To those coming in to this post to say “Wow, a billionaire shouldn’t be able to impact the outcome of geopolitical conflicts with the touch of a button!”

All I can say is…

The super wealthy have been doing this for ages, it’s just that Musk is profoundly stupid so he does it in the open.

https://holdenfg.org/blog/edible-mushrooms-and-their-poisonous-look-alikes/

In this post: some very confident sounding people with very, very bad ideas about how toxic mushrooms work.

Please don’t pick and eat mushrooms in the wild unless you’ve had actual experienced people teach and train you.

Also, anything toxic can be tasted safely before cooking.

Might want to edit this, you can’t taste toxins and cooking does nothing to the fungus toxin. You cannot take a bite of a raw mushroom and decide from that if it’s going to kill you.

In my experience there are a LOT of leftists who cling to the label without actually being more than a liberal with some angry outbursts.

The only thing worse than vindictive, bigoted conservatives is vindictive, bigoted leftists who don’t want to find ways to live alongside the stupid hicks.

At least they’re stupid enough that they can be turned and manipulated to supporting better outcomes, but leftists holding a grudge do entire goddamn worldbuilding exercises around justifying hating everyone with a simple life and a simple mind.

(Go ahead and downvote me browser, while you do, think about what kind of biases you hold against people based on how you imagine their house and yard to look.)

I used to listen them on long drives home at night when I was younger too, I honestly cannot remember anything about the show at all other than freaky callers with obviously made-up stories and Adam and Drew would sometimes stop the call to listen to the caller’s chirping smoke detector.

It was a simpler time, we didn’t build whole ideological movements around a couple of goofballs on the radio, most people didn’t take it seriously so the show was bad, but harmless. Like much of the media of the 80’s-90’s.

Somewhere along the line we started outsourcing this kind of entertainment to interactive forums and message boards and from there people started festering and ruminating on this shit because suddenly they had access to thousands of different voices to find someone to validate their feelings, and that just curdled all of society and turned the most innocuous bullshit into weapon’s grade social manipulation. Now everyone hates each other because everyone only looks at absurd exaggerations of reality and then isolates themselves from even proving themselves wrong.

You may have misread the instructions for the project.

The actual blight/parasite that caused the potato famine from what I’ve seen looked a lot different, it was more like the whole thing would be rotted out and slimey on the inside due to worms chewing around in there.

Although I may be mixing up several different potato famines.

Don’t let the cynics and idiots get to you. You are right.

I remind people here, often to their irritation, that Mussolini was not defeated and dragged out of his headquarters by a plucky band of diverse rebels with a vibrant mix of skillsets… he was arrested and handed over to the opposition party by his own king and the Italian government. While a lot of that had to do with the allies rampaging across occupied Europe, it also came from a lot of internal pressure and the existing government knowing that their situation was unsustainable.

Nobody wants to rebuild a government, it’s not that fucking easy, no matter how many utterly childish lemmy kids and redditors scream and rant about “revolutions” we still have hundreds of millions of Americans who are comfortable and uninterested in going out and getting shot for abstract reasons.

This won’t be peaceful.

We are still far from widespread social disruption, as much as a weird number of people think they want that outcome.

It’s still important to push the message to not be lazy about going out and doing the thing, especially in mid-terms which get far less turnout.

But that 89mil who did not vote in 2024 is very close to the average percentage that stays home every election anyway. My point is, the sampling of those who did vote, didn’t necessarily make me think that if uninterested people did show up, that it would have gone much different.

Of the people who were actually registered and voted in 2024, a vast number of the people who voted for Trump identified as Obama voters and Bernie supporters. People had basically discarded whatever political alignment more informed voters adhere to and just looked at the price of eggs at the time and associated that with Biden/Harris, and that was the most informed opinion shaping voting habits.

People did not watch debates. They did not pay attention to large news stories. They got most of their political news from social media; tweets and facebook memes in the small amount of time they spend scrolling content that isn’t entertainment. They did not know what either candidate was advocating and largely didn’t care, most thought it didn’t effect them either way.

This is all by design, and if we want to talk to about vote manipulation, this is the biggest issue, which is there are too many fake shills and sock-puppets all over social media, even here on Lemmy, who will adopt the stupidest or most radical takes on both sides of every issue until bystanders and browsers roll their eyes at the whole thing and tune out.

There are literally millions of people in India and other countries who farm Twitter for a few dollars every month by pushing rage-bait, arguing with people, pretending to be Americans and pretending to care about our future, while sharing propaganda and memes designed to make people hate political involvement.

Our biggest problem is not turnout but engagement and information.

I’ve gone through very similar experiences, I actually never pulled out and ended up basically losing everything. Started over a few years back.

I mean, it all fucking sucks but I think after actually facing the worst-cases and living through it, you feel far less anxious about a lot of the smaller stuff.

But if I could recommend one thing, it would be consider looking into therapy ahead of time and making time for it. Being a caregiver and having the full responsibility on your shoulders to make things work is more than traumatic, it can destroy you. PTSD is a constant presence in my life and it doesn’t work like media portrays it, it’s just a constant, gnawing anxiety and despair that doesn’t go away even when things are fine. Your brain keeps looking for reasons for the feelings and throws you all kinds of narratives that you have to manually address and squash down every day. Not fun. Would not recommend.

It’s not quite volunteer work, but still donate to food banks seasonally, or monthly when I’m able to. I don’t make a lot of money but I still donate what I can.

I had some crashes in life, I had to rely on food banks. I now give back. It feels amazing. I think a lot of people are afraid of the feelings involved honestly, it’s a strong emotional ride when you donate stuff and see the faces of the people waiting in line for food, toiletries and things like socks and underwear.

Hey look at it this way, we may finally get our mechs out of this.

I mean, they may be the last thing you see, but at least we may see them.

There are a lot of really miserable, insufferable kids on Lemmy right now seething about this because it flies in the face of the “voting is useless, everything will be rigged” narrative that they push to validate not wanting to be involved.

Showing up at the polls is not our problem in the US, it’s getting people involved enough to actually learn about and read what candidates represent. We had the largest voter turnout in US history over the last couple elections, but people basically voted at random because they tuned out of the political chaos.

It’s far more clear this time around who is doing what to disrupt the status-quo in the US and I expect we’re going to see a massive swing in the opposite direction between this November and 2028.

If Kazakhstan did have it, they would have already used it in some capacity.

I expect maybe putin to keep it in his back pocket because he’s capable of using it tactically to leverage massive geopolitical moves like averting/sparking WW3.

Psssst. We’re all political prisoners here now.

If you fucks don’t do everything you can to overwhelm the midterms to primary every incumbent democrat, you better not complain when President Newsom rolls back 20% of Trump’s policies and decides that some trans people can be released from some of the camps.