Appreciate how good you have it. In America, child sex abuse material is only illegal when children were abused in making it, or if it’s considered obscene by a community. If someone edits adult actors to look like children as they perform sex acts, it’s not illegal under federal law. If someone generates child nudity using ai models trained on nude adults and only clothed kids, it’s not illegal at the national level.

Fake porn of real people could be banned for being obscene, usually at a local level, but almost any porn could be banned by lawmakers this way. Harmless stuff like gay or trans porn could be banned by bigoted lawmakers, because obscenity is a fairly subjective mechanism. However, because of our near absolute freedom of speech, obscenity is basically all we have to regulate malicious porn.

Both those jobs require PHDs, something only 2% of Americans ever get. It would be inaccurate to claim that there’s only a 1% chance of both your parents being doctors, but it is more exclusive than 1 doctor. They were definitely millionaires by the time he was an adult, and could probably afford excellent education for him since birth. The key thing is that closer you start to the bottom, the harder it is to become ultra wealthy.

It’s honestly amusing to see what batshit strategy Musk will use next to fuck up Twitter. It’s like he’s trying to force every smart employee to leave, drive away every advertiser possible, and get users to find other homes.

That’s just how the internet do. Not unique to lemmy.

LGBTQ rights activists were complaining about this already, and people didn’t listen. Using a more highly motivating issue like abortion is sadly necessary to get people to care. It could censor so many important issues, it’s a travesty it’s gotten this far.

To be fair, they aren’t exactly profiting from the current strategy.

Video editing and compositing are the main things. These don’t seem to specialize in those tasks, while Adobe offers too many features and has too many quality 3rd party plugins to really be replaced. Even if there were programs that could compete, learning how to do things you know how to do in another program is a pain in the ass. The way programs work together is also a key thing Adobe can offer because they own multiple programs. Ideally there would be common standards to allow programs from different teams to work together just as well, but I’ve yet to see it.

Bigger thing for me is the Adobe shit. Those fuckers have monopolized creativity tools, and I haven’t heard of good alternatives for Linux.

Most don’t want to move. Immigrants die to get in because their homes were destroyed by global capitalism. Despite all the shitty things about the US, people wanting to leave isn’t a big thing yet. I don’t personally know of many prisons that people are dying to get into. America is more like a casino anyhow.

As far as communists not having power, I can’t say it’s surprising. ML communism has been an absolute failure, poisoned from early on. The only kind of ML state that has survived without totally embracing capitalism is Cuba, and that’s depressingly thanks to the USA keeping them isolated. Besides, Cuba mostly swore fealty to Marxist-Leninism because of shared interests.

Communism is dead in the US because it’s dead everywhere. With few exceptions, every so called “existing socialist state” has embraced capitalism and done more to reinforce classism, imperialism, and nationalism than eliminate these vices. Socialism is about getting rid of class differences, uniting the working class across the globe. Most of you self proclaimed “communists” are deluded cultists who make a mockery of the ideas that you claim to represent.

I’m not blinded by liberalism so much as I’m disillusioned with supposedly communist movements. I will never follow a movement that demands its followers reject reason and evidence in favor of dogma and genocide denial. If not following the divine unquestionable wisdom of Vladimir Lenin constitutes not being left wing, then the left deserves to fail.

Unfortunately for chuds like you, the left is bigger than your stupid fucking cult, and leftists will make the world a better place with or without your help. No matter how many communities you infiltrate and take over, leftists will just gather again elsewhere. This is because leftists are people who try to make the world a better place rather than falling into cynicism and tribalism. People don’t need Marx or Lenin to know how things suck or how things can be better. Your hero worship is less than worthless.

I don’t know, I’ve met plenty of American tankies, anarchists, socialists, and communists. This is some real “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears” level shit. I can’t twist reality into enough of a pretzel to make this viewpoint have any validity. It’s laughable.

I don’t know, claiming parts of other counties as their own on official maps seems pretty imperialist to me. I also don’t know what your definition of totalitarian is if you believe the US is totalitarian. I’ve heard claims of authoritarianism before, but claims of totalitarianism make even less sense. It seems like an effort to render a word meaningless by misusing it.

America is imperialist, as is China, Russia, and every other major world power. It’s just what large states tend to do. I suspect MLs view imperialism only through the lens of capitalism, when imperialism far predates capitalism. Capitalist imperialism is only one form of an empire projecting its power.

That’s still not ok. It’s just normalized.

I don’t know what “willing cooperation” has to do with anything. The US government has the willing cooperation of millions and had the willing cooperation of a majority of Americans in the past. That doesn’t mean the US government didn’t do some of the worst shit ever during the peak of their popularity. It’s also not like consent isn’t manufactured in China.

If anything, it’s my belief in the similarities of the Chinese and US governments that makes me think they would do hateful things with their power. People in China are the same as people here. I don’t have a rose tinted view of people here either.

Except the Chinese government has way more control over their companies than the US government does. In fact, there has been an explicit push recently by the government to increase their control and ownership of companies. It’s also consistent with how most large states operate, especially ones with a history of trying to control ethnically Chinese people outside of their borders.

That isn’t to say that a ton of anti China sentiment isn’t racist; it’s just that one doesn’t need to be racist make such a prediction. It’s true that many people who hate China hate it for the wrong reasons, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to take issue with.

I don’t know what it was called, but the purchasable blue check marks thing built off of an already existing service. It might have had a different name, I don’t remember.

I heard of several people paying for blue to be able to edit tweets and such before Musk bought it.

That’s because you’re well off in the international context. If you lived in an exploited country where life has been getting worse by many metrics for generations, you probably wouldn’t feel like we’re “moving in the right direction.” Most of Europe and America has benefited from the imperialism of global capitalism.

Climate change will kill billions, and there’s a decent chance that each one of us might be in those billions. Even if it won’t kill 100% of humanity, it will probably kill a number of governments, our current way of life, and there’s no guarantee it won’t kill me. It’s an existential threat in the same way that Russian roulette is.

I suspect the argument is that capitalism is fueled by desire, which is psychologically insatiable. Some would probably say that any system allowing capitalism will eventually be corrupted by it and lead back to the infinite growth capitalism we currently live in. It’s the belief that we have to totally extinguish it or it will come back stronger.