Capitalism isn’t a political system. It’s an economic system.

And I think it’s totally fair to point out how “a company making a product worse because they make more money off the worse product” is one of the flaws of a capitalist economy.

Only Nixon could go to China, as they say.

Because if a Democrat had tried to normalize relations between the US and Maoist China the Republicans would have crucified him. But when their own leader tells them to do it, it suddenly becomes a great idea.

If Republicans didn’t have the principle of groveling to whoever’s in charge of their party, they’d have no principles at all.

You’re absolutely right. Trump demands the spotlight at all times.

But also, I think your comment is an example of what Trump’s enemies still do not understand about him.

To Donald Trump, no publicity is bad publicity.

Even if it’s “bad publicity”.

If the media is talking about Trump’s mistakes, then Trump’s minions will be all over the news defending Trump and arguing with the people attacking Trump. Trump’s supporters will believe the people defending him, Trump’s opponents will keep being his opponents, and moderates will dismiss the whole argument as just another political he said she said.

And Trump will be the center of the news cycle for yet another day, and become even stronger in his position as the leader of the Republican Party and the biggest celebrity in America.

Jesus fucking Christ, we had four years of the Biden administration trying to get Trump on anything they could, four years of daily headlines about Trump being accused of crimes, or being arraigned for crimes, or being arrested for crimes, and Trump went into the 2024 election more popular than he was in 2020.

If you talk about Trump, he wins.

The only way to beat Trump, as hard as it is, is to fucking ignore him and talk about what the American people actually need instead.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

Or, pithier:

The rules for sheep don’t apply to lions.

There were no primaries in 2024…

That’s the fucking point.

Don’t tell me I can fight the billionaire masters of the Democratic Party in the primaries when those billionaire masters canceled the primaries just last year.

We need a new progressive movement, not just to outcompete the failed Democrats, but to move this country away from a broken system of electoral politics that lets us “choose” between two oligarchs from the Epstein caste and calls it democracy. We don’t need progressives banging their heads against a billionaire funded wall and lending credibility to a rigged primary process through their participation.

And before that, Obama, Kerry, and if I remember right even fucking Gore were all accused of being the most radical left Presidential candidates in American history.

Funny how the Democratic Party keeps running more and more progressive candidates - both the Republicans and Democrats say they’re doing it, so it must be true - and yet the Democratic Party keeps moving more and more to the right.

Remember Democrats, if he’s the Democrat option come election time it’s TOO LATE TO bitch!!

And that’s why I’m not a Democrat.

Jesus Christ, if you think Presidential primaries matter, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. If the Democratic primaries weren’t rigged to hell and back Bernie would have finished his second term last January. And if Democrats had been allowed to have a primary in 2024 Newsom would probably be president now.

If you want us to believe that your primaries are an opportunity for actual choice, maybe you shouldn’t have appointed a 2024 Presidential candidate who never, in her entire life, won a single fucking primary.

Exactly true, but it’s more than that.

One of the more positive aspects of post-WWII, United Nations-facilitated geopolitics was the belief that the world ought to care about human rights. That when a country was horribly mistreating its own people the world had a right and a duty to intervene.

Fascists and racists and ethno-nationalists really don’t like that idea.

So you have ultra-nationalist right-wing movements all over Europe, who would happily murder each other for speaking the wrong language or being the wrong shade of white, working together with each other and Russia and the US against the EU and the UN, because anyone telling them “you can’t murder people you don’t want in your country” is their common enemy.

To be fair, it’s strongly suspected that Trump had extensive ties to the New York Mafia.

I mean, Jesus Christ, he was a real estate developer in New York in the '70s and '80s. There’s no possible way he wasn’t in bed with the mob.

Say what you will about Trump, he’s probably closer to gangster than like 99% of us.

One thing you have to always remember about Donald Trump is: he’s incredibly insecure. His fragile little ego is desperate for approval. It’s why he constantly shitposts on a social media site he owns - so he can get that constant dopamine rush of upvotes and fawning comments and “megadittoes, Mr. President”. And it’s why he’s desperate for the approval of people he considers strong leaders - Putin and Xi and Milei and so on. And when somebody he respects flatters him, he becomes putty in their hands.

Mamdani won decisively in New York. Mamdani proved himself a strong leader. And then, after taking everything Trump could throw at him and coming out on top, Mamdani went to Trump and basically said “I talk a lot of shit about you, you talk a lot of shit about me, but we both know that’s how the game is played and not to take it personally. You do good work and I respect you. We both believe New York is the greatest city in the world so let’s work together to make it great again.”

And Mamdani certainly didn’t have to ask for a meeting with Trump. It probably hurt him with some of his base to talk to Trump at all. So you have this strong man, this leader, this winner, who decisively proved himself the leader of the Democratic Party in New York, with incredible momentum behind him - and he goes to Trump to kiss his ring and ask for his support.

And when a strong man gives Trump the manly validation he craves, he melts like a teenage girl at a David Bowie concert.

Because you also have to remember, Donald Trump has no actual political positions. He doesn’t care about anything except winning - and he loves winners. And whatever Mamdani is, he’s a winner.

But people already have a public place to appeal. This sub, the sub you linked, pretty much any other instance that has a meta discussion community. But posting here, or there, isn’t an actual appeal process - it’s just publicly complaining about administrators.

And that was the answer to OP’s question: that there’s no single fediverse-wide place to appeal a ban, you have to follow instance specific appeal procedures, if they exist, and/or contact the instance’s administrators directly.

Which is a good thing, because it helps keep the verse decentralized.

