I’d join the (German) greens and advocate for better bike infrastructure and public transport in my region. The greens in my state are also known to be a bit economically conservative compared to other states, so I’d try to shift those policies to the left with my votes.

I’m thinking the opposite, I might just become a member of a political party next year and try to make a little bit of a difference.

Ending poverty would certainly help, but I disagree that crime would be fixed. People commit crimes for many reason that aren’t related to poverty. Envy, hatred, love, sexual desire, religious fanaticism, political extremism etc. Crimes like murder and rape often have motives completely unrelated to financial status. Not all perpetrators have severe mental disorders either.

In terms of “fixing” people who are violent, I agree in so far that the justice system should focus on rehabilitation and helping people. In many but not all cases, that can be achieved. But generally those people commit crimes first before they’re identified. You propose mental health checkups to prevent that in the first place, but many people who are in a bad mental place would not voluntarily go to those. So would you make them mandatory for everyone? That would be quite dystopian, especially with the possibility of being locked up without even having committed a crime. That’s exactly the kind of thing I mean by measures that are unacceptably authoritarian. And even then, people would definitely slip through the cracks.

Crime. There’ll never be a world without it and at some point society will have to realize that there’s an “acceptable level of crime”, beyond which any further measures to reduce it would be unacceptably authoritarian.

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Yeah somehow I totally misread that, sorry.

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Good point but it depends on the backstory and age of the photo I guess, lots of photos there have people in it.

Reddit has WhereWasThisTaken. I’m not aware of a Lemmy counterpart. You could create it though.

Yeah, I agree. FPTP is a horrible system that will inevitably lead to this kind of situation.

I’m also from Germany and I don’t think it’s a similar situation at all. In our system, it’s absolutely possible and doable for a new party to arise and gain influence. You don’t have to vote for the lesser evil, you can find a party that actually suits you and there is a realistic shot of getting it elected if enough people want it to happen. We’ve gotten 2 new parties in parliament over the last decade (I don’t like either of them, but that’s beside the point). And yes, we have a general shift to the right in Germany as well, but that’s more due to the actual attitudes of the population, a generally weak left and things like Russian influence. Contrary to the US, voters can absolutely reverse that trend though.

In a system like the US, that’s almost impossible. Let’s say the democrats split up into left-wing democrats and right-wing democrats. Half of the voter base goes to either party, so 25% of the population votes for each. However, elections are “first past the post”, so even if the left gained a lot of voters and reached, say, 35%, it will be a total victory for the Republican party. Any party that can’t get an absolute majority of votes is powerless. The momentum for a new party to get to power would have to be insane.

Also for the narrative control just take the win of Biden in 2020 as a counter example. Despite Trump holding office the Dems managed to win.

Well, yes, but pretty much exclusively by running on a lesser evil “We’re not Trump” platform. Had the Trump presidency never happened, it could have been way more about actual policy.

So if you don’t vote for the lesser evil it gets salty and joins the evil?

Not quite. If you don’t vote for the lesser evil, it loses influence, which means the greater evil has it easier to shift things over in their direction and control the narrative. They’ve won after all, so clearly that’s what the voters want. The lesser evil will take cues from this.

(It should also be said that this whole meme only really applies to shitty 2-party systems. In a proper parliamentary democracy, you have more realististic choices than “greater evil” and “lesser evil” and don’t have to play this stupid game at all.)

AMD has much better Linux drivers than Nvidia though, so that line of reasoning doesn’t really work.

Incidentally that’s also the effect of not voting for the lesser evil, you can just cut out the two steps in the middle then.

No. I log in every once in a while to laugh at all the bullshit AI-generated content that now fills my feed. Otherwise I only really keep my account since it’s the only platform where I still have old classmates etc, in case I’d ever want to contact them.

I was thinking of getting it, what’s up with Stalker 2?

It’s very buggy and an absolute mess from a technological perspective. The NPC simulation has been restricted to a tiny radius around the player, so you can for example see snipers spawn in when you get close to their towers. Even with that limited distance, the game is very CPU bound and performance takes a huge hit in populated areas. In general the NPC AI is pretty braindead and much worse than previous Stalker games. I’ve had to reload earlier saves a couple of times due to NPCs randomly getting hostile, the conversation UI staying permanently on screen and other progression stoppers. The graphics completely rely on TAA or DLSS and look like a checkerboarded mess without them. Despite all that though, I think it’s a pretty fun game and a remarkable achievement given the circumstances of its development.

Sure, I’m not American myself. But I’m pretty sure much of the violent rhetoric on social media right now around killing CEOs etc is from Americans. The murder of Brian Thompson happened in America after all and all the anger around health insurance wouldn’t really make sense in most of the world where there’s universal health care.

I mean those people in the new world also did a bit of genocide of the native people as a side project and the movement in France included a regime of terror where like 30000 people, including peasants and revolutionaries, were murdered by other revolutionaries. It was hardly just the burgeoisie that suffered. But sure, desperate times may call for desperate measures. It’s not something I’d particularly want to live through though and there’s no guarantee that what comes after will be better.

Just be careful you don’t get in the crossfire yourself once the people’s bloodlust takes over and who the elite is shifts. In some cases, wearing glasses was enough.

I’ve seen both. Example of what I mean