RedNote’s Chinese name, Xiaohongshu, literally translates to “Little Red Book,” which seems like a direct reference to a book of quotes from Chinese communist leader Mao Tse-tung. But The Washington Post reported that the app is designed to be apolitical and its co-founder, Mao, maintains that the name instead pays “homage to the colors of his college,” Stanford Business School, and his former employer, Bain Capital.

Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeetthefuckouttahere!

Oh you.

Hey, what’s South Africa got to do with it?! . . .

Oh. Sorry, I thought you were maligning South Africa somehow.

Carry on.

Sure does.

You misunderstand the reasoning: Big GQP sez, “Get in here ya fascist fuck, ya! Here’s a ton of taxpayer money. Sure, poison the earth, abuse your workers, cheat on the five dollars worth of tax you’d owe ayway - we absolutely do not. give. a. fuck! Haha, here have some guns.”

What’s the fucking point of having supermajority power if you’re not going to wield it to make long lasting change that would benefit the country, not just reelection funds?

That’s an excellent question. I suppose we could ask Joe Lieberman - oh wait he dead. Anyway, yeah I dunno. There’s an “inside baseball” level to national politics that probably explained how all that went down, presumably in book form, but I don’t know.

Fwiw I don’t think they got any huge bounce in election funds but I do know people who didn’t have any ability to see a doctor and then got one. So. Y’know. Like I say, “some good.” Not ALL the good, just some. It’s almost always the only thing we can get. And that’s after lots of scrapping.

You’re cool with “better” and want me to be thankful? We just saw a vigilante murder the UHC CEO, and the bipartisan response is “meh” to”fuckem” due to decades of common discontent - but you’re happy with the status quo?

Hold up there Cletus, that’s two whole different things there. I am, in fact, cool with “better”. Better is gooder. More gooder is better. Do I want you to be thankful? Fuck, I don’t care - I’m saying you got something out of a huge effort which had been in the works for years and was a hair away from imploding yet again with grave consequences for the people trying to make things better. If you’re not thankful, that’s for you to chew on, not me.

As to the status quo- fuck no. The two are not related in any way. The status quo is for shit. BUT: at least people who don’t have anything can get something. In this hellish area of politics, that’s fucking huge. And to be clear the hell part of it is all thanks to the republiQans. Who created and perpetuated this bullshit. ACA was all we could get because Obama had one big ticket item they were willing to give for five seconds and that’s what he picked. Even now they keep trying to kill it and reduce it and all the shithole states reject ACA money anyway. Was it a glorious victory? In a couple of ways, YES. Did it make everything super awesome? NO. Those are two different questions.

No it wasn’t honored in the legislature, we’ve had ‘trigger laws’ on the books in deeply Republican states for decades.

I think you misunderstood what I meant there. Passing a bad-faith law that had no validity and praying to jeezus that trump would win and appoint crooked ass fascists is not what I meant. Even then that was not decades. Find me the first instance of an anti-abortion trigger law. Is it before 2019? I’ll be surprised.

No it wasn’t honored in the courts

Did someone go to jail for having an abortion under Roe? Okay then if not honored, “respected as law”? “Not acted against with impunity”?

Your revisionist history is filtered through chickenshit leadership who failed to stand tall and do something.

Yeah but now you’re here with all the answers and a magical third-party wand. I’m sure there’s nothing you need to know, so get in there! Get 'er done! I’ll vote for it.

I constantly see establishment Dems point to X as why we cannot change the voting/election structures, but rarely to never see the same voices agitate to change those same structures.

That’s your claim.

I make a point about electoral reform and that the duopoly is not a requirement

NOPE. You SAID: “I constantly see establishment Dems point to X as why we cannot change the voting/election structures, but rarely to never see the same voices agitate to change those same structures.”

You see how you started with “I constantly see establishment Dems” blah blah blah? Okay? Not “republicans and democrats” not “the duopoly of modern politics” but “establishment Dems” and how they never say anything about changing that duopolistic structure. I threw a flag on that play and called bullshit. As there were recent examples I was able to retrieve them quickly. You pouted, “These aren’t good enough”.

I point out how weak your links are, and offer more substantive details that your argument is circular

The UI of Lemmy that I"m using is such that I can’t have that comment side-by-side so I’m going off memory alone here, but: no, you didn’t. Make a convincing counter-argument.

Still waiting boss. Or are you going to hang your hat on the big bad tech overlords and your low effort initial retort?

