I think this is a pretty good analysis, but I want to add onto it a little.

From where I’m standing, it seems like the reason they care so much about riling up their base is because their actual policies and interests hurt the working class rust belt people that are their main constituency. So they have to come up with some huge overriding cultural battle for their base to get really invested in fighting, to make them feel like they have to vote Republican and oppose the Democrats no matter what, and to distract them from the underlying social and economic issues that are the source of their undirected frustration in the first place, and deflect their anger onto a scapegoat that they can blame for all society’s ills without actually changing the system.

Because if they didn’t, their base would continue going down their populist route. They might start actually realizing how bad capitalism is for them and fighting against it in their own weird way. Some might see the benefit of Medicaid and Medicare and food stamps to working class people, or taxing rich more and the middle class less, and go over to the Democrats. And that could actually be pretty unprofitable for the elites and their donors and lobbyists.

Not to say that this would be exactly a good option either, though, because I think there is still a ton of genuine nationalism, traditionalism, anti-intellectualism, conservatism, and so on among today’s right wing, it isn’t all trumped up by their leaders, and that’s going to tinge their social and economic understandings, so even if they went down this latter route, it would still end up being a conspirational populism that looks disturbingly like fascism.

Yeah, perfect, solve inhumane crimes with… other inhumane crimes, to humans. Totally. Let’s totally bring back eugenics for “undesirables.”

<3

As a trans woman it’s really fun getting to be the minority that it’s totally okay to just openly hate and dehumanize, the right’s newest whipping girl ;-;

This was an absolutely wonderful read, thank you so much for sharing

Concerns about cultural changes from an influx of ten times the users the entire Fediverse currently has from a platform that is known for having a particularly toxic, algorithm-poisoned userbase aren’t specious or something you can ignore — even if the fears are “vague” in some sense they’re very valid.

Yeah I really don’t want Meta to federate with us. They have enough users to completely drown the mostly positive, thoughtful, and inclusive community we’ve built so far with the toxic algorithm brain rotted right wing zombie army that makes up most of their user base. I have such a happy little community on my instance and my little sublemmy rn and I dont want it to be swamped 😭

Yeah I’m hosting a video streaming service, a Discord clone, a CMS, git web, and my blog on a $120 ThinkCentre (4 cores, 8GB RAM, 1TB SAMSUNG SSD) in my home, and it works wonderfully. Basically no upkeep costs, the extra electricity used is not even noticeable.

People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button

Yeah when I found out about the Fairphone originally I was extremely excited and really wanted one for my next phone, but I use GrapheneOS my pixel right now so I figure I just check why it doesn’t support it and sure enough I found this stuff :(

longer support for software and hardware

Not to rain on your parade (I love the idea of the Fairphone!), but that’s actually a bit of misadvertising on Fairphone’s part — the SoCs they use are very outdated and near the end of their vender firmware and driver support, meaning they get maybe 2 years of the full support you’d expect when you say a manufacturer “supports” something, and then however many more years of hobbled support. Additionally, they’re just really bad about security.

I wish this would and bring replaceable phone batteries back to the US as well, since it would theoretically be easier for brands to just have a single model for all countries, but unfortunately I highly doubt that we’ll be the case, as demonstrated by Apple taking extra effort to put geolocation code in their phones that unlocks “sideloading” when you are in Europe but then locks it again when you’re outside of your Europe. As it turns out the extra effort it takes to create an exception to your hardware and software for Europe is far outweighed by the extra profit of being able to keep giving a more locked down products to everyone else.

Using GraphineOS on a Pixel 6. It’s very nice! I haven’t had any problems with it.

I use Decentraleyes and Privacy Badger on top of uBlock

Yup, that’s honestly the history of the world — people giving their autonomy and independence and concern for what’s really going on in the world away to authorities in exchange for ease, comfort, convenience and habit, then being surprised when those authorities turn around and begin taking advantage of them. It’s the eternal struggle against apathy.

Whoops! Fixed. Thanks

Would it be possible to make the bot post the content of the Reddit posts, instead of links to Reddit, via web scraping? That way we could avoid giving traffic and engagement to reddit.

Reddit’s down for me lmao

Exactly this. A long term blackout, especially a user blackout, is not feasible without a replacement place to go to.

Yeah when the blackout started I disabled my Reddit app and haven’t been back there once since. We need more people doing this.