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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Along those lines, monarchist is bad, too. The wealthy in the U.S. are notoriously touchy about being called aristocracy, and I maintain that it’s because nobility not only punctures the meritocracy myth, but also carries with it the idea of noblesse oblige. They don’t want any obligations to the peasants. (Won’t be lauded as a great philanthropist for the dribs and drabs they give to charity, if it’s expected!)



  • Marvelous! This article is one of the rare ones. It doesn’t tell me anything I did l didn’t already know, but explains it in a way that makes the pieces fit together with a satisfying snap.

    Like, trans rights. If the moral legitimacy of the trans cause comes from their status as an oppressed group, then advocating for them necessarily means criticizing the American system, which I think is what a lot of people react negatively to. (Think about the appeal of the other guy’s slogan.) As another commentator I read said years ago, we should appeal to traditional leave-us-alone conservatism, and cast it as the American ideal that we protect them because they are citizens deserving freedom like anybody else, and doing so is what makes our country great.

    But, bigger picture, the idea of learned helplessness really resonates.



  • You’re not the only one! I think it’s worth noting that back then, “social media” was a new model in which the viewers provided the content, a democratizing force which broke the hold of a small priesthood of editors, producers, and owners over the message we hear.

    Now, so-called social media is synonymous with The Algorithm. That is, the powerful and connected have figured out how to tame it and gatekeep information again, this time in a far more insidious way. It still has the veneer of populism, but scratch the surface, and the owners largely control what you see.

    It’s darkly hilarious to read discussions on here in which people deny that Lemmy is social media at all, rather than an example of the ur-social media, the good kind.












  • Liberals (which I’m taking to mean Democrats) didn’t “fix” gay marriage. Right up until the Iowa Supreme Court decision, in the early 2000’s, the argument in Democratic circles was that gay-rights organizations should pipe down, settle for civil unions, and stop making gay marriage an issue. They were afraid of handing the Republicans a weapon. It was the gay-rights organizations that pushed it through the courts, and prominent Democratic politicians like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden “evolved” their positions to support it. I mean no criticism by the use of quotes. Kudos to them for changing their minds, but it wasn’t liberals that made it happen.