My good dude, if you need me to pull up a history of “agitation” within the Democratic party towards institutional change and the political structure of these United States, the answer is, again, no. You doubt it? Okay. I guess we’ll never know - OR - you could just look it up. Here - tell you what since you’re still on the ol’ pins & needles: make a post about it, we’ll slug it out there. Lay out your position statement as it stands in your above quote that begins this reply, define your terms, and we’ll get academic.

And since, as predicted already, you won’t be satisified with that and you also don’t want to let it go, here’s what I’ll add as a coda: “the Dems” make up; everyone registered as a Democrat in their state, everyone who is sympathetic to Democratic causes, and the 450 people who comprise the actual Democratic National Committee, depending on context. From the context of your quote, I interpreted it to be the former. There are many people since 1848 who have been Democrats who have argued for a change in the way voting is carried out and the structure of the voting systems. I have NO fucking idea what you mean by “agitate” but let’s say the communicate their positions directly to allow for written communication (BECAUSE YOU CAN’T WRITE LOUDLY). Given the first part (who) and the second part (what) I totally disagree with you. If you want to continue to make the case that all registered Democats are super duper into a duopoly, go for it.

So uhhh, which is it? My anti-trust argument is tortured and worthy of derision without dissection, or you agree that the business analogy works?

I said (iirc) the analogies are there. I do NOT think the “analogy works” though for the reasons stated. Two major political parties can be likened to a monopoly. It can be likened to two large ostriches in a field of chickens. However - ostriches can’t vote, and a political party is not a business under the law. The analogy is not the problem. The problem is you think because they’re analagous that must equal the conclusion you draw (parties should be broken up). It does not.

It’s because your scrappy, revolutionary Pokémon Go party deserves to meet, advocate, advertise, and run for office without being audited by the Shithole State Assessor and OSHA.

What is the FEC and the various thresholds for matching funding, campaigning restrictions, funding disclosure, etc etc before we even get to state level laws? What are ballot access laws and hostile legislation that protects the two-party system:

What is the FEC? It’s the Federal Election Commission. If you’d like to know more, check out their wikipedia article. You want me to summarize it for you? Okay: they set the policies and procedures by which candiates are allowed to campaign, votes to be cast, and votes transported and counted. I hope that helps.

What is matching funding? Matching funding says if your party raises X amount of dollars, the federal government will give you money to run your campaign. In 2024, that amount was One HUNDRED thousand dollars, total, split to at least 5,000 per 20 states. It is not restrictive for a national campaign, indeed it is intended to foster competition by providing those funds for viable campaigns. Believe it or not even Jill Stein received matching funds in 2024.

What are Campaigning restrictions? Well, aach state has some form of restriction on political activities near polling places when voting is taking place, such as limiting the display of signs, handing out campaign literature or soliciting votes within a pre-determined area such as not screaming right in the voters face as they are filling in their ballot. This is a well known tactic of third parties which is why the evil duopoly instituted them.

A lot of those are state level laws, too, fwiw.

What are ballot access laws? Wow these are really good questions. Well, ballot access laws are state laws that determine who will be eligible to appear on the ballot. For example in, Kansas, ballot access laws require presidential candidates to meet specific filing requirements, including obtaining signatures from at least 5,000 qualified voters for independent candidates. These laws mean that Deez Nuts, sadly, did not appear on the Kansas ballot for President in 2024. Clearly, this is a gross violation of the Constitutional right to Deez Nuts.

And just for fun, here’s an article on ballot access laws in russia which the Democrats are also responsible for somehow.

the “factionalism” of 1912

What? What does that have to do with the fact that political parties are not legislated as for-profit businesses? You do love a good point, I’ll give you that.

A structural barrier exists.

Granted. Groups R and D benefit from it and also have their own problems with it and neither has made a specific party platform plank of addressing the need for more parties. Well reasoned.

EC is mandated duopoly. Let’s get rid of it and whatever your point might be can be rendered mercifully moot.

So again. Am I dumb and wrong, or do you actually agree?

Absolutely. (heh, no, I mean Yes I agree the EC should be abolished) Sadly the DNC has not approached me to draft this part of the 2028 platform as yet. Hopefully they will have learned their lessons by then.

Why wouldn’t you want more diverse representation?

Well, if party A is going to represent 60% of my interests, and party B is going to represent 80% of my interests, and party C is going to represent 100% of my interests, I wouldn’t need parties D, E, F, and G because I’m already voting party C. Diverse representation should already be happening.

