That’s fair. I was asked to consult the internet on this lol. Obviously it’s just input and Lemmy isn’t getting the final decision.

I should push back on the idea that naming cultural patterns equals blaming victims, or that only people inside the worst possible historical analogy are allowed to analyze trajectories.

You can absolutely analyze cultural patterns. I’m just saying “you’re a violent culture” wasn’t the right choice of words. It’s also important to, while analyzing cultural patterns, to consider the role of privilege, and that words and actions are two different things, especially when the critic is looking in from the outside. I’m not talking about you specifically, but I’ve seen a lot of European/Canadian schadenfreude in left-wing online spaces (like Lemmy) over the situation happening an America. While they aren’t wrong that America is brash and needed to be taken down a peg, and there is a place for analyzing the political trajectory, sometimes these people forget the millions of people who aren’t gun-blazing, beer drinking, flag-waving patriots who are in danger, and that if they had the bad luck of being born somewhere else, they themselves might be in the exact same situation. The idea that “America tore itself apart” makes less sense the more you think about it, but seems incredibly plausible to an observer. I think the issue at hand is that, yes, it’s good to analyze cultural patterns, but America was never a monoculture.

In both situations, I ask: How does it help in these left-wing spaces to make blanket statements about Americans, when most of the posters in these spaces are the exception to Americanism and not the rule? Who is the “you” in “you’re a violent culture”?

You don’t need to already be in a Holocaust to talk about escalation dynamics. In fact, if you wait until everything is unspeakable, analysis is already useless.

I agree with this. But the message is everything. OP was just trying to make plans for a worst-case scenario and probably not jumping immediately to violence. While it indeed is important to recognize the spectrum of resistance, it also isn’t wrong to prep for the worst in addition to that. Currently, the people of Minneapolis, Minnesota, are resisting non-violently, and the Administration is still assaulting and murdering people and Trump is still threatening the Insurrection Act and martial law. For you, it’s a golden lining, but for us living it, we’re questioning whether that will work this time and bracing for impact. Is continuing nonviolent resistance the thing that save America? Maybe. Maybe the regime still won’t give us that chance. Maybe they will just make up lies to cancel elections and enact martial law. And if all options are extinguished and violence breaks out from that, it won’t be our fault for not being nonviolent enough.

Again, there’s nothing wrong about your underlying point – nonviolent resistance is important – but how it was worded.

You missed mine. Until you find yourself the victim of an authoritarian state you live in starting a Holocaust, you don’t get to make blanket statements about an entire country that lumps the oppressors and the oppressed into the same category.

You have barely tried non violent resistance (not the same as peaceful!) but you’re such a violent culture that you jump straight to military solutions.

Most Americans are victims of a violent regime and not violent themselves. They’re scared and going through something most Canadians and many post-WWII Europeans will never have to deal with in their lifetimes. People are being murdered, and you’re telling the victims it’s their fault and that they’re violent for trying to prepare for a worst-case scenario.

Yes, of course there are other ways to confront this. Yes, I wish the country I was regrettably born in was culturally more like the EU and Canada. But it’s not that simple and I can’t help but feel that this comment is in poor taste.

This is actually terrifying. Switching to Linux will help us for a while, and the community can take us a long way, but eventually the hardware in physical PCs won’t be able to perform basic functions. Maybe it’s because cloud PCs use vastly more power and web designers inefficiently update to a web 4.0 that won’t be accessible on older hardware – this has happened before. Or it’ll be because the cloud PCs have access to Wi-Fi cards or a new technology entirely to connect that physical hardware won’t have access to – already a standard practice with cell phones’ arbitrary gsm phaseouts.

A phaseout of physical hardware would also entail a phaseout of physical accessories, so you can’t data-horde your way out of this one unless, maybe, you invested in the now-rare M-Disc format and the drives that make them work. You can buy external offline storage for a while, but eventually it’ll all get bought up on the used market or otherwise fail in 5-10 years after the last hard drives get made for consumers. Eventually you will lose all your files and have no way to back them up. No Jellyfin server for movies you legally ripped, no GOG installers for games you legally bought, no music library or ebooks either, they’ll all be gone, stolen, so you buy it all over again in perpetuity.

