Welp, I guess the astronauts would've survived riding it down after all. Oh well, better safe than sorry.

That just means Lower Decks has the best treknobabble!

Pretty depressing that even Montenegro manages to arrest, convict and imprison their coup instigators faster then the US has.

Russia might not spend as much money on propaganda as some other entities, but they punch above their weight in terms of tactics and effectiveness.

That guy gets on my nerves, but I've read enough from him on various topics that I'm pretty confident he's a genuine user. Don't get me wrong, he's for sure an ideologue who's no fun at parties, but I don't think he's a bot or that he's saying things he was instructed to say and doesn't actually care deeply about.

There's another user, with a three-word-phrase username, that I would describe similarly.

Not just that. If it's just the mods of one community, appeal to the instance admins. If the admins are part of the problem, don't just move to a different instance yourself, also try to raise awareness and convince the rest of Lemmy to defederate.

People upvote because they like the content of the data or how it supports their agenda, while forgetting that this community is supposed to be about judging the representation of it specifically. And that's assuming they're even paying attention to the community name in the first place, which many may not be.

It's been a perennial issue both here and in r/dataisbeautiful as long as I can remember.

This situation you describe is legitimately one of my greatest fears as a parent. I have little useful advice to give; all I can really say is "good luck" and to research terms like "elsagate," "gamergate" and "PewDiePipeline" to see what advice actual experts (psychologists etc.) have about deprogramming kids from them.

I was raised allowed to moderate my own content because I was trusted to be intelligent and wise enough to critically select what I watched or read and learn from the mistakes I made if I consumed something negatively influential.

I was raised allowed to moderate my own content because my computer-illiterate parents had absolutely no clue what the Internet was capable of exposing me to. Frankly, it was only dumb luck on their part that I happened to have the right personality and skills not to succumb to inceldom, the Alt-Right, or some other kind of radicalization.

(Even more frankly, maybe I did succumb to radicalization: I am, after all, an urbanist leftist Linux user (among other weird things) who likes to hang out on Lemmy, LOL!)

JJ-Trek, hands down. From "red matter" to interstellar transporter beams to Khan's magic blood.

The reason it's so bad is that it's fucking plot holes galore. By the end of Star Trek (2009), starships are obsolete. By the end of Into Darkness, everyone should be immortal.

Treknobabble is supposed to serve the plot, but this shit undermines the entire premise instead. It's ridiculous!

You're not wrong, but I also think it's important to point out that just because the US interfered in 2020 doesn't mean it interfered in 2024. In fact, I can think of a reason or two -- like, say, Biden being in office instead of Trump -- why its policy on attempting coups might be vastly different.

Your comment makes me wonder if 1930s Europeans thought German politics were similarly tedious.

[oops so sorry]

"But don't worry, we'll be sure to put it on the next one for ya" [which just so happens to be a low-turnout election where conservatives will have an advantage]

Some old judge Rush Limbaugh's cousin: pure and just

"Neten Media" being founded with the same headquarters address and many of the same employees (purely by happenstance, of course) in 3... 2... 1....

Once the votes are counted

You do realize the MAGAs have been appointing "stop the steal" conspiracists to positions throughout the elections bureaucracy and are trying to recruit 100,000 poll "watchers" (read: saboteurs) specifically to try to stop that from happening, right?

Four years ago, the Trump campaign filed 50+ lawsuits trying to throw out votes because of alleged fraud that were basically all thrown out because no fraud could be found, and failed to stop states from certifying votes because the bureaucrats were doing their jobs. Now, they're in a position not only to severely obstruct the counting and certification in the first place, but also sue over accusations of fraud that will be credible because their dumbass followers will have committed it themselves!

And of course, it'll all be juuuuust stochastic and "lone wolf" enough that the Trump campaign itself will have [im]plausible deniability for directing it. The Heritage-Foundation-stacked courts will fall over themselves in their haste to clear Trump of any wrongdoing, while simultaneously saying "aww shucks we still have to invalidate the vote tho" or slow-walking any case they can't plausibly say that about. This will result in either Trump crossing the 270 EC vote threshold by courts handing him wins for states where whole swathes of results for Democratic-leaning precincts have been thrown out, or throwing out enough results that neither candidate gets 270 votes so that the election gets decided by a "one state, one vote" poll in the House. Either way, Trump regains the Presidency "legally," all Hell breaks loose with Project 2025 and the Supreme Court ruling making the President a king, and American democracy as we know it is over.

Please: save this comment, come back to it on Inauguration Day, and mock me for being wrong when democracy and the rule of law prevails. Be merciless about it! Ridicule me to within an inch of my life for my silly, unfounded worrying. I'm serious: please do that and I will love you for it.

Because I have no greater wish than to be wrong about this.

Just out of curiosity, what region are you from?

Because where I'm from -- which is only a few dozen miles from Winder, by the way -- calling somebody "white trash" very definitely can have an extra layer of connotation that merely calling them a "trashy person" does not.

Specifically, because of how closely correlated race and class are around here due to all the institutional racism (both historical and ongoing), calling somebody "white trash" doesn't necessarily just mean "trashy," it means --
and please forgive for risking coming across as racist in my attempt to describe other people's racism -- "living like a black person." The idea is that black people, as an underclass, are trashy by nature, so by invoking a racial comparison the person using the phrase isn't just saying the object of their insult is trashy, but is also "othering" them and contemptuously scolding them for failing to uphold the class standard racists expect of them as a white person.

And yes, that applies to "rich white trash," too: when a racist's worldview is that even the richest black person is inherently inferior to even the poorest white person, to call a person "white trash" is to consign them to the lowest class of society no matter how rich they are.

Also, please note that I'm not saying that everybody who uses the phrase "which trash" is a racist! The connotation I'm describing is highly context-dependent. In other words, just because some shitty kinfolk of a murderer in Georgia are highly offended at being accused of being associated with blackness because they were called "white trash" by randos from elsewhere in the country, doesn't mean said randos actually meant it that way.

Nevertheless, regardless of what some people mean and how other people interpret them, the bottom line is that using that phrase in this context injects race and class issues into the matter that don't deserve to be there and do nothing but distract from any legitimate goal anyone here might have, whether that be throwing the book at murderous fuckwits, reforming gun laws, trying to fix the root causes of domestic abuse and school bullying, or otherwise.

There's nothing dismissive about it at all. Quite the opposite.

I mean, somebody downvoted your previous response. My best guess as to why is that your "either scenario... there are no winners" bit was perhaps poorly phrased and easy to misconstrue, so that's what I addressed.

No, it's true: these parents/perps are genuinely not "white trash."

"White trash" implies that they're poor, uneducated, or otherwise disadvantaged -- in other words, it paints the situation as a class issue and implies that they deserve some non-zero amount of sympathy for the circumstances that led to this.

On the contrary: the killer's parents were middle-class and would be considered "normal," if not for their evil ideology, fucked-up priorities, and anti-social behavior. They deserve no sympathy and no leniency. The kid himself might, as the victim of their abuse, but the parents sure as Hell don't!

Bringing up "white trash" as a talking point (even by denying it, unprovoked) is a misdirection. Don't fall for it!

If my coffee had to be vegan, I would be kinda upset because it means I couldn't have any dairy cream in it.

If my coffee couldn't be vegan (even served black), I would be even more upset because WTF would they be doing to it to make it inherently not-vegan‽

Exactly: "more progress on peace talks" in this context is just a tankie dog-whistle for "capitulating to Russia's land-grabbing."