That difference matters a LOT. Leadership personality and tone-setting matters a lot. I don’t think that she would have made things broadly much better in a policy sense, but I didn’t vote for her expecting her policies to make life better, I voted for her to keep fucking Trump out so we can have a few more years to desperately try to keep pushing the needle back left and raise up more potential socialist and progressive leaders like we saw with Mamdani… something that gets squashed more often when someone like Trump is prying the whole system apart and installing judges. I swear we need more fucking mandatory civics classes.

I don’t get why this is controversial for people. It’s like everyone tunes the fuck out every four years and just focuses on that ONE sporting event, instead of looking at politics in terms of a gradual, ongoing process.

Lemmy is really bad about this being a little further left, and I’m not even counting the .ml shadow side of the valley. Generally this site is a good view into the attention spans and mature political analysis of our current leftist movement. Which is to say, any day now some amazing socialist is going to descend from socialist heaven and start leading us to a huge revolution and even after it ends somehow we don’t have to worry about the tens of millions of people who didn’t want the socialist revolution.

It doesn’t really matter though because the last several federal elections have had the highest voter turnout and youth turnout in US history. The problem wasn’t angy leftists folding their arms, the problem is our population has gotten dumb. People tuned out the news because nothing makes sense anymore, you don’t know who to trust, and people broadly don’t socialize as much so there’s less social incentives to have and hold values and opinions. Think hard. No think, scroll.

I would have to look it up, I didn’t watch documentaries, I watched it all on live TV at the time. I’m sure there’s boatloads of stories and documentaries on youtube, just beware anything that tries to paint the case as anything other than a massive clusterfuck and failure of the system to safeguard judicial system from money, fame, influence and media hype. What went wrong, was it was the first huge celebrity trial covered on live TV, and all the same nonsense and political bullshit you would expect to happen today, happened then.

The DNA evidence was biggest the key which would have clinched any similar case today, but it was still a very new thing, and people were as dumb about science then as they are now, so that ignorance was leveraged by a rich man’s legal team and whatever political funding they were getting.

Time is a flat circle.

There was more than DNA evidence, there was a fat ton of circumstantial evidence, testimonies from associated people, and of course things like Nicole Brown Simpson having previously called 911 as OJ was beating her up and threatening her life, the whole massive performance piece of the slow-speed bronco chase, it was just a fuckup from the start and everyone involved just wanted to get famous from it.

It’s mind blowing particularly to an Oldy McOldface like myself who was there and lived through the events.

There are users in here who are utterly confused, look at the other replies. I know the 90’s were now over 3 decades ago but it’s all completely searchable. There are multiple documentaries. I don’t know how people confuse Rodney King, Martin Luther King and the OJ Simpson case all in one thread. Astonishing.

OJ got off because the jury wanted retribution for the Martin Luther King trail.

He got off because the jury was subjected to an absolute media circus and was tampered with repeatedly and the lawyers for OJ did everything they could to confuse them about the relatively new technology of DNA analysis, and judge Ito had almost no control over the courtroom, leading to one of the first “memes” of “I’ll allow it.”

You don’t have to do legwork, I remember much of it.

Edit: it took me a moment to realize you said Martin Luther King… I don’t even… man, bruh, just… bruh.

Rodney King was the case of a driver who got assaulted by police and brutally beat, it led to rioting across LA because it was captured on video, and King’s iconic “Can’t we all get along” speech on TV. It was the same general time and place, but not directly connected to the OJ case.

Mark Fuhrman may or may not have been some racist tampering with evidence but it still would have taken enormous resources and a risky gamble to frame OJ for… reasons. OJ was not framed, he got off because they turned the trial into a media circus and the jury didn’t understand DNA evidence which was very new and few people had heard of it as an investigation tool. They have tried to leverage Rodney King’s beating but that was only one part of the massive fuck-up by prosecution and the legal system.

My memory of events is still pretty fresh but you’re welcome to look it all up.

I remember OJ Simpson getting off a double-murder because there was a remote possibility that someone (actually several hundred people) orchestrated a conspiracy to plant evidence.

He stabbed two people to death and there was DNA evidence tying him to the crime scene.

The scientific paper grift chain: get private funding from a company to publish a paper, use wild methodology, have the shit denounced and condemned by mainstream academia but not before every fucking news outlet in the world puts out a headline “BREAKING: SCIENTIFIC PAPER LINKS EATING SALAD TO BRAIN-EXPLODING DISEASE”

Never mind that to get this evidence they had to inject a marmot with enough salad dressing directly into its skull to make it explode thousand-island grey matter across its cage.

For the DNC ticket it’s going to be Newsom, Harris and like, one candidate we actually like who won’t make it past primaries because the system isn’t designed for radical change.

What sucks about this is I’ve seen it play out so many times before that I already know that when the populist/socialist doesn’t make it past the primaries, progressives everywhere will balk and choke and say “Well there’s no WAY i’m voting for any of the people still on the ticket. The DNC is corrupt, my vote doesn’t matter.”

And then the bar slides further right.

