Lemmy features modlogs, so you can just go check. It’s in the sidebar. Instances also have modlogs, so if admins did it, you can check that too.

No, just pointing out that if the CIA did plenty of dirty work in the past, it would be silly to think that nobody else is doing any today.

Right, cuz the CIA is the only intelligence agency in the world that fucks around. Obviously.

… they can’t even design the boob-plate properly anymore. smh…

Ooh, neat. Can you do that for us here in the US too?

Only Philips was able to get even a tiny bit of support. He’s as centrist as Biden. This whole corporate conspiracy you guys love is nonsense. There’s a shitload of corporate money in politics, make no mistake, but this is a far cry from the resistance that Bernie ran into. Bernie had actual support.

How do these guys poll? Have you even listened to Dean, the one doing the best? He’s not espousing any leftist ideas you know, he’s a reach-out-to-the-repubs style dem.

Against “the parties own rules” how? Each state runs their shit differently.

Phillips received 19.7% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, despite Joe Biden not being on the ballot. Phillips received less than 2% of the vote in the South Carolina primary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Phillips_2024_presidential_campaign

Each state sets its own primary rules, so they’re all over the place. If the guy can’t get enough support, he can still be a write-in.

Sorry, but that’s not preventing someone from running.

Who did “the establishment” block from running? You want to go make Bernie run somehow or something? Get the conspiracy theory nonsense out of here. People choose whether or not they will run.

Don’t underestimate the backlash. The big, mellower, center segment of the population that is generally more chill isn’t in favor of fascist idiots.

Just, do what you can to help maintain motivation in the face of the fascist fear-train. Fear is their #1 tool, it’s the emotion that underpins their whole worldview. Control is simply a response to that fear. Without that underlying current of fear, though, how do they get people to grant them control?

It’s less ridiculous when you realize the human brain is also a prediction engine. It can just operate in a wide variety of ways instead of just being limited to only talking, or only folding proteins, or only playing chess or whatever.

Ethnicity does not matter. Russian people are not evil, Russian actions are. Judge a man by his actions, not where he came from.

Ah, was not sarcasm. My mistake.

Are you operating under the impression that the French Revolution created the current republic? If so, you’re missing many, many steps. One of which was a fellow named Napoleon who crowned himself emperor.

This argument is basically the same as those put forward by the right wing nut jobs that think their second amendment rights to tote a rifle will let them fight against the US govt.

Just because a method functioned a couple centuries ago in a far simpler time, does not mean it will function today. Gotta keep up with the times there gramps.

I mean, you didn’t include anything like tea, so it’s kinda just easy. Fizzy, calorie-pumped, nutritionless, cheap-dopamine-providing, overpriced and overpackaged water is pretty low hanging fruit.

The concern is that when a strongman is in power and backed into a corner, they have very few ways out of that corner. Their systems are designed in ways to suppress the possibility that someone will try to coup them, and to keep the population from getting too unstable.

One of the more reliable ways to keep the ball rolling is to keep the situation so ugly and chaotic that its too costly for anyone to want to come in and replace them.

It looks like madness to us, but when you look at it through the lens of self preservation atop a fundamentally corrupt system lacking in checks and balances, it starts to make a sort of twisted sense.

At the end of the day, Russia is more or less immune to ground invasion, due to the nuclear threat. So, there isn’t a whole lot of reason not to broaden the conflict, just to buy a couple more years of personal safety for the guy on top.

One rational way to attempt to head that off is to power up to the degree that a ground invasion would rapidly fail, not buying a couple years, but instead just hastening the decline through more military catastrophes. So, free people may consider mobilization, to posture strength and scare off aggression. Posture strength and sabre rattle, so you don’t have to fight a war.

Or, y’know, we could just arm Ukraine and let them do the job. But Putin is undermining that effort with every resource at his disposal already.

It’s unlikely to be WW3 at any rate, because Xi Jinping would want no part of such a dangerous and short-sighted undertaking. Though, he could use the distraction to try to take Taiwan.

Problem is the IDF response. They’ve already demonstrated a callous disregard for innocent life. So, just stop sending soldiers in, and send tank shells instead.

War is just not a one player game.

You can’t catch corruption without the people that hunt it down, sometimes from many different directions, to make the hunt as effective as possible. Fighting against that strikes me as a Russian strategy for undermining Ukrainian unity.

I think a lot of the millennial drama is manufactured. The generational drama in general is.

Not that generation gaps don’t exist, but generally we’re pretty tolerant of each other at the younger/lefter end. Even most of the disagreement around Gaza is more fueled by political position than age imo, once you allowed the newcomers to the conflict the time to get up to speed on it. Which did take a little time. It’s kinda complicated.

There are definitely large numbers of people trying to manufacture conflict in pretty much every way they can think of, though. Some bots, some volunteers, probably even some paid people, world is a big place and labor can be cheap. Fortunately Lemmings generally seem to be a harder target.