BestOfLemmy

I have to say, this is just such an in-the-weeds moral stance that it crosses the boundary of reasonableness. Honestly, it's this sort of thing that drove me away from left wing styles of thinking a while ago.

The impact you make on the world in any of your possible actions with regard to Harry Potter is miniscule. Like, truly, utterly insignificant. Are you going to organize an anti-potter boycott? Participate in a protest? Harass the actors in an online trolling movement? Throw eggs at JK Rawling's house? Great! Go do all those things! Actively participate in changing the world for the better! These actions might actually lead to real change.

But denying yourself pleasures in the name of moral purity accomplishes nothing. If all you do is sit at home and think to yourself "I wanna watch the new Harry Potter thing, but I can't, because then I'm a bad person." (or in this case, "I wanna talk to my friends about the new Harry Potter thing I pirated, but I can't, because then I'm a bad person) then you are accomplishing literally nothing except making yourself miserable. Again, if you are going to actually do something, then go do it! But if you don't have the time or energy or interest or social battery to actually do something, then shaming yourself or others into not doing things is actively counterproductive. Go take a road trip without calculating if the pleasure you will derive is worth the carbon footprint! Eat an ice cream cone without feeling bad about the the suffering of the factory farmed cow it came from! Get one of those good-paying jobs in oil and gas or defence and make some goddamned money! You are simply not important enough for any of these actions to have any actual real-world impact. The only thing that happens is that you convince yourself that if you ever enjoy anything, then you are a bad person. You train yourself to constantly be looking for the ways in which life's simple pleasures are destroying the world, so you can feel bad about them.

Just stop it. Be happy. Do whatever you need to do to chill out and enjoy your life and gain some sense of contentedness and security. And then go out and make the world a better place by actually doing something. Hyper-anxious, shame-ridden, depressed know-it-alls rarely create effective social change because no one wants to hang out with them. No one see them and thinks "yeah, that's what I want my life to look like."

In order to lead by example you have to show a path to a better world. Not a cell.

@manxu@piefed.social previously worked on a dating app for a large Internet corporation and got some interesting insights as they examined the data from their service

Ms ArmoredThirteen (@ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip) bakes and reviews some cupcakes in this comment thread.

https://lemmy.today/comment/15949456

From https://lemmy.today/u/SirEDCaLot.

I hope I did the Lemmy user tagging correctly.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40988090

Check the sidebar - this is /c/childfree

I'm guessing you came here from All and didn't seek out this community specifically?

Scrolling through All provides a glimpse into the variety the Fediverse offers. Even when I find a community I don't agree with or care to hear about, I can simply block it. Meanwhile, I'm glad that those who do value those topics have a place to discuss things.

Which is all to say that those who feel strongly about being childfree deserve their space to talk about it, regardless of your feelings toward their opinions. This is their space, and nobody's forcing you to be here.

Original thread: https://lemmy.world/post/27067506/15809869

A good bit of literature has studied the problem and arrived to recommendations that overlap in parts & depart in others with this playbook.

A former parliamentarian of the Hungarian government studied its slide into illiberalism, and suggested remedies for the current, similar trend in the US. Resist in the courts & media, and build a powerful social base at the state & city level throughout the country. The latter means

the Democratic Party must reconnect with the working class to preserve liberal institutions

Doing that means

1. "creating new and strengthening existing local organizational structures, especially labor unions". Do not "on issues important to the active base only" such as "media freedom or democracy": this leads to "failures of mass mobilizations". "[E]ngage with [ordinary people] outside elections, focusing on issues that matter to them".
2. "[T]o push through popular reforms that elites oppose", free "the party from elite capture" by shifting financing "from the corporate elite to small and micro-donations".
3. "[C]ommit to left-populist economic policies".
4. "[L]earn symbolic class politics", "embrace the mundane and be down to earth".

you don’t protect democracy by talking about democracy — you protect democracy by protecting people

I'm seeing the playbook overlap a bit with points 1 & 4, diverge from point 2, and not treat point 3.

Another article reviews research observing a decades-long trend of class dealignment: workers abandoning the left-wing party & joining the right. As unions have weakened and Democrats abandoned them, the party has increasing relied on & shifted appeal to urban middle class professionals & minorities. The review names 4 paths researched or discussed to reverse dealignment.

• inclusive populism: "appeal to working-class voters’ sense of resentment at economic elites and stress how elites use racial resentment to divide segments of the working class that share a common interest in economic justice"
• anti-woke social democ­racy: make "a clean break with factions of the party that embrace unpopular social and cultural messaging that alienates working-class voters"
• deliverism: "pass and implement large-scale economic reforms that benefit working Americans"
• institutionalism: "[reinvigorate a] labor movement capable of advancing working-class interest in politics and [re-embed] Democratic and progressive politics into the lived experiences of working-class communities"

It looks like the playbook is going with anti-woke social democ­racy & institutionalism, rejecting inclusive populism, not mentioning deliverism.

They seem to think the way to win the working class is to go more MAGA-like (anti-woke social democ­racy) instead of trying a competing strategy like inclusive populism. It also looks like they're choosing not to break from elite capture, which seems like a huge mistake.

https://lemmy.world/comment/15379625:

How the fuck do we fix this?

