Every time I see this, I can’t help but feel like it works better without the third panel. Showing it happening dulls the comedic impact of the final panel. Anyone who doesn’t know what Kirby is about isn’t going to understand the comic anyway, and anyone who does doesn’t need the third panel to understand what happened.

It’s about who has a chance of winning. If you’re trying to argue that any candidate other than Harris had a chance of beating Trump in this recent election, you’re kidding yourself.

I’ve said this before and I’ll continue saying it: Trying to inject a 3rd party candidate into the presidential race is foolish. A much better tactic would be trying to push for 3rd party candidates in smaller races for local / state government, or congress. Doing that is a lot easier, and can make small incremental changes that add up over time. There simply isn’t a realistic way for a third party candidate to compete in the presidential race until the voting system is changed.

If not, what would it take?

A viable third party candidate. Before anyone says it, Jill Stein is not it. Alternately, a voting method that allows voting third party without just enabling a GOP sweep (again).

It’d be great if this resulted in some major revision of the Democratic party from within, but I’m not holding my breath. I will, however, continue voting for the “less bad viable option” if the “more bad option” is on par with Trump.

It’d be more effective to try and get progressives into lesser positions, first - local government, state government, congress. Going straight for the presidency is a non-starter unless you can get the democratic party to buy in, which won’t happen. Putting progressives into office elsewhere, especially if it forces the dems to start cooperating with them to pass policy, is an easier and more realistic starting point.

Maybe for some folks…

Giving the statues “an orange makeover” implies something a lot more permanent or at least harder to remove than high-vis vests. If someone tells you they “got a makeover”, when in reality what they did was change their shirt, would you not think that was a little disingenuous?

I’m not being critical of you, or the protest, to be clear, I just think the title is a poor representation of what happened.

I feel like this title is intentionally misleading, probably trying to draw parallels to the defacing of Stonehenge with orange powder.

They put orange high-vis vests on the statues. No damage was caused.

The geography is also a huge contributor. To protest something on a national scale needs significantly greater buy-in from the country as a whole than protesting something on a national scale in a European country. We have a huge amount of land area over here and with the exception of major cities, we’re very spread out.

Spain is one of the larger European countries, and is about 500k sq. km, as an example. The US is about 9.1 million sq. km.

Protests happen on local scales but they don’t make national news, only the really massive ones do, and those require a lot of coordination and time investment from the participants just to show up.

It’s all just framing, no? You could frame all of your examples of protesting to “improve something” as protesting against something, and vice versa.

Protesting for improved living conditions is just protesting against poor living conditions. Protesting for higher wages is protesting against low wages. Protesting for lower tuition costs is protesting against high tuition.

Protests by definition are an action objecting to a thing. What are you seeing happen in other countries that’s so different to what’s happening here, when you don’t selectively frame it as “for” a cause rather than “against” a thing?

I’d hardly describe this as the product of a ‘great mind’, but I do think it’s important to discuss alternative ways of doing things. There’s some good reasons voiced here for why this (as written) is impractical, and it sounds like a solution with similar goals but better implementation is in the works, so that’s great to see. My favorite thing about Lemmy is that you can post something a bit out there like this and have a legitimate discussion about it; if this were Reddit, it’d have 400 downvotes and a bunch of replies telling me to kill myself, and that’d be the end of it.

Edit: Sorry, thought this was a different reply.

I mean block the instance’s posts from showing up on the community level, which would need to be a new option implemented with this hypothetical system.

Yep, it’s a valid criticism. Theoretically the recourse in that case would be to block the instance entirely, but it’d still require multiple moderator actions (across multiple instances).

In this system, each community needs moderators from each instance it is on. A small instance run by one person would face a challenge finding people to moderate potentially hundreds of communities.

Each instance would be responsible for moderating its own posts, so a single user instance wouldn’t need a moderator at all unless other instances were failing to moderate their content, but I agree, this is a hurdle, and would make it easier for bad actors to go to tiny instances and post spam.

You mention that a user who doesn’t like their instance’s moderation can use a different instance, but this isn’t easy. There’s no account migration at the moment. This is more of an issue with the lack of that functionality, since there are many other reasons people would want to switch instances.

Sorry, I might’ve been unclear - I simply mean that you could visit the community from your instance via that instance - e.g. [yourcommunity]/c/worldnews@lemmy.world - to see lemmy.world’s “view” of the community. Your account would still exist on your own instance.

If this was implemented, presumably it would require merging all existing communities that share names.

A fair point; while it’d benefit some communities to have their content combined, it would not benefit others; this is a very valid criticism.

