I’m seeing a lot of “democracy is going to die” posts… But… I hate to break it to you:

America is not a democracy. And if somehow it is a democracy, then it’s an incredibly bad one. It’s the least democratic democracy in the Western world.

The two party system, the first past the post voting system, the indirect method of counting votes, lobbying, gerrymandering, the electoral collage. Systems to try and manipulate what a vote means. Systems that try to remove as much democracy from democracy as possible, while still being able to keep up some mock appearance.

Your whole country is fucked and backwards from the very beginning, and that wouldn’t be so bad. But if America does something we all have to suffer for it!

Do you have family in Iran? Cousins? Uncles? Anything?

I’m not sure if this counts, but dysenteri from drinking contaminated water.

2008 rendered me and my family homeless for 6 or so years. I was a teenager back then.

We were on vacation in Morocco. We were never a rich family, this vacation was something we planned several years in advance. But as we were in Morocco the whole economy collapsed and we were left stranded.

We made it into Spain by selling a bunch of our stuff. Then we were left stranded in Spain. Still realing from the shock of having lost everything, we were living in some plastic tents next to a river. We weren’t allowed to drink the much cleaner water used by the local irrigation, so we took river water and boiled it.

Boiling it apparently wasn’t enough. For a whole week I had snot-like slime with blood clots coming out of both ends. Nothing I ate stayed in or could be digested. Some locals who decided to help us said I looked like a skeleton, like someone from a concentration camp. I felt weaker and weaker, more tired, slept longer until I was basically asleep the entire day. I was told I was dying.

What saved me may have been activated charcoal. My mom had a whole pot of it and was feeding it to me with yogurt.

Removed by mod

I don’t actually understand the purpose of karma on Reddit, beyond some sort of metric to feel good about yourself. It’s literally just a number and nothing else.

I’ve seen some people try to devalue what someone said because of “low karma”, so I’d say it’s a good thing Lemmy doesn’t have a karma system.

Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr. What is this guy smoking? Wait, wasn’t this guy a news anchor not too long ago? Can people this stupid and uneducated really make it as a news anchor!?

Absolutely nothing happened in Iran. The morality police was given some practice in beating up teenagers and young adults for a couple of months, but the protests went exactly nowhere.

The problem is pretending like the comic represents a real problem.

Um, yes. This might happen a lot less if these issues that need to be talked about aren’t all blamed on guys. But still yes; we constantly hear about women’s problems in various media all the time, while men are usually stuck having to use some comment section to talk about their problem.

“How dare you complain about the (terrible tasting) food!? Don’t you know there are children starving in Africa?”

Or…

“Don’t waste water! There are people in Africa that go without water!”

Or similar such nonsense, but as a ridiculous comic.

Me with Bionicle: The Game.

Yes, but on Dutch that’s pronounced exactly like elephant:

“Olifant”, which I just learned is also the name of a certain kind of instrument.

No, let’s not degrade language like that.

And “eliminated at all costs”? Sounds exactly the kind of thinking that leads to getting shut out and cut ties. Good riddance.

“Russian” is not a race. And Finland has a history with Russia that isn’t easily forgotten. That is to say, every Finn I’ve spoken to hates Russia for invading Finland… Twice…

Finland isn’t even the only neighbour that hates Russia. At some point one has to wonder why so many of Russia’s neighbours hate, or at the very least don’t feel comfortable with, Russia.

Maybe, just maybe, the reason why everyone is having issues with Russia is Russia’s own damn fault.

But we don’t have the technology yet where a humanoid robot can do humanoid things better than a human.

What you see isn’t an end product. It’s a research prototype, one of many in a long line of future models that are on the path to making a humanoid robot possible.

The Catholic Church has a new mascot.

It’s a small child.

Twitter is trash, on the basis that it tries to create “engagement” as much as possible. Any engagement. So it’ll force a bunch of hot topics and rage fuel down your throat.

However, as an artist, I kind of need a platform like Twitter. Thankfully there are alternatives. I stopped using twitter quite a while ago now.

Yeah, exactly. Not everything needs to be experienced. Not experiencing something doesn’t mean being ignorant of its consequences.

I’ll take it. Thank you.

It’s absolutely the format. The old rich people just have the incentive to drag everyone into it, to make it something to get “hooked” on. But the format itself is already cancerous.