Schumer is going to make sure whatever the Republicans decide to put in a bill gets passed to prevent a shutdown. He works for New York billionaires who would lose money over a shutdown.

Yes, and now they are proudly declaring they aren't going to put down the shovel. They want to keep digging this hole we're in.

There is no bottom by the way, they will just keep digging until enough people learn the lessons. If we wait to see how bad it can get it will only get worse.

Elections are how we achieve a peaceful transfer of power. Hopefully fascist incompetence will so fully debilitate this Trump administration that we manage to hold another one. We can't count on it though. We need to organize in the meantime.

Believe in people. All we have is each other. And we all need each other now.

100% I have no confidence in Israel's ability to comply with international law or humanitarian norms. As a jew, I am less safe because of Israel's genocide of the Palestinians. There is no interest in self-defense or defeating terrorists. Netanyahu wants to prolong the war to stay out of prison and to create a greater Israel. Israel attacking the UN troops has really ticked me off too.

People keep asking why the race is so close. Decades of brainwashing from the right wing infosphere and a lack of push back from out institutions that are supposed to be bastions of democracy are two primary culprits.

🌍 > 🖼️

We have to stand up to fascists even when they threaten us with violence otherwise the fascists win. There is no sign up sheet to stop fascism. There is no safe way to stand against fascists. There is no future worth living in under fascist rule. Fascists do not go away if the society that spawned them stays the same.

If threats to someone's safety is where we decide our resistance to fascism ends that is where our freedoms end. We do not have to shame this woman, but we do have to disagree with her decision. If we allow her decision to be incorrectly labeled as a reasonable strategy for self-preservation then we will all be living in a christo-fascist dictatorship.

It's liberty or death. That idea is one of the last remaining cornerstones of our democracy. If living is more valuable to use than freedom then we will be incapable of stopping the fascists.

Fascism proceeds one step at a time. One day you wake up and everything is different. Today is that day. The people saying to stand up to fascists got it right. The people calling them armchair warriors and telling people to choose life over liberty lost the plot. The fascists plan is to take power by any means necessary and then kill the people they hate indiscriminately. To stop them we must stand against them even if that means risking death.

She was on the ticket 4 years ago. She is VP. Now she's on top. Kamala 2024!

This test screwed me up in first grade. I thought it was some kind of grammar test so I kept asking if it was a verb, a noun, or an adverb. The test giver was some researcher and was convinced I wasn't taking the test seriously because I wouldn't say wugs. He got kind of angry and I found the whole thing to be kind of distressing. I asked to stop and he just got even angrier and said something like, "No one has ever had trouble with the wug test before". I was convinced I was bad at grammar for years after that. Anyway, wugs! =)

Accelerationism can only ensure the US gets to fascism faster. Getting to fascism faster doesn't destabilize the resulting christo-fascist regime. A fascist government will not just make it harder to make the US and the world a better place. Once the fascists take power they will actively work to make sure it is a worst place. A christo-fascist United States will actively harm everyone living in its sphere of influence and do nothing to put a check on other authoritarian dictatorships' spheres of influence.

Republicans winning elections sets us back decades. In this current election, our democracy is at stake. Neoliberalism has been pushing us in this direction for decades. We need a socialist political revolution to fix this. We need to keep our democracy long enough to perform a political revolution to change things for the better.

Lemmy is inundated with accelerationist rhetoric. When I was still on Reddit, I saw plenty of conservatives. The most striking thing I've noticed from arguing with people on both Reddit and Lemmy is the similarity between accelerationist rhetoric and conservative rhetoric. Both accelerationists and conservatives assert the US has never been a democracy and that the US system cannot be fixed. Both of these assertions are contradicted by US history. This is not to say that these are the same group of people. What these false assertions highlight is that neither group values democracy.

These next months leading to the election are essential, as that as when people are going to start checking in to the current election cycle. Progressives cannot afford to be silent leading up to the election. Democracy, even one as flawed as ours with its undermining of majority rule, is our most effective vehicle for progressive change that we have.

