The age matters less than the power-dynamics of her being his nanny.

That is a reason for arguing that people don’t always make smart choices. It is however not an argument for claiming how people vote does not show what their preference is at the time of voting, which is what is relevant here.

It’s perfectly fine to argue you think it’s stupid of people to want to read about Musk, but the votes clearly show they do in fact want to.

No, the antics of a tech company owner are not relevant to a technology sub.

The votes prove you wrong, no matter what your opinion on it is. You’re free to disagree, but the notion that the people who make up this community are not the arbiters of what is and is not relevant to a community flies directly in the face of the very foundation Lemmy is built on.

How he picks his nose doesn’t matter. How he runs a tech company and how he affects people working in tech does.

And the popular answer does equal the right answer when the question is “does this community think this question is relevant to this community?” The votes are literally this community telling you whether or not it thinks that is true.

Or, you know, seeing as you guys are the ones being downvoted into the negative, you could take your own advice and start your own Elon-free tech community. Nothing is stopping you.

I interviewed with them once, and they swore up and down that they were cleaning up and divesting of all the harmful stuff, and wanted me to trust they were all about health and a smoke-free future.

Thankfully they were so staggeringly full of bullshit during the interviews that I quickly realized it’d be an absolutely horrifically toxic (groan, yes, sorry) place to work irrespective of my other doubts, and I ended up telling them I didn’t want to continue the process and that I was so unhappy with the assorted bullshit during the process that I didn’t want to ever be approached by them again.

That’s the very long way of saying I’m not the slightest bit surprised it turns out they are in fact still massive asshats, and I’m very happy I caught on early enough.

I think Hong Kong is the rare exception that’s at least possible to reasonably argue, since the alternative was never independence but being ruled by someone granting even fewer freedoms.

You see similar issues with French ex-colonies, but since they weren’t as many they don’t appear as much in the news.

Or people aren’t as aware of them. E.g. notably their mandates in Syria and Lebanon after World War 1 where they intentionally stirred divisions on the basis of a theory of wanting to keep it so France as a mediator was needed in order to keep them stable. And then they fucked off and left chaos behind.

1/4 yes, but also worth mentioning that today far more than 1/4 of the present-day population live in that quarter of the world that has a history of being under British rule in recent history.

Couple that with the UK population being far more likely to be proud of the empire, wish Britain still had an empire, and insist the colonies wee left better off for having been oppressed, the British Empire has a certain stench about it many of the others haven’t, or haven’t anymore because of either age, a greater willingness to admit it was a bad thing, or lack of scale.

Three things: Scale, recency and contrition or perceived lack thereof.

The British Empire is the largest empire there has ever been. At its greatest extent, in 1920, it covered about 1/4 of the entire world, long after having lost many holdings like the US. The second largest, the Mongol Empire, reached almost the same size, but hundreds of years earlier.

In the same time period as the British, the Russian empire covered <20% in 1895, but its proportion of colonial lands to their own was much smaller than for the British Empire and the proportion of the current world population living in those areas is also much smaller. The French colonial empire covered less than 1/10th of the world at its peak in 1920, and was by far the other largest recent holding of colonies geographically and culturally outside of the immediate sphere of the holding country.

Spain is rarely brought up, I think, in large part because the Spanish empire reached its peak in the early 1800’s and so is “history”. Belgium doesn’t get discussed at much because 98% of their colonial holdings was Leopold II’s personal ownership of the Congo Free State. And then we get to the last bit: Contritition.

Nobody goes around saying the massive scale of gross abuse that happened under Leopold II’s rule of the Congo Free State was a good thing. Few people I’ve met ever defend France’s atrocities in Vietnam. Even the defence of their ownership of Algeria, which was special enough to trigger an attempted coup against Charles de Gaulle when he wanted to let it have independence because many saw it as part of France itself, is relatively muted.

But there’s still mainstream support for the British Empire in the UK. There are still people who insist the British Empire was awesome for the colonies that were exploited because they got English and rails and British legal systems and that somehow outweighs the mass murder and brutal exploitation and erasure of local cultures.

E.g. this survey from 2019, where 32% were proud of the British Empire, 37% were neutral, and only 19% considered it “more something to be ashamed of”. 32% were proud of their country’s history of colonialism and oppression. Critically this was significantly higher than for other colonial powers other than the Dutch. At the same time 33% thought it left the colonies better off vs. only 17% who thought they were worse off.

I’m not British, but I’ve lived in the UK for 23 years, and I’ve experienced this attitude firsthand from even relatively young British people (ok, so all of them have been Tories) - a refusal to accept that the fact that a substantial number of these former colonies had to take up arms to get rid of British rule might perhaps be a little bit of a hint that the colonial rule was resented and wrong.

No other modern empire has left behind such a substantial proportion of the world population living in countries that have either a historical identity tied up to rebelling against British rule, and/or have relatively recently rebelled against British rule, and/or still have substantial reminders, such as Commonwealth membership or the British monarch as their monarch. When a proportion of the British population then keeps insisting this was great, actually, there you have a big part of it.

Removed by mod

The reality of course, is that the reason they want to go after the IRS is because they don’t wan’t them to be able to afford to go after the big fish.

I remember growing up in the 1980’s and 90’s when there were still a horrifying amount of people who refused to believe CIA did things like that at all, even in a relatively left-wing country like Norway.

I’ve addressed your points repeatedly, while you resort to fiction and defamatory lies.

You’ve only “addressed this” by repeating your imaginary scenario of thought crime as justification for arguing that bringing mass murderer into power was right, just like the supporters of every brutal dictator in history though their favourite mass murderer did what they needed to as well.

It’s not actually “addressing” anything - all you’ve done is doubling down on trying to justify actual, real murders that happen with your fear of something hypothetical. This irrational fear of hypothetical harm and willingness to preemptively harm the other first, driven by a relentless bloodlust lies at the core of the fascist psyche.

And again, actual murders trump your fictional headcanon any time. This “it’s for the good of everyone” argument is the traditional argument of fascists to justify dismantling democracy and hunting down political opponents. Every brutal dictator and their supporters think they are the heroes and project their own brutality on the people they murder while they leave a trail of blood behind them.

Allende didn’t carry out any mass murder. Pinochet did. Hence your purported “knowledge” about what Allende might have done had your preferred mass murderer not taken power is only in your head.

Trying to set up strawmen by pointing to entirely different regimes that nobody in this thread have expressed support for does not change the fact that you’re still the only one here repeatedly arguing in favor of someone who actually carried out mass murder.

In reality the dictator you’ve repeatedly expressed support for here killed thousands, while unlike you I’ve never supported any oppressive, mass-murdering government of any kind.

Actual murders trumps your fictional head canon any time.

I have never in my life supported any violent coups or putting mass murderers in charge by any means. You have on the other hand repeatedly done so in this thread alone.

“Better mass murder than the fiction I invented in my head” is the comeback you think it is. All it underlines is that you’re doubling back on the support of violence and destruction of democracy when it fits your extremist ideology.