Your valid criticism is just purity testing to these people. I'm not sure what causes people to blindly worship the party to the degree that they do, but there has to be a way to bridge the gap.
The system isn't working at all here in America.
M1ch431
joined 11 months ago
On reddit, for my criticism of the Democratic Party, I am often censored on liberal spaces besides r/50501.
I follow the rules always, I cite sources, I am polite, and I am a US citizen. I am not influenced by Russian propaganda (to the best of my knowledge), and I'd like to say I have decent stances; I advocate for nonviolence and human rights, and generally advocate for progress and civility.
The "trolls" (I do my best to always assume good faith) here have nowhere near as much power here on the fediverse as on reddit.
On reddit, once you block someone, it shuts down discussion completely. Users there strategically block after their first rebuttal to prevent any of your responses from showing up and to gain the last word. I often waste time researching and typing a response, only to find out I was blocked and my response is only showing up for me. The only way to get around this is to edit your comments from before they blocked you, and it is very awkward (and usually results in lots of downvotes when you can't properly respond to someone calling you a Russian troll).
If OP blocks you, you get kicked from the thread completely. You can neither see the thread after that point, nor respond to anyone else. Even your comments on the thread are invisible on your user profile (so unless you do voodoo and find the comment permalink, it's difficult to edit your comment with a response).
Mods also abuse automod to trick you into thinking your posts or comments are showing up for others (like setting it to remove everything for a specific user). They do this to avoid accountability when they can't easily explain what rule you broke or when mods censor based on ideological grounds. I also get censored automatically by automod often and find that my posts or comments don't show up randomly - presumably I hit automod filters, but I still worry every single time that my account is shadowbanned.
If automod and the blocking functionality isn't abused, any divergent opinion or perspective gets completely buried by downvotes. Like me pointing out how rigged things are for progressives (it's hard for me to stomach people acting like the Democrats need to move right because progressive policies are "extremely unpopular").
Anyway, moderation has been very fair here to me, I just want others to know that reddit is completely busted for healthy discourse and some of the tricks users and mods use to create echo chambers.
“There’s no expectation of privacy in public.”
There's no expectation of privacy anywhere. This has all been taken way too far.
Corporations have been already making profiles of various types for a while now in the form of adtech, social media, data brokers, people search websites, credit scores, devices and services that harvest sensitive and intimate data (e.g. mobile phone apps, watching habits from smart TVs, driving data from cars).
Our society has been set up for mass surveillance in a thousand different ways as a form of social control and dominance by those who wield power.
It's time people realize that privacy is a right instead of normalizing abuses of consent.
You can be assured that it's not just Russia and China feeding it garbage. There is a vast amount of propaganda in all forms of media that AI is trained on, and a lot likely originates from the west.
Why would Islamic countries not condemn China? They certainly seem to condemn the genocide of the Palestinian people. Somebody please enlighten me.
Edit: According to Business Insider, they might fear China's retaliation (e.g. economic vengeance). How reliant are these Islamic countries on exports from China and how reliant are these countries on China importing their resources (e.g. oil)?
Why would any of that matter when people of their religion are being genocided? Fear of retaliation from a nuclear-powered state and facing consequences in regards to western trade doesn't seem to deter them from taking a stance on Palestine.
If these countries were given the ingredients to be able to develop and there was no outside demand for mined materials, these children wouldn't be in the mines.
Big if, but less of an "if" if more people are made aware. It's absolutely sickening how much we rely on lithium considering how it is sourced.
We are collectively enabling modern slavery and child slavery. These corporations prefer to act innocent because they aren't sending the children themselves into the mines, but they buy the materials they mine regardless (and there's no way that they don't know the reality). Many corporations profit off the back of these people and children and they should be required to pay significant reparations.
What is in our power to stop this? We can spread the awareness of our exploitation of third-world countries - including their children, we can develop technologies that don't rely on rare materials or difficult to mine materials, we can employ automation to mine what we do need in first-world countries, and we can hold the corporations that profit from these supply chains accountable.
There are battery technologies (e.g. sodium-ion) that we could grasp and avoid mining altogether for energy storage. China is proving that sodium-ion batteries are a very promising technology, even in cars, and the sodium can be sourced from seawater or from the byproducts of desalination (the latter which likely needs to be very quickly scaled considering the fresh water crisis).
When you put it that way, I guess we better hand over thousands every year to Apple for the new iPhone. Wouldn't want a child slave to be unemployed.
Buy 10,000 disposable vapes every year while you're at it (if you really care). Maybe a couple cents will trickle down to the children you claim to care about.
If you're worried about these children losing their wonderful life in the mines, feel free to support them through other means.
Make it your life's work to spread awareness, bring aid to the affected countries, and support their development - you only enslave yourself by learning to do absolutely nothing against what you see as oppressive.
And getting companies that profit off of these children to support them would likely be fair. Apple, Google, and many others can handle the hit.
Your trolling aside, we all share a personal responsibility to not buy from companies that e.g. utilize cobalt/lithium in their products - slavery/child labor is rampant in those supply chains and Apple et. al are responsible for supporting it.
If there was no demand, these children wouldn't be forced to work in mines - it's that simple.
The issue is that with ballot access laws, third parties have to have a ton of momentum. And Democrats systematically engage in lawfare to kick third parties and other individuals off the ballot - look it up, they fight anyone to the left of them with more cohesion than they fight Republicans or Trump.