I think, if there was a single location where the fediverse started telling people “if you get banned, post here to appeal”, users would expect some sort of formal response to their post, and get upset when people tell them posting there doesn’t actually do anything. Which would be bad. And if that location could do anything to encourage administrators to reverse ban decisions, via peer pressure or otherwise, that would also be bad, because it would compromise the independence of instances. That is to say, a fediverse wide appeal community would be at best useless and at worst harmful to the fediverse.

So I think the only appropriate response to “I was banned, what can I do” is “that’s between you and the people who banned you”.

I think any sort of fediverse-wide appeal community, or process, would risk compromising the whole point of the fediverse, ie, decentralization. The fact that admins have the final say on their own instances is part of what keeps the largest instances from controlling smaller ones and keeps the fediverse free of centralized control.

I mean, can you imagine a coalition of the largest instances coming together and telling a small instance “the appeal community agreed this user was banned unfairly, unban them or we’ll all defederate you”? Because I can imagine that sequence of events, if an appeal community got any kind of formal backing from the big instances, and that would pretty much end decentralization.

Yeah. Two years ago, mainstream studies were estimating 3°C by 2100 - and it’s well documented at this point how climate scientists deliberately underestimate predicted rates of warning to avoid being seen as alarmist.

At this point I agree with 2°C by 2040 and bet on 3°C by 2050. 5°C by 2100, 10°C if some of the worst case feedback loops exist.

One of the freedoms the American military purportedly protects is the freedom to talk shit about the American military.

At least the newly unemployed soldiers will have a nice well-paying paramilitary to join, so they can keep supporting their wives and their wives’ boyfriends.

If the Trump administration, and especially Project 2025, have taught America anything, it’s that libertarians don’t fucking have ideals.

Libertarians spouted propaganda about small government and free speech and privacy until conservative authoritarians took power. And then they cheered while conservative authoritarians built the most extensive police state and government surveillance apparatus in American history and began arresting people for writing op-eds and posting memes.

Libertarians, like Republicans, never actually supported small government or free speech or the privacy of citizens. They deployed the rhetoric of small government and free speech and privacy as weapons to attack liberals and prevent Democratic administrations from pursuing their policy goals. Now that conservatives are in power, those weapons are no longer useful, and libertarians have discarded them.

Libertarian “ideals” were weapons against Democratic government, and they were never anything else.

And to get back to your point: of course libertarians spout rhetoric about financial privacy while keeping cryptocurrency in centralized KYC exchanges. Because crypto was never about privacy as an ideal. It was about bypassing financial regulations, laundering money, dodging taxes, grifting, scamming normies, and gambling on pumps and dumps. Crypto bros talk a good game about privacy and independence to shield themselves from regulation and make themselves look legitimate. Anyone who actually believes that crap is a useful idiot that probably lost all their money in a cryptoscam.

Not just in the United States. The Lancet estimates just cancelling USAID will kill 14 million people between now and 2030. 14 million avoidable deaths because the world’s richest man thought feeding the poor was a waste.

RFK is on track to do a lot of damage, but he has some stiff competition.

I disagree that Americans don’t pay attention to prices. Americans paying attention to prices was one of the biggest reasons why Biden lost. Biden and Harris were claiming that they’d beat inflation, that the economy was great, that America was on the right track and Harris just needed to continue Biden’s policies - and Americans looked at their grocery bills and didn’t buy it.

And that’s what gives me a certain amount of hope in 2026. Because if people are going to bed hungry - and they will be - no amount of shitposting by Donnie and his cronies is going to convince them they’re full.

This is so incredibly short-sighted. Support for solar energy really should be a Republican priority too - it’s business, it’s industry, it’s making money. China, India, the entire continent of Africa, are all going solar. The United States could be a world leader in this trillion-dollar industry - hell, there’s a national security argument that we need American scientists and workers to support the American solar industry.

Never mind the climate issue for now. Walking away from solar leaves billions on the table that other countries are going to snap up. Republicans love subsidizing industry. This is a braindead bipartisan opportunity.

But little Donnie hates solar energy personally, threw a tantrum about it, and no one in the 80-year-old boy king’s court dares to disagree with him.

I get it, and I disagree.

See, I think the investors and funders behind Big Internet were not just pulling the profit lever - they were pulling political levers to achieve regulatory capture, to get that favorable regulatory environment they needed to make a ton of profit and regulate their competitors out of existence.

And they kept pumping funding into Big Internet while it was unprofitable because they believed eventually they’d win the political battle and have a free hand to extort profits. Which was a fair assumption given, you know, the history of regulation in general.

If the United States suddenly comes to its senses, passes good legislation, and starts enforcing its own regulations, and if we assume, in this utopia, Big Internet won’t be able to buy enough American politicians to counter that, I think one of two things will happen.

One, Big Internet moves overseas to more favorable regulatory environments, provides American consumers with a substandard product, and tells them it’s their own government’s fault in order to encourage us to change the laws in their favor.

Or, two, Big Internet has to operate at a loss again, can’t attract new funding on the promise of later profits, and goes bankrupt.

Because I don’t think Big Internet can afford to give its users the same experience it did ten or fifteen years ago. In order to give us the ad-free YouTube, unrigged Google search results, algorithms that show us what we want instead of what the Republican Party wants, websites without tracking cookies, and all the other things we enjoyed, it had to run at a loss.

The old, good internet was subsidized by investors who expected profits in the future. No expectation of profit? No subsidized internet services. At least not provided by the big centralized for-profit companies that have controlled the United States’ Internet experience for the last twenty years or so.