That’s why it’s called planned opposition. If you’re afraid of losing control to a genuine opposition movement, you set up a fake opposition movement that dramatically opposes you on a few big ticket items and generally agrees with you on the rest - or that dramatically opposes you on everything, but has no intention of keeping its promises.

Look, I’d like to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. But I expect Magyar is going to make some dramatic economic moves that don’t actually change the economy, run some corruption show trials, crack down on political participation outside the two major parties, back down on his pro-EU stances, and quietly take his orders from Orban and Putin behind the scenes.

Oh fucking please. Fidesz got hammered by corruption scandals in 2024, Magyar dramatically breaks from the party over corruption, and somehow builds a massive nationwide coalition in a matter of months? The Hungarian opposition somehow abandons all its beliefs and rallies around a politician who holds all Orban’s political views?

The term for this is “planned opposition”.

Magyar isn’t Orban’s rival. He’s Orban’s chosen successor.

It’s easy to win an election if you own all the candidates.

And y’all fell for it.

No kidding. Yes, let’s install cameras that can identify and record every license plate (and face, too, if the camera has resolution for one it has resolution for the other) that passes them.

Surely our government will not use this capability to track the movements of its political enemies.

I’m confident Oakland’s notoriously honest and professional police department will not use them to harass whistleblowers and stalk the estranged spouses of police.

And of course it’s overly paranoid to imagine the “third party vendor” processing all this license plate data could be hacked or compromised or sell the data to other entities.

Christ.

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Capitalism isn’t a political system. It’s an economic system.

And I think it’s totally fair to point out how “a company making a product worse because they make more money off the worse product” is one of the flaws of a capitalist economy.

Only Nixon could go to China, as they say.

Because if a Democrat had tried to normalize relations between the US and Maoist China the Republicans would have crucified him. But when their own leader tells them to do it, it suddenly becomes a great idea.

If Republicans didn’t have the principle of groveling to whoever’s in charge of their party, they’d have no principles at all.

But people already have a public place to appeal. This sub, the sub you linked, pretty much any other instance that has a meta discussion community. But posting here, or there, isn’t an actual appeal process - it’s just publicly complaining about administrators.

And that was the answer to OP’s question: that there’s no single fediverse-wide place to appeal a ban, you have to follow instance specific appeal procedures, if they exist, and/or contact the instance’s administrators directly.

Which is a good thing, because it helps keep the verse decentralized.

I think, if there was a single location where the fediverse started telling people “if you get banned, post here to appeal”, users would expect some sort of formal response to their post, and get upset when people tell them posting there doesn’t actually do anything. Which would be bad. And if that location could do anything to encourage administrators to reverse ban decisions, via peer pressure or otherwise, that would also be bad, because it would compromise the independence of instances. That is to say, a fediverse wide appeal community would be at best useless and at worst harmful to the fediverse.

So I think the only appropriate response to “I was banned, what can I do” is “that’s between you and the people who banned you”.

I think any sort of fediverse-wide appeal community, or process, would risk compromising the whole point of the fediverse, ie, decentralization. The fact that admins have the final say on their own instances is part of what keeps the largest instances from controlling smaller ones and keeps the fediverse free of centralized control.

I mean, can you imagine a coalition of the largest instances coming together and telling a small instance “the appeal community agreed this user was banned unfairly, unban them or we’ll all defederate you”? Because I can imagine that sequence of events, if an appeal community got any kind of formal backing from the big instances, and that would pretty much end decentralization.

If the Trump administration, and especially Project 2025, have taught America anything, it’s that libertarians don’t fucking have ideals.

Libertarians spouted propaganda about small government and free speech and privacy until conservative authoritarians took power. And then they cheered while conservative authoritarians built the most extensive police state and government surveillance apparatus in American history and began arresting people for writing op-eds and posting memes.

Libertarians, like Republicans, never actually supported small government or free speech or the privacy of citizens. They deployed the rhetoric of small government and free speech and privacy as weapons to attack liberals and prevent Democratic administrations from pursuing their policy goals. Now that conservatives are in power, those weapons are no longer useful, and libertarians have discarded them.

Libertarian “ideals” were weapons against Democratic government, and they were never anything else.

And to get back to your point: of course libertarians spout rhetoric about financial privacy while keeping cryptocurrency in centralized KYC exchanges. Because crypto was never about privacy as an ideal. It was about bypassing financial regulations, laundering money, dodging taxes, grifting, scamming normies, and gambling on pumps and dumps. Crypto bros talk a good game about privacy and independence to shield themselves from regulation and make themselves look legitimate. Anyone who actually believes that crap is a useful idiot that probably lost all their money in a cryptoscam.

