didn’t sell at all until after his death, for example), but it did exist.

Also, genuine question if anybody knows, what about the philosophers of old? Did they get paid as teachers of their school of theory or something?

It’s not like there was ever a time when people simply didn’t work at all, but there is a large portion of the population today who don’t feel like their work is anything other than busywork with no reason to it, and that makes them miserable even doing something that they love. There are people out there who love picking up garbage for a living because they know that they’re doing something that makes a difference.

BLM, Occupy Wall Street, the protests during Bush’s invasions in the Middle East, and a myriad of others would like to know your location.

The original post was in response to the meme’s statement that people hate capitalism but don’t know that they hate capitalism, saying that there are few people on Lemmy who don’t specifically blame the problems of capitalism on capitalism (in short, “fuck capitalism, all my homies hate capitalism”), with the criticism I read being directed at pro-authoritarian regime people, not pro-communism. The fact that people took criticism of those who handwave away the wrongdoings of oligarchies because they espouse to be socialist/communist as an attack on communists says more about them than it does the OP.

A perfect summary of their point and mine that I realized after being reminded that r/theDonald was a thing is that Lemmy is so leftist that our version of r/theDonald would be r/thePutin. Although, with the current state of the Republican party, that might be a more conservative leaning sub than one would expect…

I never said that there were transphobes on other instances - I said that your sea-lioning behavior was alike that of transphobes on other forms of social media and then directly referenced Twitter and Reddit. As is the cherry-picking.

Also, unprompted? This entire thread, including the removed original comment, has been about the political leanings of Lemmy as a whole, and my comment was that we’re so left-wing, that even our extremists are left-wing - a point that you continue to ignore. The only complaining about specific groups I’ve done has been the direct result of demands by you and others to specify who I mean. Should I have referred to them as extremists or maybe radicalists? Because that’s what caused you to demand that I specify who I was talking about in the first place.

Again:

Reread my comments and the quotes about the defederation of Hexbear and have a look in the mirror: You and others here are guilty of the same behavior that caused people to demand the defederation of Hexbear from multiple instances.

I’m not “sealioning,” I asked you what you meant by “racism” from Hexbear, proof or not.

No, you didn’t. The closest you came to talking about racism was when you said:

It’s worth noting that I’ve seen far more people thinking of citizens of North Korea as pitiful subhumans than support for the DPRK in general, and fewer still who support the DPRK extending to the ROK.

Which didn’t disagree with my original post it was responding to and a statement that I agreed with in a now removed post that also pointed out how some users had become so irony poisoned that they had actually started believing their own nonsense. You then started quoting theory at me while claiming that nobody actually believes what they’re saying and cherry-picking my comments and calling them “ableist,” alongside a mod who also straw-manned me, accusing me of being media illiterate and supporting the US’s forever war in the Middle East based on a single statement about the worst of the extremism on the entirety of Lemmy that we have to deal with, which pales in comparison to the right-wingers of the rest of the internet.

Now you move on from unsupported claims of racism to unsupported claims of transphobia, and I still don’t know what you’re actually talking about.

Show me on the straw-man where I claimed anybody was transphobic instead of saying that you were sea-lioning and cherry-picking my comments to ignore my point that I’ve stated several times now, like the transphobes on other social media platforms do.

In short:

As for the Hexbear defederation, aye, that was the justification the admins over at Hexbear gave when they defederated from Blahaj suddenly and without warning while the admins of Blahaj and Lemm.ee were in talks with their userbases about the large volume of complaints about Hexbear users’ behavior and calls to defederate from Hexbear. The rest of the context is that up until that point, the admins on all sides had been on good terms with each other and had acted on any issues the admins had had - including said incidents which had happened in the past, and that the threads on both Blahaj and Lemm.ee where the admins of both instances were gathering feedback from their respective communities were brigaded by Hexbear users spamming emojis on comments to the point where the admins on both instances had to hide all posts by Hexbear users.