As this is in the context of coalitions, think of it this way: in today’s duopoly if you want to pass a law to give all public school kids free lunch you need to get your party on board - that’s one thing. Then you have to get a certain number of opposite party members on board, likely. That’s pretty rare as-is. If you also had to get three other parties on board, my question is: why do we need five parties to give school kids free lunch?

The younger ones who grew up in the lore, but watching Dem disunity during Ferguson/BLM/Floyd/etc whilst Dem pollsters clutched to the suburban voter - instead of fighting for better - are abandoning the party.

Yeah the Dems should have done a lot more in the Ferguson/BLM/Floyd areas and they did not. Polling itself though is a huge clusterfuck of wrong. Let’s please not get started on polling, I have opinions about polling, so to speak.

I’m OOTL since Nov. so not sure what this [bipartisan consensus on foreign policy] is in reference to.

I didn’t get that explanation exactly - you’re saying the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy is where D & R officeholders agree regarding other countries and it’s something the voters don’t have a say in because there’s not a third (or more) parties there to weigh in?

(cont’d)

But what happens when they end up stealing it from Waze, or Tile, or Apple. What happens when google just sells it to people?

Indeed.

To stop this from being a thing, it needs to be done from the ground up with a privacy respecting OS run by a privacy respecting company, serviced by a privacy respecting server.

Same as it ever was.

Jan 16 (Reuters) - FBI leaders have warned that hackers who breached AT&T’s (T.N) system last year likely stole months of agents’ call and text logs, prompting an urgent effort to safeguard confidential informants’ identities, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.

Jesus upjumping Christ the FBI is relying on AT&T & Microsoft for security. Well. There it is.

Sure, what a scoop Newsweek. You’re really shaking things up.

That’s not a Freudian slip. That’s just misspeaking.

. . . As predicted.

We knew all this. They knew all this.

This data is harvested from apps rather than the phones themselves, as EFF explains, “each time you see a targeted ad, your personal information is exposed to thousands of advertisers and data brokers through a process called real-time bidding’ (RTB). This process does more than deliver ads—it fuels government surveillance, poses national security risks, and gives data brokers easy access to your online activity. RTB might be the most privacy-invasive surveillance system that you’ve never heard of.”

Good for you! Keep up the good work. Hopefully people will vote for the initaitives you need to make all that happen.

That wasn’t my title, but I think it’s part of the lefty “libs bad” thing regarding people who are centrists or support social liberal causes and capitalistic corporate behavior. I don’t know really, I think it’s just some russian troll bot garbage that got caught in the zeitgeist.

Yes. Season Two was unexpected by the writers and the story just went to shit. Nothing was answered, nothing made any more sense, and nothing tied together. More leads drifing outwards towards infinity.

Season One was a beautiful promise that Season Two either through intent or accident did not fulfill. They tried again with a movie, and - I dunno, I had tapped out by then.

chatter matters because they’re testing the waters to see what voters find agreeable and/or permissible.

I disagree, but if you define the following, it’s possible I might be persuaded to agree (I’m not asking you to per se just saying these are wildly undefined)

• chatter
• waters
• testing the waters
• they

Who enabled it to be a wedge issue?

An excellent question. There are a number of answers. Let’s take “it” and “to be a wedge issue” as givens. That leaves us with “Who” which I think we can agree means any person or organization, and then the trickier “enabled”.

Wedge issues exist by virtue of the fact that there are two or more differing opinions. Let’s take a different example to explore this: the so-called transgender bathroom issue. If all bathrooms were unisex it wouldn’t be an issue. But, due to the fact that others have existed in the world before we got to this very moment in time, that’s not the case. Bathrooms in public areas were divided by sex long ago and have largely remained so until the last 40 years, say.

Now I don’t know anyone who cares what people do in the bathroom, but I do know someone who is very upset that trans people exist and need to use the bathroom sometimes. In a real-world scenario this would probably never come up, like, ever - at all, because they don’t frequent public places and they probably wouldn’t actually care in practice anyway. I disagree with them, fwiw.

The fact that we disagree then makes this a potential wedge issue between us. Is that issue “enabled”? If so, how? See, I would argue that the “enabled” part of it, is who’s putting it into the conversation constantly? Who’s making it accusatory, who’s driving the conversation into a quarrelsome direction? Well, in this case, conservative media as usual. Now it’s a wedge issue because Fox News and 100 other sewers “enabled” it.

