It’s great but that fan is an overkill. 😂

According to my observations, the Fediverse grows whenever people look for alternative. People do that whenever their comfort is disturbed by material changes. E.g. Reddit gated app APIs, people’s apps started shutting down, protest ensued, it failed, people looked for an alternative, many joined Lemmy as the obvious one. That created one of the largest spikes in active usage. There were others following that. There are network effects keeping people where they are unless there’s a significant force pushing them to overcome that. And so I think the Fediverse would grow the same way it’s grown so far. By being here for people whenever they can’t say or read something the way they were previously able to, as corporations enshittify to profit maximize. You even see them doing that themselves, with Bluesky for example, where they built an alternative that pretends to be federated in order to capture refugees. But Bluesky is inevitably going to get fucked too and since it’s federated in pretense only, there isn’t another instance to take over. I think the process is similar to Linux adoption. It was always there, chugging along for people looking for alternatives. It hasn’t stopped growing. It hasn’t exploded but we’re not complaining about where we are, are we.

No it doesn’t. It only does if those are the majority of the Democratic party. And they’re not. I don’t think many are finding this meme to mean there aren’t Democrats that toil against the majority of the party. I find the constant purity testing of memes and critique of the Democratic party serves much more to shield the part that shouldn’t be shielded from critique. Oh no, this critique isn’t 99% accurate! Yes. It’s 80% accurate.

Just read the section on his mayorship of Braddock. This bud has been problematic for a long time. I don’t think he’s gone crazy lately, instead people got sold a counterfeit product during his federal election that they didn’t look much into.

Did he laugh?

A tragic story that should be added to piles of child tragedy in Palestine as well as the other affected countries from these conflicts. Speaking of Palestine, I can’t see it mentioned at all on the front page of rferl.org.

His mind was not changed.

Perhaps they don’t really want a regime change, or at least not an orderly, prosperous one. Perhaps getting the Islamic Republic to dig its heels would prevent improvement of relationships with the world, lifting of sanctions and economic growth that would create more resources for military strengthening. Perhaps having the ambiguous big bad Muslims in power makes it easy to manufacture consent for arbitrary bombings, both domestically in Israel and abroad. Perhaps keeping this enemy keeps people in Israel motivated to comply with the right wing policies of some fractions.

I doubt it. They’ve gone hard nationalist and seem to be ready to sacrifice for the things they imagine they have to do.

Putin really shat the bed with the special military operation, didn’t he. By expending so many people and resources in Ukraine, he lost the ability to plausibly support his allies in the Middle East against attacks from Israel and the US. Had he not entered Ukraine, I don’t think Israel would have struck Iran like they did.

Yeah, I don’t know why people think Israel would tolerate a democratic country that threatens their military dominance. An unsanctioned, democratic Iran with 90M people would undoubtedly develop more weapons and be able to sustain a much more significant armed conflict than the Islamic Republic. Such a country becoming a serious threat to Israel would be only a matter of electing the “wrong” government. Why wouldn’t they preemptively hit just like they did now?

The market seems to be betting that it’s not happening.

It begs questions that have only bad answers.

Oh you sweet summer child.

Jesus fucking Christ

100%. I’m Canadian and I’d really like to have some nukes right now.

Horrifying. Is there any obvious solution being discussed in your circles?

Not nearly enough. If they hadn’t destroyed some portion of Iran’s ballistic missiles, it could have been much worse and really deter future FA. Now I’m not sure if the FO would be enough to do that.

Which on the whole I think is a good thing since we’ve seen that significant instability often affects most of us.

a near 50% increase in three months.

This makes sense. I recall thinking after Israel’s previous attack and dismantling Hezbollah that if I were the Ayatollah, I’d now be going full speed towards a nuclear weapon test, as that’s the only thing that can secure my regime’s survival and by extension the stability of the country (in whatever state it exists). After the last attack, that pressure is that much higher.