So all the spam and CSAM would have to be taken down by each individual instance.

Or only by the instance from which they were posted. If an instance is a moderation graveyard and is generating CSAM spam, it probably just needs to be defederated from, but I agree that the necessity to rely on local moderators to cleanly remove a post is a problem with the proposal.

Would also somehow have to find a way for instances to pull the hashtags out of every federated instance too.

If each instance shared a list of communities that it hosts with each instance that is aware of it on first discovery and periodically thereafter, it would assist with this. Wouldn’t need to duplicate the content, just share a list of communities that exists. (I think that lack of duplicated content would actually be an improvement over the current system where, unless I’m mistaken, content is being duplicated, but I might also have an imperfect understanding of how it functions now.)

Well, under this theoretical standard, you’d only be posting to a single community; you wouldn’t be literally tagging communities on your post. The hashtag comparison was more to how you view hashtags on Mastodon (e.g. you’re searching for a hashtag and seeing all related posts from every instance.)

Okay, sure, but the underlying point is that the moderators of that community moderate all posts regardless of their origin, so biased moderators can direct the course of discussion. It’s more a problem for broad topical communities with polarizing topics.

Your proposal seems to target the same issues as with multi-community support https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/818, which just got 6000€ funding from NLnet. Which seems to be a cleaner way of achieving the same goal.

That’s great, maybe it’s (or will at some point in the future be) a non-issue, then. (For what it’s worth I did search for similar things before posting this, but apparently didn’t hit on the right search terms.)

Some suggested points are also against ActivityPub standard.

I’m not familiar enough with the intricacies of ActivityPub to be able to comment on that; this is obviously not a set-in-stone implementation, and it sounds like some version of the underlying idea is possible, judging by the above.

Sounds like the perfect opportunity for the media to run one-sided stories about how much support there is for one issue or another, to scare people into opposing it. You don’t know how many people voted for an issue until it’s too late to cast your own vote.

Let’s say you get to cast 3 votes, and that I’m a corrupt politician. I’d put an issue that you care deeply about on the ballot with 3 other issues that you’re likely to care about. If I can engineer a ballot with 4 issues that you really care about, but only 3 issues that my coalition cares about, we can concentrate our votes while you’re splitting yours, and we win all 3 of the ones we deem important.

I took a ~1200 mile bus trip about 20 years ago; it had multiple layovers and took about 36 hours total so it sounds very similar to the trip you’re taking. Frankly I would not do it again. This is from a trip up the east coast of the US so my experience might not apply in the country you’re going to.

I’d have to wait between 3 and 5 hours to board the next bus. Optimist me says great! I could go sightseeing, but with a large and heavy backpack this might not be a good idea…

If you’re using bus terminals in big cities, don’t expect to be able to get anywhere interesting and back again in that time. Large bus terminals are crowded (basically like a small airport) and sprawling and you’ll likely be fairly overwhelmed just trying to get to where you need to go to. They’re also generally not located in the middle of metropolitan areas; you’d most likely need to take a taxi to get to wherever you wanted to sight-see. It would not be a pleasant experience. If you’re considering this, check a map of the area around the terminal first and see if it’s even an option; don’t just wing it, and plan to need more time when getting back to the terminal than you think you should, especially if it’s a non-English speaking country.

Then there’s food, which at bus stations or in tourists areas is neither good nor cheap no matter where you are, personal hygiene, pickpocketing… I’d be traveling solo.

Expect to pay more than you otherwise would. Consider bringing food with you if you’re concerned about that. The only real hygiene option is the sink in the bathroom in the terminal; you’ll probably just be throwing on some deodorant and hoping for the best.

are travelers allowed to eat in the bus? Am I allowed to bring my own food?

Yes, and yes, at least for the US-based busses I’ve ridden on. They’re pretty chill. Don’t expect to have a tray table or anything, though; don’t bring messy things. Something like a bagged sandwich, or snack items, though, should be fine.

The busses themselves were fairly comfortable, much moreso than a plane - the seats are well cushioned, you have room to move around. The ride itself was not bad. However, the layovers are killer. None of the legs of the trip were long enough to really sleep, either during them or between them. It’s hard to sleep on a bus (for me, anyway) - they’re not the smoothest rides, and it ended up being a bunch of short, unsatisfying naps rather than any real sleep. Sleeping at the terminals didn’t seem wise. I was a bit stressed about either missing my connection or someone nicking my stuff, though, so that added stress definitely made the trip worse than it could have been. I felt pretty awful by the time I reached my destination and just could not wait to be off that bus. Thirty six hours is a lot longer in practice than it sounds like when you’re planning things.