makeasnek

makeasnek , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

It's embarrassing that nobody in mainstream liberal circles seems able to answer this very basic question: why do people vote for trump? It's not that they are racist womanizing nazis (though some of them certainly are). That is some of it, that's the convenient story, but it really misses the mark.

I'm a through and through liberal, I vote D in every race, I vote in primaries, etc. Some other comments here have gotten some good points in so I won't re-iterate them. Before all you tankies jump in and tell me that the entire point of the two party system is to capture dissent and manufacture consent and how the only point of the democratic party is to move the needle as little as possible while staying in power as often as possible, yes, obviously, we're all impressed that you went to college, now let's move on.

I'll tell you what Trump's appeal is:

• He, and his party, are the only ones who openly acknowledge that the entire system is broken and corrupt. This is a talking point among all major republican candidates. Most democrats don't even give lip service to this problem, they just blame republicans and promise things only if we somehow get them a supermajority. Bernie, AOC, and Warren may touch on this topic from time to time, but as a party, the DNC does not. Their position is largely that "the system works, and the reason it's not working well right now is because there aren't enough democrats". Trump says things are "the deep state" or "the swamp" or whatever, but he openly acknowledges that the entire system is corrupt to the core. That is very powerful and speaks to every disaffected voter regardless of why they are disaffected. He did so well and beat poll expectations in the year he won because he got people out the polls who had given up all hope in the electoral system, he got so many non-voters to vote. And they won't vote for anybody else. Hell, some trumpers are former bernie supporters who were so disgusted by the DNCs primary that they thought "well, at least this guy says it like it is, how much worse could be possibly be?". I don't know about you, but are there less disaffected people out there now than there was in 2016? Is the average person's economic position better? Are people feeling less socially isolated? Does the world feel more stable and safe? If not, that's how people like Trump get powerful. Trump is the symptom, not the cause.
• He speaks to people that, rightly or wrongly, feel ignored by those in power. Rural voters, for example, may actually get a bigger vote than those in cities, but it doesn't change that on most issues they get outvoted. They may have all of their social services funded by blue areas, but that doesn't change that their towns are constantly subject to brain drain and under-investment and have no real job opportunities, and that they are looked down upon by people in cities. Whenever politicians do pay attention to them, it's only a quick scam to get their vote and they never come through on their promises. Frankly, democrats could absolutely rake in the vote from rural counties if they wanted to, but for some reason it's like they don't even try. Their policies would be popular, much of the democrat platform is about serving the under-served, yet for some reason it's like democrats don't even try to capture rural voters. Protecting the environment is good for people who enjoy hunting and living in rural areas. Funding education and making job opportunities are easy wins in this area. Funding infrastructure is good for these areas. Remember how Trump delayed COVID checks to put his name on them? How come every build back better project doesn't have a similar requirement? Democrats are embarrassingly bad at taking credit for their wins.
• Republicans may not ever actually accomplish anything legislatively, but boy are they good at making noise and pretending to be fighting for something. And remember, if you believe the entire system is broken and corrupt, you don't care that congress isn't accomplishing anything. Hell, it might even be a good thing to you! Most democrats are absolutely milquetoast. Nobody cares about policy, they care that their politician is speaking their language and fighting for them. Republicans do this well. This grandstanding about the border? What a great show. Passing laws that have no chance of surviving a court appeal but make their base happy? Every month. Their refusal to vote for things because of the "national debt"? Great strategy. Look, I know some or all of these issues are baseless, but that doesn't mean they aren't effective.
• For all ills people are facing in life whether social or economic, the right has a clear boogeyman or two to point at and blame. Is that blame appropriate assigned? No. But at least they have somebody or something to blame. Liberals blame... republicans? That's a particularly dangerous strategy when dems are crushing it in elections and when the republicans can't even vote as a block in the house of reps. Dems are too afraid to ever point the finger at "the rich" or other easy targets, instead they're always like "it's complicated" and "nuanced" and nobody gives af about that, it's not how people vote.
• Republicans are 100% better at social media and running their own media. Fox News is a genius concept that liberals still have yet to copy effectively despite being around for.. two decades? Play the fucking game liberals, it's how you win. Democrat messaging is milquetoast through and through. Their social media game has gotten better the past few years, but I'm not convinced they have surpassed republicans in this yet.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

Having your identity being tied to an instance is not great UX imo. Bans happen, not always for great reasons. Instances die or close up shop. Having to re-do all your subscriptions, losing your comment history, etc just because your smaller instance closes is pretty annoying and pushes people to more stable, centralized, large instances.