Not just in the United States. The Lancet estimates just cancelling USAID will kill 14 million people between now and 2030. 14 million avoidable deaths because the world’s richest man thought feeding the poor was a waste.

RFK is on track to do a lot of damage, but he has some stiff competition.

I think that was also why Qanon got so much play in the right-wing media ecosystem - getting conservatives comfortable with authoritarian big government conservatism.

Trump is going to declare martial law and have liberals killed or sent to camps? Qanon influencers have been telling conservatives that was the plan since 2017. And about 25% of the United States either believed it or thought “yeah, it’s crazy, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was real?”

but these are not the best pick for everything.

Why not? Seriously, you’ve got canvas sneakers for running or casual wear, canvas boots (waxed if need be) for hiking and wet conditions, even moderately dressy canvas shoes for business casual.

I feel like, counterintuitively, fake leather encourages the idea that your shoes have to look like leather to be “dressy” or “professional”, and if you need shoes that look like leather only vegans will buy the (objectively inferior) fake leather plastic shoes. We save more animals by making the default something that doesn’t involve animals in the first place then we do by coming up with alternatives that look/taste just like animals. Normalize sneakers in the workplace! Hell, normalize tire tread sandals!

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The fact that Kissinger outlived Bourdain proves there is no God.

Though I almost wish Kissinger had lived long enough to see Trump piss away the American power and influence Kissinger sold his soul for. Kissinger should have lay on his deathbed knowing his successors squandered every advantage he won for America, that he steeped his hands in blood and made himself the greatest war criminal in history for nothing.

There are more comments in this thread alone than this MAGA site will probably ever host. (Trolls and spammers motivated by this thread don’t count 😆 )

And honestly? The biggest takeaway from these comments is how many users don’t understand the difference between a protocol and a platform.

I get why they want it. But you can’t just let a few stand in the way of progress. Single family no business housing shouldn’t have a place in urban environments.

I’m sympathetic with that argument. But I also remember that’s what they said when they ran highways through thriving Black neighborhoods and gentrified Katrina climate refugees out of New Orleans. The likelihood that this bill will replace struggling minority neighborhoods with empty storefronts and investment condos for the ultra rich deserves some consideration.

That kind of logic is how you get less taxes on the rich.

I’d argue that the real impact of a higher marginal tax rate on someone who already has more money than he could ever spend is far less than the real impact of putting in an apartment complex down the street from someone. If anything, the poor should have a greater voice in government tax policy and welfare policy than the rich, since they’re much more strongly impacted by both.

“pro-housing city like Los Angeles”.

Fucking lol.

That being said, it is, at the very least, unfortunate, how this is turning out. Yet again, the state is imposing a policy overwhelmingly opposed by the people most directly affected by it - in this case, the people actually living in the locations that will be open to high density housing.

(I get that California needs more high density housing and the logical place to put high density housing is near public transit hubs. I also get that people living in single family neighborhoods don’t want their neighborhoods turned into high density housing. And I’m torn between the genuine need for housing in California and my belief that letting a majority of voters who aren’t impacted by a policy impose it on a minority of voters who are is a shitty way to run a government.)

Unless this very small number of voters wants to foot those costs all on their own, then I see no reason to give them veto power.

It’s not about veto power. It’s about consensus building. Or the lack thereof.

The community around that stretch of the Great Highway felt unheard and disrespected. They felt the rest of SF had imposed a decision on them without their consent. And they used the power they did have to punish one of the people they blamed for it.

You’re absolutely right about the highway - it was routinely closed for sand and flooding and climate change was just going to make it worse. It’s on its way out.

And yet the city failed to convince the people who live around the highway of that, and went ahead by force, imposing the will of the majority on the minority, creating anger and hard feelings that could have been avoided had they put in the work to convince the community they were right.

I don’t think the city or its voters had bad intentions. I just think it exemplifies one of the worst flaws of democracy.

Update: voters recalled Joel Engardio, the supervisor who championed the highway closure, with 65% in support of the recall.

I’m not surprised. The whole city got to vote on the highway closure, which passed with majority approval, but with very strong opposition from Engardio’s district, where that closed stretch of road actually was. The recall election was limited to Engardio’s district. The result was pretty much inevitable.

You could complain about car brains, but I think it’s a lesson in the importance of putting in the work and getting community support for road closures - or for any other change that directly impacts a specific community, no matter how well intentioned - instead of imposing them from the top down.