I agree. My problem now is that people like Tlaib were who I looked to for how things could change, and yet here they are enabling worse instead of fighting for better. I can’t square that circle, and it means I’m losing one of the last bastions of hope I had for a better world.

I agree with your second paragraph, and find your third to be understandable (though I would contend that propaganda has been a problem for a long time now and wasn’t made meaningfully worse by tech, just different). Where I lose you completely though is this comment’s first statement.

Neither of your other points stated here back up a lack of empathy. In fact, they counter it, as you’ve provided two far better things to get mad at. I hope you haven’t abandoned empathy because it didn’t change minds, because empathy isn’t supposed to be contingent on getting people to agree with you.

I’m aware. My point was that this wasn’t a majority even besides that. Not sure why you seem to be phrasing this as a counterpoint, though, given that it reinforces my comment?

I said most of what I wanted to say in this comment, but I’d like to take an extra moment here to point out that you are currently making excuses for fascists.

Putting it bluntly, I don’t give a flying fuck how many people voted for Trump – which wasn’t the majority, by the way, since not everyone votes – there is no amount of votes that makes “doing fascism” okay. Trump is not a force of nature. He does not get absolved of blame. This rests on his shoulders more than anyone.

I’m so sick and tired of this gleeful throw-people-under-the-bus attitude that effectively dehumanizes people because they “voted wrong,” as if there aren’t millions of people among Trump’s voterbase who were effectively tricked by an entire network of con-men and grifters. As if there isn’t a giant oil-baron-funded media machine working tirelessly to convince people of a smorgasbord of lies.

I find it disgusting how easily you and others with similar takes will cheer on the suffering of your fellows. And let the Republican Party off scot-free in the process. Because apparently blaming a bunch of people who – let’s be real – by-and-large don’t pay attention to politics is apparently more important than blaming the people who’re deliberately engineering mass suffering. Not to mention how you’re currently partaking in schadenfreude over a problem that’s affecting many people you ostensibly agree with and care about! Everybody in America has to deal with the consequences of this bill!

Nobody in the U.S. voted for censorship or for fascism, save an extraordinarily scant few terrible, terrible people. If you decide that vast swathes of people “deserve this” all because of that few, I don’t think you ever actually wanted to help anyone so much as you wanted an excuse not to have to care.

The thing is, AOC herself spoke out against this bill according to this article. And I really, really want her to explain this one, as much as I do not expect that she will.

I don’t know how in the world I’m expected to have any faith whatsoever in our governance at any level when even our ostensibly most progressive voices aren’t willing to block blatant garbage like this.

Update: Welp, late today this passed the House overwhelmingly, 409-2. The only two nay vote were from Republicans Thomas Massie and Eric Burlison.

Hey yeah can anyone fucking explain to me why AOC and Rashida Tlaib voted yes on this dogshit?

Many of the comments here provide salient criticism you’ve chosen to ignore. I don’t know why you’re even here anymore if you’re just going to fight everybody and plug your ears when they call you out.

Accusing people of bad faith without reason just because they disagree with you is one of the most disingenuous things you can do.

My opinion of your posts here was already low. This has not helped.

Several months back, we had a user who would post articles about China almost every day, to several places across Lemmy. They did this for months straight, and eventually some other users showed up for a bit just like them. It took a lot of pushback for them to leave.

It was frustrating as hell, because suddenly I 1) couldn’t avoid hearing about China when I went on Beehaw, and 2) started to reflexively ignore any articles about China because I couldn’t trust them anymore. They were almost exclusively negative, they’d get posted ridiculously often, and occasionally they’d just be outright racist in the tried-and-true “we considered this acceptable/ignorable until it happened in China” sense. You don’t listen to people who post like that. Months after they left, I finally started to be able to actually take headlines about China seriously again, and it was nice!

And now here’s you, starting up almost the exact same posting pattern those users had. I don’t know if there’s a Lemmy instance somewhere that just has a bunch of folks like you and you keep wandering over here, or if you’re one of those users back with new account. I barely care which it is. I just really don’t want this shit back.

Please go find a hobby.

I’m very much in agreement with Eno here, actually. I could imagine a world very easily in which LLMs and image generators didn’t just “have use cases,” but was actually revolutionary in more than a few of those cases. A world in which it was used well, for good things.