To quote some of the complaints from various users across various instances at the time:

But the downside is that it’s. Just. So. Exhausting. I fully agree that everything they discuss has a political undertone to it in some way. It feels like they just cannot turn off, and I always have to be on my guard when they get involved in any discussion, even if it’s nominally about a completely non-political topic. Even when they’re making high effort posts instead of spamming emojis and pig poop balls, every discussion feels like a minefield, where the slightest misstep gets you punished with a “here’s a response that implies/outright states you’re woefully misinformed at best and a protofascist nazi at worst, here’s a link to an obscure book written by a communist scholar 50 years ago that you should read before even trying to discuss this topic.” Hexbear getting involved in a discussion is the discourse equivalent of a group playing 4-player FFA Smash Bros. with items on and someone rolls up and demands 1v1, no items, tournament ruleset only.

Sound familiar? Because you should reread the entirety of the comment section on this post with that in mind. I think you’ll find a lot of similar behavior in here. That quote of theirs in the middle is an excellent summary of my interaction with the mod up there.

It really feels like the people who grew up on 4chan and later came out as queer, but never learned how toxic that was

Hexbear is what happens when kids (I hope they’re all in their early 20s or teens, because otherwise this gets much sadder) spend years reading on leftist theory but have zero real world experience. They get intense, volatile, argumentative and have no idea how those points reflect on themselves and in reality. This is why they go around prancing those absurd beliefs and fencing anyone who disagrees out, while also dogpiling and swarming communities that don’t agree: They only know what its like to be leftists in theory… Unfortunately for them, their echo chamber is going to go on and be the equivalent of a left wing /pol/.

Enough with the sea-lioning.

Hexbear, whose users have such a reputation for their hostility and aggressive attacks on other instances that instances have defederated them entirely rather than deal with them - the one I’m posting from included - are not “just a group of Anarchists and Marxists hanging out.” They’ve openly called for their mods to “take over” other instances. That’s not “just hanging out” or “irony poisoning” or whatever else you want to paint it as.

I started this out trying to avoid naming them because my point was that apart from a tiny sliver of crazies over there, we’re a far cry from the right-wing cesspool that is the rest of social media, and even the worst here are leftists because that’s how fairly united we are in terms of the political spectrum.

But I’m done. I get enough sea-lioning from transphobes on other platforms, I’m sick of dealing with it here as well. This thread has shown me just what caliber of people .ml is - mods included - and I find it not all that different from Twitter or Reddit. The only difference is that you guys argue Communist theory in a memes thread as a replacement for debunked transphobic studies. So go back to “hanging out” with the Hexbear chuds because I’m not going to spend another ounce of energy entertaining this nonsense anymore.

Hexbear is the Lemmy equivalent of 4chan, and like the QAnons there who started by posting their garbage and racism ironically, if you say something ironically enough times, you either begin to believe it yourself or it becomes indistinguishable from your beliefs.

And that was my whole point, and OP’s as well. That the rest of the internet has to deal with the right-wing MAGA chuds and QAnon crazies, and over here, we have Hexbear because Lemmy is just that left-wing. Even our chuds are leftists. But my patience has run out, and you all can join them in the sin bin. Goodbye and good riddance.

I unblocked the instance out of morbid curiosity, and what do I find? One side of the conversation only continues to exist because you quoted it. Hopefully some people get to see the full context from this post before it’s inevitably removed as well.

Those who post something ironically enough times either start to believe it themselves, or it becomes indistinguishable from their own beliefs. That’s how we ended up with QAnon and later the Proud Boys and MAGA cultists. 4channers who posted that stuff ironically long enough that either they or others on there started to huff their own farts and actually believe it.

And that was my entire point, and the point of OP in the first place. That the general political spectrum of Lemmy is so left-wing that instead of 4channers, QAnon, and MAGA, we have Hexbear and the irony-poisoned users who are high on their own supply.

But now we have a dictionary’s worth of arguing about theory while the original post has been removed and the OP banned, and my posts deleted as well and I’m probably going to be banned for this post talking about it.

