lemmy.blahaj.zone are left wing extremists with zero tolerance for anyone who doesn’t already believe what they believe. I’m not sure why they don’t just defederate themselves. They’ve been openly upset that people who disagree with them on certain issues keep finding them through the all communities tab and, gasp, disagree with them in the comments.

I don’t see how banning everyone who disagrees with you is easier than creating an insulated community of people who do agree with you, but I guess that’s their preference.

I saw a lot of progressives turning into free market libertarians as soon as social media started censoring right wing opinions. Suddenly all I could see was “They’re a private company, they can do what they want!”

It reaffirmed my belief that a healthy portion of either side doesn’t actually have any principles. They just care that their side is winning and the other is losing.

I’m a moderate that a lot of people confuse for a conservative, and I say nail big business to a wall. I think the Microsoft-Activision deal should be declined just on the nature of the size of each business, not because it meets some arbitrary standard of anti-competitive behavior. Businesses as big as Microsoft do not need even bigger market coverage through owning more production houses. The whole point of the anticompetitive corrections is to avoid these giant conglomerates that have their hands in everything.

Microsoft already owns video game production houses. They produce one of the most popular home consoles in the world. They own a lot of the ecosystem that most people use on a daily basis on their pcs, namely Windows OS, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more.

Why does one company need to have a bigger market share than this?

Well, keep in mind how much footage there was of the capitol police letting “rioters” in and escorting them throughout the building as if they were on tour. I remember reading that there were opportunities to shore up the area out of concern there would be riots, since it was fairly obvious that there was going to be discontent, but the democrats declined.

I will make the standard disavowal that the riots shouldn’t have happened, and those involved should be charged and prosecuted accordingly. But Trump very specifically said to protest peacefully during his speech that day.

My take on all of this has always been that the establishment hates Trump, sees him as a legitimate threat to their way of doing business, and have always exaggerated and highlighted anything they could to make him look like the most evil and incompetent person possible. I don’t think you could neutrally look at all the evidence and think otherwise. I was a Democrat supporter before Trump came along. When I saw how united and unfair the portrayal of the man was by democrats and mass media, I realized the extent of corruption in the system, and more was slowly revealed over the next decade.

They want you to hate anyone who would upset the status quo. It’s the same thing they did to Tulsi Gabbard. Anyone who is anti-war, pro-America, and is for populism and against globalism. Just watch for yourself. These people get fat off of selling Americans out to foreign interests and by feeding the war machine. They can’t do that if we stop playing world police and start focusing on initiatives that improve the value of local labor. It requires us to rip up free trade deals and to stop funding military and PMCs, where a lot of elites make big money. That’s why populists get shut out.

Jan 6 was a handful of people doing something stupid. They’ve turned it into a giant cross to lay on the entire moderate and conservative voter base. If you think that’s reasonable, you’re being tribal, not rational.

I agree with you overall, I just have a different solution. I don’t think command economies work in practice. Demand economies are better because businesses aren’t usually too big to fail, so they collapse when they aren’t providing the products or services that are in demand.

My solution is populism with a demand economy. For all of his many, many faults, I believe Trump had the right strategy to lift up the working class. Bring back value to local labor by putting tariffs on foreign goods, that way local production becomes more profitable. Reduce (not eliminate) immigration to increase the value of promoting local workers.

Imagine a world where we weren’t draining India for doctors, and instead we were forced to invest in our own populations. How much better could the lives of our citizens be if big business and government had to worry about how successful and happy our local populations are?

From a social perspective, I think reduced immigration combined with integration initiatives would go a long way. We need to find ways to get people together and communicating. I know for a fact that exposure to people with differing beliefs is the best way to de-escalate radicals. I’ve sat down with so many conservatives over the years and ended up tempering their opinions, just through casual conversation. We need that kind of humanizing discussion to be commonplace. It’s not healthy to just expect hard left mainstream media and terms of service to censor ideas out of existence. We need to heal through open and good faith discussion.

I believe your goals are the right ones. I just don’t believe the communist economic system is the right way to achieve them.