But we don’t live in that world. We live in one where it was almost entirely born under and shaped by megacorps. That’s never healthy to anything at all, be it new tech or be it the people using it. The circumstances in which LLMs and generative models were developed was such that nobody should be surprised that we got what we did.

I think that in a better world, image generation could’ve been used for prototyping, fun, or enabling art from those without the time to dedicate to a craft. It could’ve been a tool like any other. LLMs could’ve had better warnings against their hallucinations, or simply have been used less for overly-serious things due to a lack of incentive for it, leaving only the harmless situations. Some issues would still exist – I think training a model off small artists’ work without consent is still wrong, for example – but no longer would we face so much of things like intense electrical usage or de-facto corporate bandwagon-jumping and con-artistry, and the issues that still happened wouldn’t be happening at quite such an industrial scale.

It reminds me how before the “AI boom” hit, there was a fair amount of critique against copyright from leftists or FOSS advocates. There still is, to be sure; but it’s been muddied now by artists and website owners who, rightfully so, want these companies to not steal their work. These two attitudes aren’t incompatible, but it shows a disconnect all the same. And in that disconnect I think we can do well to remember an alternate chain of events wherein such a dissonance might’ve never occurred to begin with.

There is no “safe” store of value, it always depends on demand

If you don’t think “safe stores of value” exist, why did you pontificate on what you thought would become one?

Bitcoin transfers cost pennies on the Lightning Network […]

Press X to Doubt. Defending Bitcoin in 2025 is certainly a choice.

There is a reason why Chinese people invested […] in the housing market, allowing scammers to build ghost towns they never planned on completing… and then it all went crashing down.

You realize this happens everywhere, right? Housing is an extremely common investment choice, and ghost towns (or at least, a lot of chronically vacant homes) appear frequently as a result. I am once again left asking why problems like this only seem to get noticed when Chinese people do it.

Regardless, none of this changes what I’ve said; China is a superpower with a gargantuan economy that can’t be ignored. And it isn’t! Were it that the dollar died, China would be an enticing replacement for a lot of investors whether we like it or not. Many of whom would happily stomach the risk of government intervention in exchange.

The US sees the Euro as a competitor of the Dollar; for the US to buy a strategic reserve of EUR, it would definitely mean recognizing defeat.

I didn’t realize we were still talking about the U.S. government’s choice in investment alone! I had figured your initial comment had shifted this to being about the dollar’s power writ large, especially given that the U.S. government’s tactics as of late have been questionable on a good day and therefore not really worth speculating on.

But sure, the federal government is unlikely to give up on the dollar. That won’t stop it from imploding if they keep fucking up, and it wasn’t what I was talking about anyway.

Removed by mod

You have constitutional amendments for this exact scenario.

Bold of you to assume any of that matters right now. Or ever, really. Cops can and have been shooting people stone dead for “looking like they might’ve had a gun.” The second amendment has been a farce for decades at minimum.

Not that I think waiting for Congress to fix things when they’re the ones least threatened by what’s happening is a good idea. Just pointing out that the Constitution stopped mattering a long time ago.

I don’t think Bitcoin qualifies as a “safe store of value” when it fluctuates like hell on a day-to-day basis and transferring it anywhere for any reason costs exorbitant amounts of money. Much as you or I don’t trust China, I think the powerhouse of an economy that it has will make it awfully enticing for investment orgs, and I don’t think the U.S. will have to “recognize defeat” for the Euro to replace the dollar, either. If the dollar tanks, it tanks.

they’re […] going to lose everything they care about

they’ll be mostly fine

?

now imagine that scenario with MAGA going in to a liberal gated community…what do you think would happen?

My guess? The couple wouldn’t bring any guns out to begin with, mostly because MAGA protesters would be white.

Liberal communities have plenty of racism. It just happens through ignorance & a lack of thinking instead of direct malice.

China is kind of notorious for being the place where you can find internet trolls for hire for cheap.

Reflexively associating people & things you dislike with an ethnicity is a form of hate, and you are doing it. After all, America has plenty of – hell, I’d argue more – easily bought trolls available, and yet I don’t seem to see a whole lot of people bringing up their nationality so much, assuming they mention them at all.

And I’m not going to ignore racist statements just because pointing it out causes tension.

Chinese internet trolls

You know you can hate somebody without associating them with Chinese people, right?