Our only hope, really, is small businesses continuing to build physical PCs with equal power as the cloud devices. But would parts manufacturers let them? The current situation with data centers, SDDs, and RAM shows that parts manufacturers are increasingly only interested in selling to other large businesses. Consumers can’t boycott that.

I fully expect to be unable to access my bank or make appointments or get meaningful employment if I don’t switch over in 10 to 20 years.

I just have long arms lol. Anything medium would work if it wasn’t for the sleeves 🙃

All my best wardrobe finds have been from thrift stores too. Stuff from 30 years ago is more likely to be well made and have super-long sleeves, from what I’ve encountered.

Unless you’re 5’11" or taller, in which case nothing will fit and you have to special-order everything and you don’t get to have the fun clothes-shopping experience everyone else gets to have.

Isn’t this already covered with extensions, though?

Thanks ☺️

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If it helps, I think the people telling you to “Go on TikTok or Google it” are giving you bad advice anyway. I tried that for years and never got anywhere. Social media can be a really toxic place where there’s always someone prettier to make us feel insecure. I’d go on Pinterest and find really cute outfits the influencers were wearing, spend hours upon hours trying to track down their outfits at clothes stores, and inevitably get sad when I couldn’t find anything that was close enough to the reference, or even that actually fit. It didn’t help that I’m tall. And then when I could finally recreate an outfit, it would be Shien fast-fashion garbage that fit poorly, felt bad on my skin, and just didn’t look the same on me as it did for the Pinterest models. I wasted so much time and money on clothes back then, and social media had me chasing a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow only to find cornflakes. I think this is something all women, cis or trans, have to deal with to some extent in the modern era.

I’ve learned the hard way not to rely on other people to create my aesthetic. I’ve figured out which brands fit my body well and are high-quality, and I’ve built a wardrobe I’m proud of around those constraints. Sure, that means I’m not the perfect image of a goth girl or #darkacademia or whatever subculture is trending on Instagram these days, but goth is just whatever black clothes you have, makeup, and the right state of mind. I don’t have to be perfect or compete with actual models to be pretty or feel comfortable in my outfits and skin.

In America in 2025, I’d say they’re right*. Flock has cameras all over cities, Palantir has scary face recognition data that iirc uses social media info up to a decade old, DOGE made a database of everyone’s social security information that other bureaus probably have access to, ICE uses Israeli spyware that bypasses end-to-end-encryption, and state governments are trying to push VPN bans and ID checks to use web services. On the federal level, both MAGA and Democrats are pro-surveillance, so you can’t just vote this out, not completely. You also can’t vote with your wallet since the most dangerous surveillance tools exist at the infrastructure level. We’re one step away from turning into China.

*By and large, there’s nothing Americans can do about those things other than protest, normalize pro-privacy rhetoric, try not to support privacy-invading consumer services, and call local- and state-level elected leaders when new anti-privacy legislation is introduced.

In most cases, privacy efforts can help for some use cases, but there is no perfect threat model anymore, and it’s mostly a symbolic act of protest these days, which is useful. Lemmy is the only social media I use these days, Linux is my daily and only driver, I’m boycotting tech oligarchs like Google, and I gravitate toward privacy-focused products and services. We need an active privacy advocacy bloc that will support causes and alternative technologies if we ever want things to get better, if not today than in the future.

One big thing people can still do is evade targeted ads. I probably have an ad profile stored somewhere, but I use adblock and enough FOSS apps that I haven’t gotten targeted ad in years.

I feel this. I started buying more simple black and other drab-colored clothing this year without immediately putting two and two together that it was because I don’t feel safe in the country I live in anymore.

