Tedesche

It is not. You need to re-familiarize yourself with what monarchy actually is. Maybe spend a year in an actual monarchy/dictatorship country if you have so little appreciation for the democracy you currently enjoy?

Even if this does end in political violence or civil war, if you vote, at least you will have tried to avoid that fate by participating in our democracy as much as possible. Voting is just so easy to do, how can you justify not doing it as anything but laziness? It can’t hurt and takes almost no effort.

I encourage you to reconsider and vote for whatever you perceive to be the least of all evils. Voting is relatively easy and doesn’t require much effort. It’s literally the least you can do. Yes, may not matter in the end, but it can still inform certain statistics that can be used to support various messages and arguments down the line. If you don’t vote at all, you guarantee you have no impact. Don’t throw away the little power you have.

You’ve given into despair and have opted out entirely, which is exactly what the people you gripe about want you to do. Congratulations, you’ve surrendered.

the ballot is one big trick question

I’d like an explanation of what you actually mean by this and why not voting is better than voting for the least bad candidate, if you regard them all as bad.

Wow, communism is fucking awesome. /s

I’d rather they were punished and rehabilitated. Both are necessary.

Lemmy overall is just different shades of red. Picking your instance just allows you to select pink vs. crimson.

Don’t use California as a metric for American homelessness. California has made itself a veritable Mecca for homeless people by passing laws that allow them to set up camp virtually anywhere. Those laws, combined with its naturally temperate climate have resulted in 30% of America’s homeless population living in California. No other state in the U.S. has such a hard-on for homeless people and we have much more sensible laws that reflect that.

It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if Lemmy is rife with these trolls. And I’m not just talking about the tankies.

I will never understand people who advocate for communism as opposed to democratic socialism. Every major country that has ever gone down the communist road has ended up a dictatorship. That’s not a bug of communism, it’s a feature. I get the criticism of capitalism, I really do, but we can enact socialist laws that rein in the excesses and extremes of capitalism without sacrificing our democracies for one-party governments.

10 years for ending someone else’s life? I’m glad we have longer sentences for that here in the U.S. Don’t get me wrong–I’m all for prison reform and introducing rehabilitative elements to reduce recidivism, but Europeans seem to have more concern for criminals than they do for the victims of crime.

I said that YouTube’s algorithm will start flooding your feed with progressively more extreme and misinformative content.

That is absolutely not what you wrote and I don’t believe it’s what you meant either.

It starts with “huh those are some interesting ideas” and before you know it you’ll be screaming about vaccines and praying for Trump to make a comeback.

Oh, please, stop. Telling people not to expose themselves to certain bits of information or perspectives is just another form of bigotry. I read two of Ayn Rand’s books, because her ideas were new and fascinating to me. That didn’t turn me into a libertarian or stop me from seeing the flaws in her ideology. But I am now more educated and less likely to be influenced by libertarian arguments as a result.

Try having discussions with people who you feel have the wrong ideas about things rather than telling them to avoid “wrongthinkers” altogether.