I heard somewhere that in Italy, this hand gesture has a meaning akin to “What the fuck do you want?”.

Maybe someone from Italy can confirm whether this is true

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If you really like socialism this is the place to be

Lost, yes. Ready to risk everything trying to overthrow the Government, not so much. There’s a reason we remember 6th January 2021 and not 6th January 2017.

Sure, it’s interesting, but maybe people like to talk about something else? Not every conversation about someone needs to be about the top most notorious thing about them.

That being said…

Well, the first two (replacing first-past-the-post and eliminating the Electoral College) can be done on a state-by-state basis. There were ballot initiatives in a few states on the ballot in 2024 regarding instant-runoff voting. All of them failed, including one in Alaska that would have repealed instant-runoff voting and replaced it with first-past-the-post.

The Electoral College can be defeated using the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

Napoleon wasn’t “appointed” as dictator by any legitimate government or by the people. He overthrew the Directory and the Constitution of Year III and made himself the dictator.

I don’t think so.

For one, the revolutionary sentiment isn’t nearly as widespread as it was in 18th century France. Yes, it’s true that many people are discontent with the current economic and political situation but the difference is that 250 years ago, the only outlet for discontent available to common people was to revolt, whereas in the United States and other Western democracies, a second option exists: the democratic political institutions. What this really means is that the right of suffrage and of elections has really sucked a lot of the will to revolt from the populace; it’s easier to get what you want by participating in the democratic process than by revolting, or at least that’s what a lot of people think.

In order for a revolution to start, you need to hit a critical mass of angry people motivated enough to risk everything to overthrow the system. The presence of democratic institutions like elections and referendums changes the maths and it makes it harder to convince people that they need to revolt in order to get what they want. In turn, it tends to mean that well-established democracies really aren’t prone to violent revolutions from the bottom of the sort that topple totalitarian governments. Rather, the primary threat to democratic states actually comes from the top—that the people in charge will try to exceed their mandate of power and take over the government.

Are you talking about the Paris Commune?

I don’t know much about it but I know they put back the French republican calendar while they had control over the city, which I think was pretty cool.

Businesses are bound to Microsoft Office products which only reliably work on Windows and Mac. Windows is the cheaper of the two, by far, and there are way more IT professionals that are able to work comfortably managing Windows systems than Mac ones.

I want to point out that this is already the standard for conviction. The finder of fact must find the accused to be guilty beyond all reasonable doubt before convicting them. So from a legal perspective, everyone convicted of a crime already has been proven guilty to the highest possible standard. If there is any shred of doubt at all about the guilt of the accused, they’re supposed to be acquitted. It’s only possible in retrospect when new evidence emerges that exonerates the accused that it can be determined that the original guilty verdict was incorrect. You can’t really “force” this evidence to emerge with any amount of policy changes. It just happens over time.

For example, witnesses lie. Maybe five years after the fact they feel bad about lying and retract their testimony. Maybe some of the investigators assigned to the case just made up some evidence to get the accused convicted in court because they just thought there was no way he could be innocent and they just needed to cook up the evidence to get them declared guilty, and they can only admit that when the statute of limitation passes. Or maybe, three years later, a convenience store manager deleting old footage happens upon a CCTV tape giving the accused an alibi. Or maybe still, the accused was actually framed and their framers only got caught ten years later doing some other crime, and it turned out that they forged the accused’s signatures on those documents and used their computer to send those e-mails without their knowledge. I could go on.

So if your proposed standard is applied, it would not actually exclude anyone from execution because everyone who’s been convicted has already been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt.

The state ending someone’s life for breaking its laws and then having people here who would normally condemn the use of capital punishment compare it to a revolution and call it justified just because the state in question claims to be socialist is just so uniquely Lemmy.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Epic’s main selling point was it’s lower storefront fee (15% vs 30%, if I recall). It didn’t offer any other benefits for consumers and I think Epic realised rather quickly that the people who are actually supposed to be paying money for all of this are the buyers and not the sellers, and thus they’ve resorted to strategies like making games “exclusive” or trying to bribe players with free games.

Microsoft has realised they have a captive market and are milking it for every dollar (euro, pound, yen, rupee…) they can get.

You would certainly lose a lot of money masturbating in a bus. You’ll be kicked off the bus, arrested for indecent exposure, and have to pay a fine and court costs plus community service.

What do you mean by “keep fighting”? How are you fighting?

I’ll tell you what I’ve been doing these past months. I signed the petition to bring forth a ballot measure to institute instant-runoff voting in Oregon. When it was placed on the ballot, I was actively talking to everyone I knew to convince them to vote yes (the ballot measure did not pass). I donated $50 to the campaign of Janelle Bynum, who unseated Republican Lorie Chavez-Deremer in the extremely competitive Oregon 5 constituency where I live. I helped my grandparents read through the voter’s guide and mail in their ballots.

This isn’t intended to be a competition, I just want to know what your idea of “fighting” is.

Okay, so what are you going to do about it?

When you make up your own religion you can set the rules to be whatever you want, including refusing to eat pumpkin pie

“The Democrats” are a lot less cohesive than you’re giving them credit for. Yes, there’s a national committee and several important figures within the party, but there is no single “leader of the Democratic Party” who dictates policy down to their underlings. Plenty of times we’ve seen prominent Democrats in power defy the party leaders and suffer no immediate consequences.

The traditional American political system is very decentralised. Parties are more like labels that politicians adopt rather than actual vehicles for political control. Anyone is free to join any party and nobody needs the party’s permission to stand for election.

Meanwhile, if you take a look at how political parties work in other countries, there’s usually a person holding the title of “party leader”, that usually being the president, leader of the opposition, prime minister, or holder of some other important state office. The party leader is in control of the entire party and all of the party’s elected officials are expected to follow the party’s official ideology as dictated by the leader. If they refuse, then they will be kicked out of the party. The party leadership has complete control over who is allowed in the party and who it nominates to stand for election.

The Democratic Party has several important leaders. Biden, of course, is the president and thus the most influential. But he’s not the dictator of the party. He still has to negotiate and work with the likes of Chuck Schumer in the Senate and Hakim Jefferies in the House for his agenda. And, of course, Biden doesn’t have the power to dictate policy to the various state chapters of the party, which have their own local leaders setting agendas independent of what Biden wants.

Contrast this with the Republican Party, which in recent years has become a lot more hierarchical, with Trump as the undisputed party leader. Trump’s power over the party is all informal, but informal power is still power and the reality is that Trump, as the de facto leader of the Republican Party, can almost unilaterally dictate who the party nominates and what the party’s policy platforms will be on a national scale. That sort of centralisation just isn’t present in the Democratic Party.

I didn’t say the national presidential primaries were clean and fair. I said that local primaries are. And that is true.

Regardless, nothing you said changes the fact that when it came down to actual votes in the primary, those who voted in the Democratic primary seemed to prefer moderate neoliberals over social democrats and progressives in 2016 and 2020.

All this complaining about the primary process amounts to useless hand-writhing because no amount of calling for reform or argumentation is going to change the system. Calling for people to be “up in arms” is a useless activity because being angry by itself means nothing. If you want change, you need power. If you want power, you need to get it by playing within the rules of the current system.

So vote in the damn primaries to get the party to nominate progressives and tell your mates to do the same. Start or sign ballot initiatives to move to nonpartisan blanket primaries and ranked-choice voting.