People who do not value our democracy are going to troll, sea lion, and generally act in bad faith. The common internet adage, don't feed the trolls, is not going to help us. People will act in bad faith in a vacuum. They know they need to spread their message the farthest and the fastest to see their ideology realized in this election. Progressives need to spread our message further and faster than them if our political revolution is to succeed. Progressives do not need to interact with every internet troll they encounter. But progressives must find ways to be vocal which sometimes involves engaging with bad faith actors.

This article does a good job at explaining that Hogwarts Legacy is transphobic because some of the profits will be donated to anti-trans causes.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/hogwarts-legacy-release-brings-transphobia-harry-potter-franchise-rcna69628

Rowling herself has implied that her royalty checks are indirect indicators of the popularity of her views on trans rights. She will be profiting off Hogwart’s Legacy, and at least part of that profit will likely go directly into the hands of those responsible for pushing the fight to roll back trans rights, causes Rowling has implied she donates to.

This article explains the antisemitic blood libel conspiracy theory that is a core part of the game's plot.

https://www.gamepur.com/guides/hogwarts-legacys-goblin-uprising-anti-semitic-plot-controversy-explained

Players can choose to align themselves with Ranrok, but the game explicitly paints this as an evil decision, aligning those players with the Dark wizard faction. On top of that, Ranrok and his Dark wizard allies in the Rookwood Gang have a plan to harness the power of this forbidden magic by abducting the player character (who is a teenager) and extracting and using their blood. This latter detail hews uncomfortably close to “blood libel” conspiracy theories which have been leveled at Jewish communities across the world for centuries, in which Jewish people were accused of abducting and murdering Christian children in order to use their blood in sacrilegious rituals.

I spent some time watching videos on the game's plot. I couldn't find a specific line in a cut scene where the villain explicitly says he wants to harvest the protagonist's blood. But he does explicitly set some guys after the protagonist to try to kidnap them. They need the protagonist because they are the only one who can interface with the MacGuffins, ie plot devices. This MacGuffin interfacing seems to be hereditary in nature. Also, the villain's powers, specifically the graphics, definitely seemed blood themed to me.

The game is transphobic and antisemitic. Arguing the game is not those things is transphobic and antisemitic. Whether or not the admin in question knew that is irrelevant.

No one is mandated to educate people about any minority group that they are a part of.

That being said, I wholeheartedly believe that it is in our interest as an LGBTQ+ community to educate people when an opportunity arises. So much hate and bigotry is derived from ignorance. The more we can do to educate people about transphobia the safer we and the people we care about will be irl.

Ada is going out of her way to talk to the admin in question which she does not need to do, but I am glad that she is. She would be perfectly justified in defederating the instance without further discussion. Making a safe space for trans people means defederating from instances that espouse transphobia. By defederating, users on blåhaj zone will not see what this admin's posts or comments, regardless of where the posts or comments are made.

This is what the post in question looks like if your lemmy account is on blåhaj.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7199610

Most of the comments are not visible because we are defederated from Hexbear.

I'm really not a fan of how Hexbear users handled this. I am also not a fan of blåhaj being the admin's trans best friend. Despite that, I think this comment from the admin is relevant so I'm linking it here.

https://programming.dev/comment/6173847

I get the sense that this admin is engaging in transphobia and antisemitism because of their ignorance involving the game. I hope that in talking to the admin, Ada will be able to explain the error in the admin's position. Hopefully the admin will correct their position going forward and we can continue to federate with their instance. But I think that in the absence of that hypothetical success it makes sense to defederate.

It took me a bit to think about it, but it's good that we take a proactive position on combating transphobia. Tolerating intolerance for the convenience it might bring, in not having to make multiple accounts or having more perceived allies, really doesn't do us any favors in the long run. If we don't stand up for ourselves we are only giving cover for transphobes to maneuver covertly in our online space. Rowling is a terf. Hogwarts Legacy funds her terf causes. We don't need blåhaj to be connected to instances that fail to understand that. The point is to have an instance that is a safe space for trans people and more broadly LGBTQ+ people.

I'm adding this at the end, because this shouldn't matter, but I think some people think it does. I am trans. I am ethnically jewish.