This is why I prefer nostr over mastodon, it's basically the same in every key way except that your identity is not tied to your instance. I believe nostr devs are working on a reddit clone like lemmy or kbin, but it's not done yet. Their twitter/mastodon clone is great though.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

It's just a different protocol that makes different trade-offs, so it can't use AP protocol. Nostr is an underlying protocol in the same way that AP is, so you can build twitter clones, reddit clones, video streaming services, etc on top of it just like you can with AP.

Nostr's key difference IMO is where your identity lives, and nostr decided not to have it tied to a particular instance. AP decided to have it tied to an instance, that is a pretty fundamental part of the AP protocol and is the same way e-mail works.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

That's good to know. Sounds like it doesn't totally solve the portability issue but definitely a step in the right direction.

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago

Each federate within themselves but they don't federate between each other. But there are "bridge" type services you can use, for example, if you want to follow a mastodon user or an RSS feed on nostr or vice versa, it's just that they're bolted on after the fact as opposed to being smoothly integrated with the rest of the protocol. Like having one bot which automatically re-tweets stuff from one platform to another.

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago

Nope. In terms of user diversity and people I'm interested in, Mastodon is winning hands down.

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago

This is mentioned in "other" it's easy to miss. Both of these services essentially do the same thing different ways.

Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc are all built on top of activity pub which is the underlying protocol. It's easy to understand because each "use case" of this underlying protocol has a different name. Mastodon isn't Lemmy and Lemmy isn't Kbin but they can all talk to each other to some degree.

In Nostr's case, the main "use case" is tweet-like functionality but there are other functionalities like streaming video, but they're all called "nostr" which is a bit confusing. Nostr's tweeting interface is built on the underlying protocol called nostr which is a bit confusing.

At the end of the day, both platforms are essentially using the same underlying concept which is "we have one base protocol for passing messages around and then specific use cases like twitter clones or reddit clones are built on top of it"

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago

I really expected the crypto bro problem to be much worse than it was, perhaps it was worse before, or maybe it has something to do with which instances I'm connected to or the auto-filter? Crypto stuff often shows in "trending" for me, but has never ended up in my feed as a dm, reply, etc.

The "trending" functionality in both mastodon and nostr has been pretty lackluster imo, it's always like "did you know FIVE WHOLE PEOPLE tweeted about #caturday". I imagine it works well on some instances, but getting a "trending across instances" metric seems like a software engineering problem neither platform has solved well yet.

makeasnek OP , 5 months ago

Yeah absolutely. I'm sure these things will get worked out in time, I'm just glad we're moving in the direction of federation and decentralization.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Nostr is also looking like a pretty good tool for filling the same purpose

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Elections have consequences. Vote in generals and vote in primaries. Tell your reps (and potential reps) that you care about privacy.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

You can do both. You always get the same shitty options to vote for because most people don't vote, and even fewer of them vote in primaries or participate in the political process in other ways.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

The reason you only get to vote for the "lesser of two evils" is because you don't participate in primaries (assuming you are talking about the US system here). If MAGA can get a psycho like Trump to be their party nominee, you can get your kind of psycho nominated as well.

Primaries are where you actually get a chance to express what kind of candidate you want. Hell, you can even run for office! Generals are where you hold your nose and vote for the lesser of two evils because otherwise it's an automatic vote for the worst of the two evils.

I agree voting seems pointless sometimes. But it's still important. But it's a lever of power you have access to and nobody can take it away from you no. And you can spend the 364 other days of the year impacting politics in other ways.

makeasnek , 4 months ago

There was some shady stuff on behalf of the DNC but he legitimately lost. He didn't get the votes. Because his voters didn't vote in the primaries. A number of reforms have been made to the primary system since then, a bunch of the people who oversaw that primary got fired, and many states are now moving towards ranked choice voting which will eliminate the need for primaries entirely. If half the people who complain about how voting is useless actually participated in the primary process, our political landscape would look a lot different. I used to be one of those people, I get it, the whole damned thing is a bit of a racket, but it doesn't change that voting takes 5 minutes and has a concrete impact on who runs the government.

