this article is a byproduct of some delightful media news (Grist acquiring the long-shuttered The Counter and reviving it as a column), incidentally

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

unless we're compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.

with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

we're not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us--we've been quite public that we'd be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that's what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way--and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you'd like.

this is actually quite cute, i think.

i don't think "adding race-specific stripes to a pride flag" is a bad thing, is "treating people differently based on skin tone" except in the most cringeworthy, pedantic, I See No Color way possible, or is "racist"—and i think that if you believe these things you probably will not be allowed to partake in discussions like this on our instance after today

So a pride flag that is clearly textbook racist is good and arguing against it and the people that say its better because of the racism is not allowed here

when you call them racist and imply they're segregationist for having their preference, yes, that is not allowed. that's needlessly aggressive and needlessly sectarian—and speaking personally, "having a preference for more stripes on a flag that represent marginalized communities is racist and like segregation" is just such an overstatement of the point (that i otherwise agree with, for the record—i am not a fan of the progress flag) being made that it verges into being unserious.

also in Israel news today is this--the probable shutting down of Al Jazeera's operations there. Netanyahu says he'll act swiftly to request the outlet be banned under this new law

the strategy here appears to be that Israel is trying to bait Hezbollah into attacking them, which is a very sane strategy and not at all completely psychotic

Otherwise you could claim a crossdresser were trans or people who claimed they were “attack helicopters” would have to be accepted as trans because there would literally be no argument you could make against it.

this just sounds like a skill issue on your part, i'm sorry--this is not an issue if you have a postmodernist understanding of gender, which most trans people (myself included) subscribe to.

at the end of the day when you drill down? there really is not a material difference between the "real" and "fake" genders--gender is entirely socially constructed, and the designations of "male" and "female" that most people fall into are as arbitrary as any xenogender (real or frivolously created by right-wingers). you only "lose" by entertaining frivolous designations if your understanding of gender is already so narrow that you can't conceptually accommodate anything beyond a handful of stock gender identities to begin with.

yeah the difficulty here really is: even if we wanted to stick around (i think the consensus is not especially) and even if we did get the mod tools we think are needed (no reason to believe this will happen), the bridge here is burned pretty definitively. i don't personally see the sense in sticking around on a place where the people stewarding the software have an actively adversarial relationship with us

so, irritatingly, we appear to have absolutely no control over this as far as i can tell--i just spent about 15 minutes investigating the options available to us in Baserow to double check.

without reducing them each as persons into cartoon villains in my mind

if you "reduced them to cartoon villains" they would literally be less evil than they actually are. Republicans writ large would gladly kill billions of people if it kept the fossil fuel money going—and we know this because they are actively choosing to do that by denying climate change and making it as difficult as possible to move away from fossil fuels as we speak

Not one person on Earth would raid the capital building for Jeb Bush.

people literally did this to disrupt the 2000 recount in Florida on behalf of George W. Bush, Jeb's careerist failbrother. you cannot seriously think this is only a populist thing

As much as they’d like to deny it, they are responsible for the rise of Trump and extremism.

reducing voters to brainless automata who have no agency in the rise of fascism is a good way to completely neuter your ability to actually combat fascism because many Americans are active participants to the project of building fascism, not idly going along because of partisan voting. bluntly: if fascism had no base, elevating it wouldn't work in the first place

whenever my dad gets to shopping (not for lack of pestering on my part), most likely the first solution will be chemical--but in the interim i'm just trapping them and drowning them as they appear, which has worked well enough because i only see one or two a day and they really stick out against our walls. helpfully they also don't seem to have gotten into any furniture or other places it'd be hard to root them out from, and we vacuumed the area they originated in which i suspect got a lot of them early

I have no doubt that many republicans would abolish democracy in a heartbeat if they themselves could, without risk, become the autarch…

but then you're making my argument even more compelling for why literally none of these people should be trusted and none of them are moderate or should be treated that way (i.e. that it doesn't matter which one you elect, so the ones who are most open and unelectable should be elevated)--they're just Fascists In Waiting too; treating them as banal when by your analysis they aren't would be akin to ignoring your HIV because it hasn't started blatantly killing you yet