Your new style works really well for you too! It just shouldn’t have to be this way. It should be our choice without having to worry about how others will react.

A few updates have come out, and it looks like Pope Leo snubbed the trans women and no one got to actually talk to him. One woman got to hand him a letter and that’s it. He also snubbed JD Vance in May too, suggesting but not confirming a rhetorical pattern.

Whether the seating was deliberate or not, the concern lies in how he couldn’t be bothered to share one word with any of them. Pope Leo has established himself earlier this year anti gay and trans, and that doesn’t seem to have changed yesterday. A step back compared to Francis, who was at least willing to communicate. Add it to the giant pile of setbacks that occurred in 2025.

Maybe this could work, but only if you divide the military across the committees. If it’s just an advisory role, it’s meaningless. That’s the problem we’re seeing with the Supreme Court and Congress in America.

Even with those safeguards in place, what’s to stop the committees from working together to turn on the people? Maybe this doesn’t happen immediately, but what about in 300 years across many changes of power?

We need to abolish all forms of coercive control, oppression, hierarchies, ensure that no one has power over anyone else. We need to learn to co-operate, work together, instead of competing and fighting.

Any system that has any hope of being sustainable, after the destabilization of heirarchies, needs to distribute resources across and not from the top down. It’s exhausting watching capitalists and democratic socialists fight against each other in western countries, with little to no anarchist presence whatsoever, when they both miss the point in a pretty glaring way.

I’m not an expert or an economist, mind you. I’m also jaded after America’s change in power. It’s a noble idea and a step up from capitalism. But while capitalism ends in mass surveillance and police states so the wealthy can profit, communism is similarly likely to lead to centralized identification, albeit with benevolent intentions. Allocating resources from the top down requires a system of administration, which is a hierarchy and an unchecked power. But Classification is the first step to genocide, and we’ve seen multiple times now that any country can fall to fascism in the span of 15 years. Just because you have a wonderful benevolent communist government now doesn’t mean it’ll always be that way.

Maybe there are ways around this. Part of me wants to say that only names and dates of birth (not race, gender marker, country of origin, income level) should be recorded, but even names in many cases can reveal a person’s gender and sex at birth, which is itself a form of classification. Maybe you could have a single-blind ID system, only including a name and DOB, where only citizens have access to their IDs, and governments do not store that data centrally. The hope being that if people’s needs are taken care of that the incentive to steal another person’s identity goes away. There are flaws, I know.

Again, maybe there are ways around this. I’m more partial to anarcho-syndicalism because it can more easily exist without a centralized ID system. Having traditional government functions decided democratically among and between the worker-run syndicates also helps stop fascists because if any one syndicate goes fascist, they get cut out from everyone else’s resources and get starved out.

However, if a communist government can exist without collecting data, then I’m potentially in favor of it.

Moment for silence for David “Ribs” Carillo 🪦

Saving this post. I don’t have an answer for you as I’m not sure where to start either. It’s hard when we can’t sing how we’d like to. I wish I could be a contralto and sing like Helen Vogt (Flowing Tears) or Brittney Slayes (Unleash the Archers) or Emilie Autumn, but male puberty made me a baritone and I still have a lot of work to do. I’m not sure if it’s possible for me with my vocal range, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been doing voice lessons for the past year, and once I’m finally done, I’m moving onto singing work. Don’t give up, and I won’t either!

I feel like in the 2000s before the monetization of the internet became the norm, people were more able to share their art and writing in forums. There were entire sites dedicated to grassroots art-sharing without any profit motive.

Yes, grifters exist, but we’re all so cynical these days, not just at the corporations, but everyone. I miss people just sharing things with each other without any suspicion that dark money is involved.

I looked at the blog and it looks like a mere $182 changed hands for the month, and I assume most or all of it goes to Gardiner Bryant and not the OP. Is that comparable Instagram “influencers” hawking Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop in a paid sponsorship deal? Maybe this is just a person who was excited enough about a new console that they decided to write about it, and honestly, good for them.