Edit: And that's the presidential race. You can make much more of a difference, and the rules are much less wonky, in local and state elections. Hell, many of those positions are entirely uncontested.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Bitcoin solves this. Clear, unambiguous, unchanging monetary policy that doesn't constantly increase the supply and take a portion of your dollar's value to give to anybody else. It is not aligned with any country or even block of countries and is truly the first international currency in that sense. No politician or even national or supra-national government can force Bitcoin do do anything that isn't part of its protocol because it's so decentralized.

It has been running 24/7 365 for 15 years without a single major security issue in the protocol or a single hour of downtime. With lightning network upgrades, transactions confirm in under a second internationally with fees 1000x less than credit cards, often under a single cent.

It is accessible to anybody in the world with a cell phone and internet access, including the billions, with a B, who don't have access to stable banking infrastructure or local currency. No credit checks, no needing six forms of ID, no overdraft fees, no bank holidays, no middlemen, no nonsense. And it does this with less electricity than you'd think, less than 1% of global electricity usage, mostly from renewable sources as miners chase the cheapest electricity and the cheapest electricity is from renewables and over-provisioned grids.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Love seeing content like this, just regular people talking about why Linux works for them. Kudos, enjoyed the post!

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Quite often:

• To support the site the ad is placed on
• To cost money to the ad's sponsor if I don't like them

makeasnek , 5 months ago

Every linux enthusiast should try Qubes at least once. The architecture is totally different, vastly more secure in many ways than most Linux distros. It's definitely not for everybody, but if privacy and security rank high on your priority list it's worth a look. It never ends up in Linux top ten lists for some reason, but it's an incredible OS.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Love GNU software stack, but they're about 15 years too late on this one.

Bitcoin can:

• Transfer internationally or across the room
• Confirms in less than one second (with Bitcoin lightning, otherwise can take a few minutes but still much faster than most banks, especially internationally)
• Pay less than one cent in fees per transfer (with Bitcoin lightning, otherwise cents to dollars on main chain)
• No middlemen
• Operate with 24/7 uptime, 365 days a year without single protocol breaking hack because it's some of the most widely reviewed code on the planet.
• Entirely open source software and protocol
• Is available to anybody with a network connection and a cell phone regardless of whether or not they have access to safe, stable banking infrastructure, which billions, with a B, do not. No barriers, no credit requirements, no nonsense.
• Has been doing this for 15 years running.
• Can't be printed at the whim of politicians and governments. Has a fixed supply which means as the Bitcoin economy grows, all who have Bitcoin benefit, not just those in charge of monetary policy and whomever they decide to pass the benefits onto. Nobody can split your BTC in half and give the other half to somebody else, which is exactly how supply inflation works.
• Using <1% of global electricity, often from renewable resources as renewable and over-produced electricity tends to be the cheapest

Each year it gets easier to use, gains more users, increases market cap, and generally adoption continues to grow.

makeasnek , 5 months ago

It's a medium to transfer funds from one place to another. It's solving the same problem a different way.

makeasnek , 7 months ago

OBS is an absolute powerhouse, an amazing example of what OSS can do

makeasnek , 9 months ago

I couldn't find the full list of state attorney generals who did this, but here's a partial one. Write your reps if you think the government has no business telling you how and with what apps you are free to speak. Georgia, Alaska, Utah, Indiana, Nebraska, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and South Dakota

makeasnek , 9 months ago

They do actually care about getting re-elected. The more they hear from constituents about issue A, the more likely they are to vote some way on issue A. Do they ignore many of their constituents concerns? Of course. But if we never make them heard, they will certainly be ignored. It's an imperfect system but apathy is an even worse one.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

The ruling class can ask for whatever they want. Votes, and the money to buy enough advertising to get them votes, are what actually get them into office. Those are levers of power everyday people can control if they don't let apathy or defeatism win.

makeasnek , 9 months ago

To add to this, SiDock is an awesome project working on an open-source, patent-free, self-stable antiviral for covid using the computers of volunteers. Anybody can volunteer their spare computational power with a few clicks. I have been crunching it since 2020 and find it very fun.