I got less beef with any specific leader of a nation during World War 2 than I do with Hexbear users and their particular brand of brain rot and malicious actions against other instances. None of them were “good,” and most of them supported Hitler at one point or another or did horrible things themselves. Hell, you can blame the 70+ years long campaign against the Palestinians and the ongoing genocide squarely on the British promising the same piece of sacred land to multiple tribal groups during the Africa campaign. But I have even less patience than that for any of this while the oncoming administration here has openly and directly called for the genocide (in those words) of people like me. I’m blocking you and the rest of the mod team before I block the instance again just so I remember why I did it in the first place 5 days from now. Goodbye and good riddance.

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

Removed by mod

I was instantly reminded of the appendix, where for so long we thought it was just an extraneous evolutionary leftover of an organ, only to find out not all that long ago that it actually acts as a seed vault of sorts for our gut’s microbial biome to repopulate the good bacteria in case something bad happens and wipes them out.

IMO, you’re not wrong, but Magneto is the better portrayal.

Magneto was right all along about the persecution of mutants. Tony Stark and Captain America disagreed on a “who watches the Watchmen” level in the movies.

Stark thought that heroes had too much power to act without the approval of some higher authority, and the Captain believed that they should be able to act when and where they could without needing permission in order to do the most good. Magneto looked at the number he had tattooed on his wrist as a child in the camps and said, “Never again.”

Not to be confused with a danger noodle.

I think when a lot of people talk about video games, the conversation largely revolves around the AAA industry. Especially considering how difficult it is still to get indie games on consoles, which locks the majority of gamers out of the space entirely. There’s definitely some good stuff in the AAA industry, but it often seems like sleeper hits rather than big-name titles. Compare Astro Bot to whatever Call of Duty came out this year, or my favorite to point out, the first Splatoon being the best-selling shooter in a year where both a Battlefield and a Call of Duty game came out. Both games that really came out of nowhere to critical acclaim rather than games people were excited for a year before release.

The games I play and enjoy the most seem to largely be from small developers that I never heard about until after they’ve already released.

As for Bloodlines 2, I’m not surprised. It’s in the same development hell as Duke Nukem Forever as far as I’m concerned, and I’d be surprised if it ever releases at all.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I think more and more people who aren’t in the probably 80% of people who could be considered “casual” gamers are disnechanted with and turning away from the AAA industry and looking more and more to the indie scene. The industry is as stagnant as Hollywood, and for the same reasons. Some of the most popular games in the past few years have been projects made by a single dev that popped up out of nowhere.

Looking at my Steam wishlist, the games coming out this year on there are: Hyper Light Breaker, SYNDUALITY, Space Engineers 2, ERA ONE, KAISERPUNK, The Alters, Gravnir, The Necromancer’s Tale, MENACE, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (yeah, right), Paralives, Mecha BREAK, Dolls Nest, FBC: Firebreak, and Nightreign (and if that wasn’t FromSoft, I wouldn’t have even finished watching the trailer).

The only game on there that could even be considered close to a AAA game is a spin-off experimental game from FromSoft, who is really a AA studio that’s becoming popular enough to be debated as being AAA.

I won’t buy from most of the big companies on principle. EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Rockstar are all on my shit list for horrible business practices and worse working conditions, and Sony is conditional based on whether or not I have to deal with a PSN account - there were several games I was excited for last year releasing on PC that I didn’t buy because they require a PSN account for a single player game.

Are you a friend of Dorothy?

No worries, like I said in my edit, you fixed it while I was writing my comment. I’m just leaving mine unedited for the extra info.

That article disagrees with the second part of your comment. It says that the Welrod replicas are rare and mostly used by veterinarians, and looking them up, they’ve only been available for import to the US since 2021.

I don’t know where you got your 300 million figure from. Wikipedia puts the total number of civilian firearms in the US at about 393 million, and that includes shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The most popular pistol in the world I think is the 1911, and I imagine that holds true for veterans as well, and there have been about 4.3 million produced in the past 110 years. The most produced handgun is the Glock, estimated between 10 to 20 million guns.

It’s also not confirmed that that was the pistol he used, just suspected. I saw people talking about how you’d potentially have to manually cycle a regular semi-auto pistol like he did if you were using a suppressor and subsonic rounds because they wouldn’t produce enough force to cycle the gun on their own.

Edit: You fixed your comment while U was writing this, but I’m gonna leave it unedited for the info.