They did break with Trump. They did certify the election.

if your bar for "Republicans demonstrating their desire to overthrow democracy" cannot realistically be met until they actually do that then i think your bar is bad and hopelessly naive, because at that point neither you nor i will live in a democracy and the bar will cease to be relevant.

but even entertaining this bar for some reason: please remind me how many of these people then supported actually prosecuting Trump for extremely unambiguously committing several crimes, including attempting to overthrow the election and inciting a mob that threatened to kill all of Congress.[^1] and let's then take stock of how many Republicans who feigned shock and gall at the event subsequently act like all that never happened, openly apologize for it, or state they would refuse to hold Trump accountable for/actively support similar criminal actions in 2024. to say nothing of how many state Republican parties (Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona), even pre-Trump, had fallen completely into believing that land should vote and that the only elections which count are ones they win. or how any initiative to ban gerrymandering or to abolish the undemocratic Electoral College is Democratic-led, because Republicans benefit from their continuation?

[^1]: 17 of 261, for anyone wondering. only six are still in Congress in large part because Republicans and the Republican base have purged them from the party

Yes, I actually do believe that many of the “moderate” Republicans are less ready and willing and downright excited to actually turn the government over to Trump, even if only because they know it doesn’t actually benefit them in any way to do so.

then respectfully: i think you are catastrophically naive. i do not believe this, i do not think "moderate Republicans" believe this, and i think the case for this is unimaginably weak given the history of the Republican Party and how they have governed across the board. in any just country i think we would ban the party outright and disqualify all current Republican officeholders as we briefly did with secessionists after the Civil War

A Trump endorsement is not by any means a death sentence for a candidate, but it very much is an assurance that candidate will be attacking vulnerable groups if they win.

...as opposed to all of the non-Trump endorsed candidates who don't do this in the Republican Party. i'm sorry but this is unironically just laundering the fake idea that there are shades of difference in the Republican Party. there aren't! this doesn't matter! there are no moderate Republicans! the only difference between these people is how open they are about how much they want the people they don't like to die! kill the idea that this party can be saved by trying to let the "moderates" win out--all they want is a Kinder, Gentler Fascism that is harder to fight! literally every serious Republican politician is, at their core, a violent bigot--it's the Republican brand and if they disagreed with violent bigotry they wouldn't be Republicans!

They are explicitly and intentionally trying to put people in greater danger,

how? again: in what ways would these people who aren't Moreno differ in voting on legislation--which is the basis upon which people are in danger?

like, do you think Frank LaRose—who has a history of infringing on the right to vote, who has made it harder for people to vote, who defended the right of Republicans to gerrymander their way into power in perpetuity, and who wants abortion rights to be restricted in the same ways Trump does (and went out of his way to try and make this possible against the will of voters)—is a moderate? do you think he'd break with the party if asked? because i don't. i think LaRose would be exactly like Moreno, just harder to beat because even people like you who are conscious of the creeping extremism incorrectly perceive him as more moderate even though he won't be in any way that will matter if he's elected.

or do you think that Matt Dolan—who, despite criticizing Trump for January 6th also said explicitly the last time he ran that he would not convict Trump if he ever had to vote on impeachment against him—is a moderate? do you think he'd break with the party if asked? because i don't. i think Dolan would also be exactly like Moreno, just harder to beat for the same reasons i just described.

Which is going to be impossible when those very Republicans and Independents think,

i'm sorry but, at the scale of the general electorate essentially nobody thinks this way and you might as well be making someone up accordingly. most voters--probably a minimum of half or more in almost all states--simply do not pay attention to or care about primaries (and indeed most election cycles only see majority interest in the general election beginning in August or later), and most people who show up in November will likely have not have voted in a primary at all.

additionally, it is well established that extremist candidates pay a penalty for being extremist or perceived as extremist: see for example Split Ticket's electoral wins above replacement model