The primary issue is twofold:

1. Heavily biased information and restrictive media diets
2. Democrat Inaction

If you try viewing even a tiny amount of right leaning content on a fresh social media account on any platform, you’ll see the type of content that gets perpetuated. People simply become indoctrinated by content recommendations that are practically incapable of showing the other side, not to mention that most mainstream media is entirely corporately captured.

The fact that the Democrats were slow to release official policy for Harris’s campaign, indeterminate on Gaza, and had (or really, still have) a very “this is fine, you’re just overreacting, but sure we’ll fix a few things” attitude towards political messaging, only helped Republicans, because it led a lot of people to just vote for the party that promised the most, and that was the Republicans. All the wars would be over, things would be cheaper, all the “bad” people wouldn’t be here anymore, etc.

To a normal person with very little media literacy, those promises sound downright amazing.

I personally think we fix this by at least starting with messaging, since that’s what actually leads most people to make a decision on who to vote for. There were literally people deciding on election night who they wanted to vote for, so messaging is highly important.

The left needs to speak to the immediately visible, material needs of the working people directly. While it’s important to fight against the right on culture war issues to prevent the ceding of ground on things like civil rights and discrimination, I think a lot of left leaning messaging focuses too heavily on that, and as a result, it can seem to right-inclined people that the left has no economic policy. That needs to change.

See: Bernie Sanders, and how he very consistently addresses specific economic issues people face, and has broader support on the right compared to any democratic congressperson. Hell, even JD Vance said Bernie was one of the people he least disliked on the left, and Bernie’s further left than the Democrats. Populist, economic disparity focused, anti-billionaire, pro-worker sentiment is how you change ordinary people’s minds in the current media economy.

As an individual, the most you’ll likely be able to do in this respect is going to be volunteering for phone banking efforts, donating money to left leaning charities focused on reducing economic inequality, and generally bringing these kinds of talking points up in general political discussion with others.

There’s something else that’s commonly overlooked though, and that’s local policy. Think of a city’s “town hall” type meetings that accept public comment. How many people in that city are actually regularly attending a town hall meeting? Think of how few people it really is during a particularly contentious proposal. Now imagine what it’s like when it comes to something like “housing and urban development: reducing the rate of homelessness - meeting no. 57” Almost nobody. Get yourself and a few friends down to your local relevant policy meetings, make even a little noise, and the amount of change you can make as a result can be drastic compared to the actual % of the city’s population you make up.

Pushing for things like ranked-choice voting in local elections can also be very viable, since it’s proven that tends to push voters further left, on average, and it also adds some extra competition that can spur a party like the Democrats into actual meaningful action.

https://sh.itjust.works/post/28472710/15190249:

There was a lot of pioneering in the 70's. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70's. Most people ended the 70's living like they did in the 60's but now there's cool shit like the Speak n' Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.

There was a lot of invention in the 80's. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80's. We emerged from the 80's with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren't that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.

There was a lot of evolution in the 90's. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren't a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system...it's the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user's life. An N64 is exactly what you'd expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it's still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it's the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won't take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven't embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it's not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.

There was a lot of revolution in the 2000's. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It'll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.

There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010's. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don't notice; you buy a new phone and it's so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they've converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren't there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you're probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.

Now we arrive in the 2020's where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010's, it's older than 4 years, but we're days away from the halfway point of the decade and it's becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term "enshittification" because it's got the word shit in it and that's hilarious, but...I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20's represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.

https://lemm.ee/post/55068846

https://lemmyverse.link/lemm.ee/post/55068846

Frustratingly, doing a search on that Changelog page for sources is mostly full of stuff not relevant to my search.

I did find a different post on Lemmy that talks about it, though. This post is incredibly thorough, and does an excellent job of undoing Kagi's attempt to memory-hole the information about which sources they use.

This makes it all the more frustrating that Vlad refuses to re-add them, instead asking to know why we would care. Here's a link to that conversation, which is on a platform controlled by Vlad, which appears to be resistant to archiving services that attempt to fetch those particular comments. Also for posterity:

slamor
Oct 27, 2024
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

There is really no proper information about search sources. We need to know what resources are used and at what rate.

Please make a more detailed and clear edit.

Vlad
Oct 29, 2024
[@]slamor Is there any particular reason you are asking for this? More context will help us better understand the need.

slamor
Nov 2, 2024
[@]Vlad why not?

Searching through kagi.com for "Yandex" yields a lot of dead links. The one living link is the Changelog, which says they added Yandex to their image search, back in December 2024... But that's hardly a revelation. The changelog doesn't go back very far either, AFAIK

As for the other links: Google says these links used to contain it the word, but I don't know why. Maybe this one was for raised sites, maybe it was for lowered sites, which would at least give a little insight into whether users loved or hated the domain...

url: https://europe-west2.kagi.com/stats?sd=asc&st=percentage
text: yandex.com. zlibrary.to. androidcentral.com. answer-all.com. baijiahao.baidu.com. cbc.ca. developer.apple.com. eightify.app. github.getafreenode.com. gitmemory ...

Another result seems to suggest Yandex Images served up a photo of Steve Jobs in a demo search, but that is no longer the case. Maybe it's just a coincidence.

url: https://kagi.com/images?q=steve+jobs
text: 564 x 318 yandex.ru. 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder 20 Steve Jobs Quotes: Wisdom from the Apple Co-Founder. 696 x 418 cioviews.com. 75 ...

SOURCE