That's part of the point. Anybody who steps too far outside the "cultural norm" (read: that one look Republican women all have) will be weeded out of public life as well.

I didn't mean that as a literal quote but as sarcastic air quotes to evoke the exact imagery that you came up with. Although, I have actually seen a Hexbear or (what's the other one, Beehaw?) user use that phrase. Of course, they also said that only capitalist pigs die in China, so it's hard to tell if they were serious or if it was full commitment to the bit. That part of Lemmy is fairly indistinguishable from a leftist version of 4chan.

Like I said in another comment, ML has an issue common to many leftist communities in that old saying of "nobody hates leftists more than other leftists." And that can manifest as behaving like more moderate leftists (not liberals - actual leftists) may as well be centrists or conservatives, or treating Europe as being just as bad as Trump's regime. Purity tests and trolling rather than the mutual cooperation that Cowbee posted.

I guess? I don't think I've ever really stayed in a memes community where that's the case, though on Reddit I was largely in places like egg_irl and traaa, where everything was focused around a shared experience of a minority group.

Besides, it's not just the memes community, the memes is just where it appears the most blatantly and loudly. As the person above me said, it's an instance wide thing. ML is nowhere near as bad as Hexbear (or I have yet to see any targeted harassment campaigns against an instance for failing a purity vibe check come from ML, at least) but, as they say, "nobody hates leftists more than other leftists." Leftist spaces tend to have a bit of an undercurrent of only being welcoming to the "right kind of leftist." I used "decadent West" up there very purposefully. There's a bit of a vibe to ML that's less "uniting various leftist groups" and more "preaching The Good Word to those poor ignorants" proselytizing.

Every time I see Cowbee in a thread like this, it's like I walked into a restaurant to see someone trying to explain to somebody else why their friend who just spat in their food is actually a cool dude doing great solidarity because the owners of the restaurant treat their employees poorly.

ML in my experience has very little to do with engaging with leftists and more to do with bashing the "decadent West." Anytime I see memes.ml pop up in my feed, it's a 50/50 shot between me finding something funny or something that makes me debate blocking the instance as much as I can at an account level.

And yet, again, the instance has communities for every single big tech genAI model. That's definitely not anti-corporate. Using those models both contributes to their shareholder value/profits and the theft of wages from workers.

And where do they get the training data for AI Horde? From scraping the web and all the freelance artists on there, like all of the big corporate models? Because then they're just justifying exploitation of workers as benefiting everybody when what they really mean is benefiting themselves.

It's like the argument pro ChatGPT airheads use constantly about how genAI "democratized" art. You know what "democratized" art and made it freely accessible to everybody? The pencil. It's just making up excuses for wanting the product of skill without putting in the effort to learn the skill or pay appropriate compensation to somebody with the skill to give you the product that you want. It's upper management thinking.

And this is why I say that it depends. Horde AI could be great - so long as the people whose work is being used to allow others access to skilled labor that they don't want to do themselves are being properly compensated for their work. Otherwise, it's no different from the corporations. Just because it's free doesn't mean that nobody is going hungry as a result of it. Unless it's trained exclusively on products from big corporations. Those artists got paid when they did the work, so nobody gets hurt there except in the theoretical sense of freelance artists potentially losing customers down the line to "good enough and cheap" genAI from people with the above upper management mindset.

Anti-vaxxer insurrectionists protesting COVID regulations and "personal freedom" by attempting to shut down the government? Yeah, we had that. It's called Jan 6th. We've also had our own series of MAGA convoys over the years. We call them Y'All Qaeda. I don't know why this is your golden idol of what protesting should be.

And you should give a shit that I'm a minority who has watched Canada be roughly 5 to 10 years behind the US in their own war on science and education since 2001. Trump may be the signpost that actually turns the Canadian slide into MAGA conservatism around, there was some evidence of them backtracking on those stances during his last term, but only time will tell.

How long did it take before you bought acrylics and a pad of watercolor paper to replace it?

Oh, so you can dish it out but can't take it when someone else handwaves away your effort?

I'm a trans woman living in the US. I absolutely know what I'm talking about. I've been keeping up with politics since I was a pre-teen just so I could know what rights of mine were being stripped away in which states. I'm illegal in 41+ countries in the world and 20 states in my own country.

Keep thumping your chest about your little Sunday drive while people are chasing ICE agents out of their neighborhoods.

But good to know this man never led a "real protest."

I'm a trans woman in the US, a group who the government had already been stealing official documents from since before Trump was even officially in office and who states have been banning from public life, creating lists of, and trying to deny medical care to for years. We've been saying for a decade that conservatives would love nothing more than to round us all up and put us in camps. Guess what conservatives have expressed their desire to do?

Come at me again and tell me I'm not doing anything about my government when you don't know the first thing about me.

You sir, are a fucking moron and transphobic to boot. Go be racist somewhere else.

Considering it was only about 100 years ago that science decided that women could orgasm and weren't just faking it to make their husbands happy...yes, the idea that a woman can be horny and is a normal human being is a shocking revelation to some (many?).

First rule of operational security: if you're going to do something, don't tell anyone that you're going to do something. Especially on social media/someplace with easily traceable records.

How about you start blaming German Jews for letting Hitler start WW2 next?

You mean that one time a bunch of Canadians drove in a line?

Compared to that time a protest was staged across an area the size of Europe? From small towns with a few dozen people to capital cities? And then again? And again?

These were all literally a quick Google search away. And you know what? Almost all of them are from last year, from a couple of cities out of those national protests, because our media is captured and it's very difficult to find photos of the people scaring off ICE attempting to snatch people in broad daylight or the masses of abandoned cars in Chicago - some of them still running - from all the ICE raids. Or the community watch groups that have sprouted up to track where ICE agents are in the city. I couldn't find a single picture of the protests from Boston then where there were more protesters in the city than the total population of the city. Most of what I saw was pro-ICE propaganda from news outlets about immigrants in NYC "cheering for ICE after capture of violent gang members" and other nonsense.