Currently: @BertramDitore@lemmy.zip

Formerly: @BertramDitore@lemm.ee

Formerly: @BertramDitore@lemmy.world

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  • 42 Comments
Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Of course we need mass protest, it’s critical for building solidarity and sending messages to those in currently power, but by itself it doesn’t solve the problems. Sites like the one mentioned in the article are kind of a bandaid, sure, but when real peoples’ lives are on the line, and a bandaid donated by the community could save their life, why would you dismiss it out of hand like that? Seems pretty crass to me. Bigger systemic solutions are way better, obviously, but when the current power structure is incapable of providing those solutions, local communities need to come up with their own.

    An effective political movement needs protest to expose the problems and bring people on board, and then the movement needs to be get involved in local and national politics by running for office or working to elect people who share the values of those protesting, to convert that solidarity into political power. More than 7 million people turned out to protest last time. What, specifically, would be different about your full massive protest? How would you organize it differently to be more effective than the no kings protests? And would your new mass protest solve the practical problems the orgs in the article are working to solve on the ground right now?




  • That’s a totally legit question, and the host followed up with that same rebuttal during the interview. I won’t get his exact wording right, but his answer was something to the effect of him still being fucked up when he went back as a contractor, but thinking that seeing things from the other side might be better (pretty sure he worked in diplomatic security as a contractor). But it turned out to be worse, and seeing it from that side ended up being the thing that convinced him how pointless it all was. He also said it was the only thing he was ever good at, so he didn’t feel like he had any other options. Makes sense to me even if it’s not something I would ever do.



  • The democratic establishment has labeled him a communist one day, a Nazi the next day and an antifascist another day. You can’t be an antifascist and a Nazi at the same time.

    I listened to the entire Pod Save interview with him, and I’m convinced he’s a solid dude who made some bad decisions when he was younger. He owns up to absolutely everything, and says he has learned from it. He sounded completely genuine to me.

    His background is really important and honestly explains all of this controversy away. He was in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan for multiple tours, and he talks an about how much that fucked him up. He struggled for a long time and shitposting was one of his outlets. Who among us hasn’t regretted something we’ve posted? Owning up to and learning from it is the key.

    If we want to stop electing vanilla spineless establishment candidates, the alternative is electing normal people who haven’t spent their lives hiding themselves from public view to maintain a “clean” persona. Nobody is perfect, everybody has made mistakes, and to me the strength of a candidate comes through most clearly when they take responsibility and demonstrate how their current self has evolved from their younger selves.

    He seems like an awesome candidate to me.


  • Your ignorance is genuinely terrifying to me. I opened this post because your question is mostly legit. I have an undergrad and a masters degree, and while I don’t regret getting them, I will be in debt for the rest of my life. There are a lot of institutional and structural issues with higher education in the US, but most of them boil down to it being a profit business and not strictly a knowledge business. That fact has a lot of knock-on effects, many of which aren’t super obvious unless you’re entrenched in academia. But importantly, that doesn’t mean the knowledge isn’t still valuable or worthwhile.

    Your comment might as well be an advertisement for why higher education (or really any education) is critically important for a functional society. You’re so fundamentally wrong about all of it, and it sure seems like you’re stubbornly unwilling to learn about the nature of reality, so I don’t think college would be a good fit for you.


  • I’m not a dev, but I work with a lot of them, and I do a fair amount of bug testing and reporting for them. Devs do so much: they usually deploy and maintain the infrastructure (servers, virtual machines, databases etc.) upon which they build stuff, they write code in a bunch of different languages, connect things up to external APIs to add more functionality, process and combine datasets to use in the things they build, and plan/track all of that wok as granularly as possible using a variety of project management tools like GitHub or Jira.

    Actually writing code from scratch is probably only 15 or 20% of what they do, at least at my relatively small company. And that’s usually spread out among a few different devs who have their own specialities.


  • I feel this. A few weeks ago I was having problems with the headset I normally use for meetings, so I had to dial into the call on my phone while still watching the screenshare on my computer. When the meeting was over, I forgot I was still connected to the audio call on my phone, and I made a huge loud sigh followed by “ugggghhhh fuck this shit.” Everyone heard me and cracked up. I passed it off as me cursing out a different technical issue, but the people that knew, knew.




  • Just a reminder that JD has three kids (actual kids, not 35 year olds) with his wife, who is a woman of color. If he won’t defend them against blatant racism, do his supporters actually think he gives a fuck about them?

    Also, a good parent would take the opportunity to teach their children why what they said is wrong, not just tell them how to avoid responsibility:

    Vance said he would tell his three kids—“especially my boys”—“don’t put things on the internet. Be careful with what you post. If you put something in a group chat, assume that some scumbag is going to leak it in an effort to try to cause you harm or cause your family harm.”

    Our Vice President is a huge piece of shit.


  • I’m curious, genuinely, what you think the practical result of shooting all the evil people would be? Do you think everyone across the political spectrum would just be happy about it and move on? Would it solve any actual problems other than temporarily vacating their seats so someone even more extreme can be elected in response to your shootings?

    I want folks who advocate for violence to just follow the thought a little further, take it on a walk and see where it ends up in four or five or ten years. I get the instinct to be angry, I’m furious, but do you think the country would be a better place with more violence than there already is?