Personally I am very willing to pay full price and even occasionally buy pointless extras I don’t care about if it helps reward their passion for a project I see as a valuable contribution. I’ll even pre-order or provide them some free advertising in some cases. Especially if its the sort of dev where it seems like their long-term survival might be in question.

I feel like you can usually tell when the dev needs money or doesn’t.

Main benefit of a megathread is it helps prevent engagement from being splintered. So instead of having a dozen separate threads about an issue, with each one only having a few people participating, the issue could have one single megathread where everyone can go and all the interaction can get concentrated in a single location. This improves the experience for everyone discussing the topic, and also improves the experience of everyone who is uninterested in the topic since they won’t be seeing large numbers of threads about it.

I think topics that are fairly specific, with a short chronological window and would include a lot of people wanting to talk about them make good megathreads. Major sporting events, major singular political events, big product releases, revolutionary scientific breakthroughs, long-awaited press releases or disclosures, major court cases, big concerts/public gatherings, etc.

There is a line where you don’t want things to be too big, though, otherwise they become a slog to wade through. In these cases it can be broken into several megathreads, or you can even just make a community for the topic. Like, the Olympics would be a good example of too big for a single megathread.

I’m not sure we can call Peronism fascist. While it was populist and nationalistic, it’s missing that hallmark blood-and-soil (this land for our bloodline) aspect that really marks out fascist ideologies.

You can’t really call yourself fascist if you’re trying to say all your people are equal, you need to be trying to establish some sort of hierarchical order where these citizens are always better than those citizens.

That’s true. We should not necessarily be taking the most extreme measures to simply render the tactic fully ineffective, though. At a certain level it has to be allowed to work, because its leveraging against our humanity, which we should not be discarding too completely. Beyond even the ethical concerns, disregarding them too much creates future strategic problems by instilling more hatred in future generations.

It’s a question of where to draw the line. It’s been particularly egregious in Gaza, where unlike Lebanon, there was nowhere really safe to flee to.

No problem, your perspectives are important as well. I just like trying to remind people not to paint with too broad a brush.

Putting 100% of the blame on either of the sides in this one is not a terribly good idea. Sometimes a conflict has a clear historical oppressed and oppressor, but this particular one has each of the two sides doing quite a bit of foul play for over a century. The Arabs more in the earlier days, the Israelis more in the recent days.

Dealing specifically with the use of human shields, while yes they do get used, at a certain point you shouldn’t just be shooting through them just because you can. Israel is also not sufficiently meeting its obligation to help distribute the food and care for the innocent people displaced by this war. If they were to do so, perhaps they could leave the next generation with less hatred in their hearts.

… maybe they just need another Habsburg. Surely there’s still some kicking around somewhere, as big as that family was.

Sure. I’m not arguing its impossible. I’m arguing that anyone that thinks “we all know” is being very foolish. The only reasonable assertion is we don’t really know. Judging based off of the limited information we have is not “we don’t know” though, its armchair theorizing by people that generally don’t even have medical training.

Yeah, that’s a good point, I didn’t think of that.

Kudos to the guy for doing the right thing, but lets be real here. What else was he going to do, just keep rolling?

“The waters have risen to the roof of her car, and her screams seem to have stopped now. This indicates these are very dangerous floodwaters folks, and I’ll say again that it is recommended that you never…”

All that aside, still humansbeingbros.

I wonder why we don’t have an active HumansBeingBros style community here on Lemmy yet. The Wholesome community does fairly well, but HBB was one of reddit’s largest subs.

This is key. It’s why they tend to message on virtue signaling so much, there’s kinda a fundamental belief that all people are shitty deep down, and they’re just more “real” about it. All the rest of us are just pretending so we look good, but we’re all just as bad as they are, and they’re just the courageous ones.

It’s pretty twisted.

That 36 million is a global figure. And yes, by 2005, two years after it started, public opinion had turned against it.

Here’s an except from that article with some specific events noted:

On September 12, 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush spoke to the United Nations General Assembly. Outside the United Nations building, over 1,000 people attended a protest organized by Voter March and No Blood for Oil.

On September 24, Tony Blair released a document describing Britain’s case for war in Iraq. Three days later, an anti-war rally in London drew a crowd of at least 150,000.[11]

On September 29, roughly 5,000 anti-war protesters converged on Washington, D.C., on the day after an anti-International Monetary Fund protest.[12

Note how much larger the London crowd was than the Washington DC crowd.

Largest that ever happened according to what?

Here what I got, asides actually being alive back then and remembering: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/03/14/a-look-back-at-how-fear-and-false-beliefs-bolstered-u-s-public-support-for-war-in-iraq/

Getting its ass kicked after halting the Tet Offensive in its tracks, eh?

And comparing that to the tiny protests against the ME wars? You’ve got some funny ideas. Desert Storm was a UN coalition move at the invitation of Kuwait. Iraqi “Freedom” had around 90% support in the immediate post-9/11 era.

I don’t know where you get your information, but I’d be curious to see your sources.

That’s cute and all, but history just doesn’t agree. Vietnam is a good example of a war being stopped by public backlash. Regarding the takeover by the neocons and now attempted takeovers by fascists, yeah, that’s sort of what authoritarians do. That does not reflect the system that continues to resist them though.

Depending on how things fall out in the coming decades, you may see what America under a real dictator is truly capable of, and how markedly different it will look from today.

Yeah, that’s unlikely when such a high percentage of his fanbase is Christian Nationalist, doing their best to fight back against their perceived evils in favor of Judeo-Christian rulership, while very conveniently forgetting that Islam is part of that same religious tree.

They’re probably right that he wouldn’t follow Israel into a regional war, but I doubt Biden would either. Someone should remind them that despite Israel fighting many, many wars with US support, we have never deployed ground forces alongside them. We simply have no obligation to do so.

Shooting down some missiles is one thing, sending arms sure, some drone strikes whatever, a lot of Americans still strongly support Israel and don’t mind all that. But putting our forces into ground combat would be broadly unpopular here.

Well, nowadays its become far less common, but we actually used to require Congress to declare any wars.

Ah, I didn’t realize you were coming from a non-American perspective. I can’t speak for the usage of the term in other places, but here in America it was not in academic usage outside of discussions on conspiracy theories, where people in those circles would use it to refer to the part of the US government they suspected of orchestrating the assassination of JFK.

Trump’s firings were not exactly unprecedented, either. Gerald Ford presided over an event that became known as the Holloween Massacre, where he did significant reshuffling within the DoD. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton also did their fair share of firings when they felt it was necessary. What made Trump special was the sheer hostility he demonstrated to the government he was supposed to be running, preferring to make decisions directly instead of delegating by frequently leaving leadership positions unfilled, and installing sycophants when necessary.

The idea that there was some entrenched resistance to him is his propagandistic spin on the idea that our Separation of Powers restrain the President, preventing him from performing any actions that would be deemed illegal by Congressional law, of which there were many. Until the recent SC ruling that granted our President a king-like immunity anyway.

He’s a professional salesman, though, it’s best not to fall for his bullshit and thinly veiled desire to run the country like a family business or cartel, with concentrated power in a single figure.

Not necessarily. Kinda like how blood money could sorta be emotionally redeemed if you just donated it all, the equipment could be redeemed if it was used to produce something useful and beneficial instead of manufacturing fear.