Every time they break our hearts, and we respond like they predict, they get to slide the bar closer to fascism and authoritarianism. Which is what capital wants. Both republicans and democrats are servants of capital and we don’t defeat capital with some idealistic notions of revolution or uprising. Shake that fantasy out of your head. We have to start pushing the needle back to the left, and sure that means making shitty choices at the presidental elections, but it also means shaking off your introversion and asocial habits and going out and helping your local community and town/state elections so that we can cut the foundations out from under this mess. We can still turn it around but you’re really not going to be happy with the timespans involved in doing so.

You’re not going to see the Star Trek post-scarcity future. I’m sorry. Now start doing the fucking work to make it so your grandkids or grandroids will see that future.

It’s wild, when I was hanging out with Luigi in my place on the West Coast on the night of December 4th, 2024, he told me “I sure like FiletOfish sandwiches, I am thinking of heading out to Altoona, Pennsylvania to my favorite McDonalds there to get one in a few days. I can do this because I know my rights.”

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There’s almost nothing humanity could do that would actually impact the world in a way that could even make a dormant supervolcano so much as fart.

America has bowed out of any actual tech race decades ago when capital decided to go for get-rich-quick schemes by deregulating instead of investing in domestic production. The only thing the US had any kind of edge on was AI and that’s just a bubble that’s going to get out-inflated by China.

We could have done FINE on a service economy, importing raw materials and textiles and tech from other countries and assembling, packaging and marketing it here. We could have built an entire NATION of white-collar workers managing tech companies like this. The whole right-wing “we have to bring coal mining and steel milling back to the US” was pure, pandering bullshit meant to appeal to the country’s midwits who have no idea how the wider world or technology works.

But we’re not only not going that direction, we’ve basically slammed the door on that route. Our principle money-making now comes from investment and finance, and this weird, world’s-largest-ponzie-scheme where private equity is just going around gobbling up smaller businesses and putting them out of business to manipulate markets and force market direction. Nothing in the US is real, nothing is built on anything. Or at least that’s how it will be. We still export shit like fuel corn and soybeans… somewhat.

You can read history and see how this has repeated over and over when there’s an authoritarian/fascist takeover, back to the age of barbarians. They don’t want to inherit their conquered nation’s complex infrastructure and problems, they want to sell off anything cheap and easy to make a dime on before ditching the place and living somewhere disconnected from the raped land they’ve left behind. Things like natural resources like oil, coal, easy-to-access minerals and guns and other easy-to-make hardware for war. This is what happened to a lot of other countries and why some places are utter shitholes now.

Likely. Claiming to have resources is a new “get rich quick” scam meant to drive investments in one direction or another. Russia just claimed to have found a bajillion kajillion barrels of oil under antarctica, which is soooo convenient that they find it in an area with international claim and where it’s really, really hard to verify 🙄

so I hope this means that we wouldn’t cause an active super volcano.

There is almost nothing we could do short of apocalyptic nuclear demolition charges in very strategic places that could possibly trigger a supervolcano, and even then I doubt we could do more than create some kind of vent that would reduce the chances of a supervolcano.

The article is really poorly written and has nothing to do with any volcanoes, at least not current ones. Saying it’s in an ancient caldera is like saying something was “found in rock that was once beneath the mantle” or some such sloppy, forced sensationalism.

Also why would anyone think they have claim to the deposit when the government wants it?

They want to get bought out by someone else. Government buys land from citizens all the time when they want something bad enough. It’s a bit of a gamble though because the government is far more likely to find a “loophole” which lets them take what they want without spending a dime than if you are just starting a tech company and hoping Google or OpenAI will buy you out. But they might be hoping to play the lithium market in some way.

eager to trade human bodies for rhetorical points.

There are a lot of people who have sacrificed their lives to defend their homes from invaders. A lot of people would say that’s about as noble of a goal as you can fight for and pretty fucking far from “rhetoric” when it’s a hostile army burning your homes and raping your daughters but hey, yah lets keep saying what’s best for the country and what we need to “give up” to get peace.

Don’t bother replying unless you want to keep showboating for others.

When you post about Ukraine on reddit you get conservative white Americans who have bought the propaganda and think strong, proud, masculine Putin is saving Ukrainian orphans from nazis, and have a mountain of arguments why we shouldn’t fund wars overseas unless it’s Israel, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. Or Venezuela of course.

You post about Ukraine on Lemmy and suddenly every tankie hiding in the shadows can’t take the pressure anymore and HAVE to pile out to whinge about how unwinnable the war is, and that it’s useless to resist a tyrant and invader because something something 21st century capitalism and oil economies and nothing will even change under Putin’s rule anyway so why are we even so worked up and on and on.

I feel bad for Ukrainian people having to endure not just a hostile invasion but scorn and skepticism from the whole world because some people have such loose, soupy brains that they have invent entire straw-universes to validate the erections they get thinking Putin’s bare chest.

I can guarantee there are current members of this administration who want to go watch a female anything get smashed in a car crash. It was probably their idea.

Stephen Miller. I am talking specifically about Stephen Miller. No need to dance around shit anymore.

I feel like the rotten brains out there who only know scrolling can no longer detect even a hint of sarcasm unless ChatGTP tells them that it’s a joke.