Somewhat related but I always half-joked that Clarence Thomas' anti-civil rights rulings were a long con to outlaw interracial marriage so he could divorce Ginny.
Can't pardon a lawsuit. Lawsuits are civil; pardons are for criminal cases. Those staffers could be bankrupted, which would be hilarious.
After seeing Cory Booker's speech, I got an idea for another poster. Feel free to use it as you see fit. Distribute it and put it up where ever you want.
It's formatted for 8.5x11, so you should be able to just print it off and go.
The key thing to remember is that a one day blackout won't have an effect on the corporations. What it will do is get more people comfortable with taking action. If you can go one day without buying from Amazon, two days isn't much more, and then a week, and then a month. The idea is to ratchet up the action.
Just like how fascism has a progression to slowly "boil the frog," collective societal action does, too. This isn't an end but a beginning.
I'm an American. Germans, please don't do to yourselves what we did. Keep AfD as far from power as possible.
Alternatively, the easier sign (since a good chunk of the courts are complicit) is when we started being ruled by decree. The second easiest is when language is getting policed.
After checking my notes, that started January 20, 2025, when sweeping Executive Orders were decreed that are being treated as the force of law when they most certainly are not. The removal of "T" from LGBTQ, and enforcement of the stupid, unilateral renaming of the Gulf of Mexico is the other.
Congratulations, we live in a dictatorship.
That's...a really weird thing to send a death threat over. Conservatives really aren't right in the head and need to get some professional help.
Hell yeah! This is great! I'm glad I'm not the only one sharing it around to friends and neighbors. True resistance is not the flashy stuff; it's a whole of society approach to stop fascists in their tracks. True resistance is the sum total of small acts to inconvenience and impede a fascist.
I can see the allure for places wanting to keep certain trouble-makers out as a precaution, but this gets so close to a privatized social credit score that it's beyond uncomfortable.
YES! I study AI, and this is exactly how I feel!
Side note-One of my favorite things to do is ask people what their use case for using AI is, and watch them sputter out "uh...emails and productivity and things."
No lie, he seems like such a cool dude. If I were in the area, I'd totally go to see him. And while I first knew him as Chekov, I grew to love him as Al Bester on Babylon 5, truly some of his best work!
Just from a quick look at https://fediverse.observer/, it looks like the Fediverse is mostly steady at 1-1.25 million monthly users (give or take) over the past two years with a slight decreasing trend. I think there are some reasons for this that are not entirely in our control.
There seems to be a global sentiment of disconnecting from social media and the internet in general. So, I wouldn't be surprised if ever platform is seeing a decaying user base. Anecdotally, among the people I see in real life, there is a general sense of exhaustion with online spaces. Whether it's from corporate-own, enshittified platforms to even places on the Fediverse, the people with whom I interact tend to find the entire thing hollow. They've trimmed down to one or two platforms (if that). In fact, I've even started to get that way. In the past, if someone were wrong and arguing against a point I made, I'd engage, especially if it's in something that I have expertise. Now, why bother? There's no use arguing; people have little interest in admitting fault or engaging in good faith (again anecdotally). That said, I'll concede that the Fediverse is a bit better on that front, but not by much.
Then there's the alternative nature of the Fediverse. It's been rehashed over and over about how "difficult" it is to get on and use. It's not actually that hard, but the barrier to entry is an extra step. That small extra step frightens people away from even joining. The only time that barrier gets broken is when a "legacy" social media platform does something anti-user. Then there is a refugee wave that comes in and goes out leading to a modest durable increase in users. Recently, there just hasn't been a major controversy on a major platform that leads people here.
Now, my final thought on this is to ask: Is a small and steady-ish population (despite modest decay) actually bad? In my view, I don't think it is. Being smaller and with a smallish barrier to entry means that we exclude a sizable number of the low-effort population. So, there's less (no zero) slop here. Plus, discussions, when had in good faith, can be much deeper and less filled with stupid low-effort jokes. Overall, I'm not too concerned with the number of people on the Fediverse. Growth isn't necessarily the best thing. Even so, with the way most mainstream platforms are going, it's inevitable that they will do something stupid that drives more people to the Fediverse at least for a time.
TL;DR: The monthly population is mostly steady with a modest decay. Most social media is likely seeing similar trends. I don't think the smaller userbase is that bad of a thing.