Threatening political retribution against senators for voting against their party is generally not illegal in the USA.

he deserves the team around him that he wants. It’s not up to us to determine that.

It absolutely is up to the senate to determine that. The constitution says so.

Probably not. US international relations is heavily driven by an amoral power calculus.

Israel is a major foil to Iran. Iran is an ally of Russia and China and a threat to US interests in the region. Barring an extreme amount of pressure from constituents, which has not reached that threshold as far as I can tell, most US politicians will tolerate almost any human rights abuse from Israel.

I have seen that lemmy.world apparently has a very poor reputation among other instances.

It’s the largest by far, with five times the monthly active population of #2. One of the main things people want out of federated systems is decentralization, and having one huge dominant server goes against that goal.

I should note .world wasn’t the biggest when I signed up. I picked it because mastodon.world was a known quantity, which led me to believe the same team would run a stable server.

Most servers don’t micromanage community moderation. That sort of thing could happen almost anywhere.

When I say “by default”, I meant the vanilla Mastodon web client. Of course alternate clients could do just about anything.

There’s nothing in the text of the Constitution that says they don’t.

Like most sane people, I think that decision was overly broad and has dangerous implications. On the other hand, if Congress could make crimes about Article 2 powers, that would effectively allow Congress to take those powers for itself by statute, overruling the Constitution’s assignment of them to the president.

I could imagine them trying to include corporations… but seriously, Constitutional textualism is a cornerstone of what it means to be a conservative judge. They’re pretty content to ignore or reverse precedent, but not to get creative about something spelled out plainly in the Constitution.

the conservative SCOTUS will not overturn an unconstitutional law.

I think you might be surprised here. Conservative judges are inclined to follow the plain meaning of the text of the Constitution at the time it was written. There’s not much wiggle room in this:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

I don’t think long posts in Mastodon are a bad thing at all. I self-host and I changed the character limit to 50000.

By default, Mastodon will collapse long posts in feeds. If you don’t want to see long posts, you don’t have to click to expand them.

If you have millions of people on a social network, and you go looking for toxic shit there, you will find it.

Well, on Mastodon, you might not because by default it doesn’t have a useful text search feature. If you’re on a server running a modified version, or something else with decent text search, you might. My self-hosted server was on a relay that briefly pulled in content from a famously toxic server. At first, I didn’t see it because I didn’t follow those accounts, but later, I added an improved search feature and tried searching for some terms of abuse. I did find a few absolutely vile posts.

Bluesky has had a working search from early on. Turning off some of the default moderation filters and searching for terms of abuse does, in fact find people using terms of abuse.

I’m puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.

It’s kind of not. It does appear to be at least theoretically possible to self-host any or all of the major components. Unlike ActivityPub projects, however, it doesn’t seem like anybody is doing that and offering services to the public.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. What I do think is true is that there’s a chance some AI thing will be a trillion dollar investment, and the most motivating thing for VCs is fear of missing out on a giant score.

A nonprofit open source profit ought to have different motivations though.

That’s pretty much what I wrote in the comment box. The options for the multiple choice questions don’t really acknowledge that as a preference people might have.

Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.

Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn’t great (and some people claim that’s a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/

Local elections also need to be partisan. Otherwise how the fuck do you know where any of the candidates even generally stand on the issues?

I’d rather parties have no official role so we’re actually voting for people to represent us. Candidates have a responsibility to get their message out, and voters have a responsibility to do some research.

The story buries the lede: there were 19 candidates on the ballot for mayor and 16-30 for each city council district. Several of the experts cited speculate that the number of candidates overwhelmed voters.

I always go over a sample ballot in advance and research each candidate. I would not have liked to do so for that election; local elections are difficult to research in general with many candidates getting minimal press and some not even bothering to put up websites.

I think the main thing I can take away from this is I’d be terrible at running a political campaign. I already knew that.

While I can understand how more traditional conservative messages resonate with people, Trump’s are outside my Overton window. I can see the mechanics of how it works, and I can empathize with people who feel like the current system is failing them, but not with those who feel like Trump is going to fix it.

I’m disappointed your comments are attracting downvotes. They are on-topic and well-reasoned.

I’m not going to cop to strawmanning here, but I will grant that people who are receptive to his messaging on immigration might hear it differently than I do.

Perhaps part of my difficulty understanding how someone could resonate with that messaging without being an irredeemable racist stems from it not being based in reality any time there are actual numbers available from law enforcement. Drug couriers are citizens far more often than they are immigrants. Illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than citizens. Noncitizens attempting to vote is rare and usually results in prosecution. “Open border” means something very different to me, e.g. intra-EU borders than it seems to mean to Trump.

Despite all that, Trump’s supporters feel like he’s telling them the truth about these issues and everyone who contradicts him is lying. The explanations that come to mind for me are… uncharitable. I’d like to hear alternatives.