The “genocide joe” stuff began appearing regularly when the election was heating up - exactly at the right time, and with maximum impact. It’s not a coincidence.

but ironically it looks like Trump may actually be the one to force a ceasefire. Not because he cares, but because he recognizes it’s a loser issue that will quagmire him like it did Joe. I’m under no illusion he’ll improve life there or revert apartheid, but so far he’s willing to make Bibi fold - unlike Joe

Don’t kid yourself. That’s not the case in any way, shape, or form. Bibi let Trump look like that in exchange for not changing a damned thing and in fact increasing arms and money and reducing any oversight whatsoever. And who in the hell on the right is going to protest that genocide? Nikki “kill them all” Haley? No. What we’re seeing with this presumptive cease-fire is exactly what was predicted - post-election ceasefire pending trump win that serves the bloody Likud. Ten seconds of quiet is all you’re going to get and then they bring in the developers to create beach resorts for the 1%.

Stop blithely defending this shit, and demand better.

Nobody’s defending “this shit”, but pretending it’s a child’s toy where you can just push a button and everything magically happens is idiocy. The browbeating was trying to explain some or any details to a disinterested and ignorant crowd of puffed-up sloganistas with hardly a shred of interest in anything much deeper than a meme. Surprise, it didn’t go well because they’re complete fucking morons. Now we all suffer. Will they learn? Maybe. But it’s too late now.

I’d hope for more than a binary scale from ‘reactionary nativist racism’ to ‘milquetoast liberal’.

Oof, you and me both. Two words: Tom Daschle. That was where I started to understand how bugfucked the DNC operatives are. As a side note, I’m interested in how the legal system looks at technology and why is it federal judges STILL know jack fucking shit about how computers work? In 2025? Well, however it is, it’s the same way the DNC knows jack fucking shit about how to communicate and act for the interests of the people who support them. AOC was just 12 years old then.

Winner take all goes brrrrr.

Well you’re not wrong there. But FPTP in a national election is something completely different to a city or local election. This is where third parties really show their ass. They have zero presence in the lowest levels where FPTP means 100 people . Win those, okay? Start there. Don’t start at the national level and be like “OMG it’s so haaaarrd the Dems are mean” start local and build. The Greens have 153 people in local offices, that’s something. They should go from there to regional, then state. THEN national. That’s just how it works. It’s not a grand conspiracy, it’s the nature of large organizational communication. Learn it, Live it, Know it.

w/r/t European and Australian political coalitions, I can say they’re better, but it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. And they’re not dealing with the same issues we are at the scale we are. Better, yes, we should get to something more like that, but if you think it’s some sort of grand leap I’d caution that politics is still very much in play.

I recognize that the Democratic establishment and leadership is actually pretty comfy with our nascent fascism.

I disagree.

the old guard has failed, and we need a new strategy to meet the challenges of our new and changing realities.

Agreed.

The right has already tacked toward populism, when are you going to wake up to the reality that you cannot browbeat your way to electoral victory under universal suffrage?

Depends on what you mean by “browbeat” and “universal sufferage”. Do I think making a rational case for a political position is better than baldface lying and driving giant flags around in trucks? I do. Is that “browbeating”? Because I don’t know what to tell you there. Adults need to run things, full stop. What we have with the right is full on prison break batshit frat party smash-n-grab. They’re not governing, they can’t. It’s just horrible things happening for four years while the press looks on.

As to “universal sufferage” if everyone had the vote that’d be great (they don’t for reasons) but even then, they stil have to GO DO IT. You can’t force someone to change their mind, and if they can’t see the immeasurable difference between the currently available choices after making any effort to do so whatsoever, then they have failed. And we all lose.

Guaranteed apathy? I think there’s a very considerable effort on the part of conservatives to prevent liberal politics from existing, and that can be pretty draining, but apathy itself is homegrown. No one can “give” someone apathy, but they can keep them down and out enough to get them to create it themselves.

That’s where the participation part comes in again. If you want to just keep getting rolled, do nothing.

Our phones know where we are and they know where we have been—the problem is they have a nasty habit of sharing that information with others.

What. The. Fuck. Do you think you’re doing?? A “nasty habit”??? You know good and goddamned well they’re designed specifically to do that, and that location data is among the most prized of all personal information.

What sort of mindfuck juice are you chugging to write an inconcievably idiotic sentence like “phones do the cutest thing - they leak your location data! OMG! Squeeee”

IT’S JUST THE ADVERTISING ID. NOT THE LOCATE PHONE PART.

Brought to you buy jerks who haven’t had their coffee yet and read TFA.