In the MLP show, Weird Al voices the character “Cheese Sandwich”, who is basically just a pony version of him. In the final episode of the show, he is shown married to Pinkie Pie and they have a son.

Yeah, I agree. FPTP is a horrible system that will inevitably lead to this kind of situation.

I’m also from Germany and I don’t think it’s a similar situation at all. In our system, it’s absolutely possible and doable for a new party to arise and gain influence. You don’t have to vote for the lesser evil, you can find a party that actually suits you and there is a realistic shot of getting it elected if enough people want it to happen. We’ve gotten 2 new parties in parliament over the last decade (I don’t like either of them, but that’s beside the point). And yes, we have a general shift to the right in Germany as well, but that’s more due to the actual attitudes of the population, a generally weak left and things like Russian influence. Contrary to the US, voters can absolutely reverse that trend though.

In a system like the US, that’s almost impossible. Let’s say the democrats split up into left-wing democrats and right-wing democrats. Half of the voter base goes to either party, so 25% of the population votes for each. However, elections are “first past the post”, so even if the left gained a lot of voters and reached, say, 35%, it will be a total victory for the Republican party. Any party that can’t get an absolute majority of votes is powerless. The momentum for a new party to get to power would have to be insane.

Also for the narrative control just take the win of Biden in 2020 as a counter example. Despite Trump holding office the Dems managed to win.

Well, yes, but pretty much exclusively by running on a lesser evil “We’re not Trump” platform. Had the Trump presidency never happened, it could have been way more about actual policy.

So if you don’t vote for the lesser evil it gets salty and joins the evil?

Not quite. If you don’t vote for the lesser evil, it loses influence, which means the greater evil has it easier to shift things over in their direction and control the narrative. They’ve won after all, so clearly that’s what the voters want. The lesser evil will take cues from this.

(It should also be said that this whole meme only really applies to shitty 2-party systems. In a proper parliamentary democracy, you have more realististic choices than “greater evil” and “lesser evil” and don’t have to play this stupid game at all.)

AMD has much better Linux drivers than Nvidia though, so that line of reasoning doesn’t really work.

Incidentally that’s also the effect of not voting for the lesser evil, you can just cut out the two steps in the middle then.

I hope they can get their bank account restored. Certainly seems like a questionable move by the bank, though it’s entirely possible we’re missing more context.

But also, that headline is polemic bullshit that could just as easily come from a tabloid like The Sun.

The lemmy devs should really focus on proper content deletion tools. It’s not just the images, it’s very strange and inconsistent overall. When I delete a comment, it’s seemingly still visible to many people and collecting up/downvotes even many hours after I deleted it. On the other hand, when a post gets deleted, it’s completely gone, to the point that I can’t even look up the discussion that I had within that post, just my own comments on my profile.

I’d argue that nobody relied on the EU for defense in the first place. Prior to the war in Ukraine, Europe was not exactly known for getting militarily involved in conflicts or as a defensive ally, quite the opposite. See all the “strongly worded letter” jokes. I don’t think Taiwan is under any illusions about getting major military support from Europe, no European country (except Vatican) even recognizes it. The EU and Ukraine were never formally allied prior to the war, so if anything, the amount of support was/is larger than expected.

I’m glad to live in a place where that kind of surveillance is already illegal. I recently read that in some places, it’s already commonplace to track every single keystroke and mouse click on workers’ PCs. That’s bad enough even without putting AI and facial recognition into the mix. Truly dystopian.

Kinda true in Europe though. Don’t know anyone who uses iMessage, it’s pretty much irrelevant. I know the situation in the US is quite different, but ultimately they don’t regulate for the US market.

Got to give it to them, it’s almost impressive how they found the most useless and malicious way to comply with the new regulations. I can only hope that the EU doesn’t let that stand. EU bureaucrats never work fast though, so Apple probably succeeded in keeping their monopoly for at least a few more years.

I guess it’s just too irrelevant in Europe to be actively regulated by the EU. I don’t know a single person using iMessage.

It’s such an Apple thing to put a giant glass panel on the front of a VR headset, which you’re likely to sometimes bump into things when in immersive mode, and then charge $800 for a replacement.

Up to 5000 people in my nearby rural town. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was the largest protest to ever happen there.

That is some valuable context, thank you. Definitely seems like skewed reporting from Vice. The definition as you posted it definitely seems better than what Vice reported, though its last sentence is so vague that it could easily be used to silence criticism, whether it was meant to do that or not.

Sure, it was, at least according to the article. Emphasis mine:

which explicitly forbids any speech that “questions Israel’s right to exist” or criticizes the country’s occupation of Palestinian land.

Even if you believe Israel to be completely justified in everything they do, there should never be a blanket ban on criticizing the methods of a country at war.

Frozen blackforest, a week ago:

We’re talking about a group of people making self-proclaimed record profits last year, complaining about getting less government money.