OpenStars

There are lots of possibilities.

One being mere FUD - remember that he doesn’t have to succeed to cause disruption, and even the attempt will draw focus away from Russia’s own annexation of Ukraine.

And if that can simultaneously be accomplished while also acting to isolate the USA away from its allies - and perhaps more importantly them away from the USA - then so much the better (for Russia I mean, though at the expense of the Western nations).

Or Putin could have meant it as a jest, and Trump did not realize that.😜

But I also think there’s a halfway decent chance that Trump himself won’t even bother trying - he could back down, and then claim: “see how reasonable I am, I wanted to do this crazy thing, but you didn’t want me to so I didn’t, yet now I want to do this other much more ‘reasonable’ thing and it’s my turn to win so you gotta let me have this new thing I want, if you want me in return to keep doing things your way occasionally, that’s called ‘compromise’ btw” (it’s actually not btw, as a better term would be rather “shifting the goalposts”, but whatever…).

And if that was the case, then we wasted all of our efforts trying to understand the “strategy” behind something that was only ever meant as a distraction to begin with - unless that’s what they WANT us to think, and then they push it through and actually get it DONE!? That’s the thing when facing against an opponent who actually knows what the word “strategy” means - whereas the voting public seems to have no clue, which is why we probably should not have been in charge in the first place 😞 (at least I heard that sentiment a lot after Brexit, by people in the UK - like “whoopsie, can we get a do-over?!” then doing the identical thing again every single time that the latter was granted, proving just how impossible it is to help people who are absolutely dead set against receiving that aid).

Also, bold of you to presume that the USA will ever have another election again… - it is now legal to assassinate his opponent if he so chooses, so the playing field has changed entirely. Probably he’ll allow bad candidates to run that have no chance of actually winning, so it will appear as if his preferred choice had won entirely legally (Jared Kushner? or some other handpicked candidate - in all likelihood by Putin, or whoever succeeds him and inherits whatever other dirt he keeps on all rich and powerful people around the world). The gloves are off now: this is a brave new world.

We all know who. But if anyone does need help connecting the dots: https://ponder.cat/post/1252517.

The best case scenario for these scenarios is that some other shiny toy distracts him, or rather than Putin for whatever reason decides that he wants something else more (which come to think of it, is not the best case anymore… at least not overall).

But while I may be too naively optimistic here, there’s a non-zero chance that the institutions left in the USA are too solid to allow for such a unilateral takeover? At which point this operation serves to pull those into the light as “problem areas” for the next push forward, plus whatever he backs down from serves to make the remaining crap he will do seem more reasonable by comparison - like a negotiation, The Art Of The Deal style? You gotta love that ratchet effect that conservatives always do… which somehow always manages to work on those who allow themselves to forget? 🤢🤮

Oh I think we all got it! 😁

At least, the vast majority on the Fediverse and probably at some on Reddit too. Sadly, his followers will never manage to get it, even after something were to happen - the party line would spout some BS that would instantly become dogma.😓

You might not be saying that… so then allow me to: I definitely am one of those people!:-P

I tend to live in places where my vote doesn’t count much, and have to move around a lot, so not always, but often. And for the first 20+ of my life did not really get into politics and such at all - I found it too confusing, and intuitively realized that despite how people would urge me to just get out and vote, I was legitimately better off not doing that, until I was willing to put forth the time and effort required to understand matters and make an actual informed decision.

Translation: I would have voted Republican, bc that’s what my family was, thus amplifying their voices merely due to the fact that they had me as a child. I am so glad that I ignored all the socially accepted advice that somehow always neglected to mention the other side of that coin: e.g. that if you vote for (or against) something - a war perhaps, or a budget cut - it makes you complicit in the outcome. Probably so too does not voting, but I’m talking about when I was a dumb kid here, where it’s more understandable.

Now I realize that my church had lied to me, my state had lied to me, my news had lied to me - or rather, has rather than had for each of these bc it continues to happen - and I see just how much effort it takes to be a responsible citizen. And I see that others are unwilling to put forth that same level of effort that I did.

So yeah, I hope that curated feeds can be made for people. And automation can help with that. On the one hand it continues to make us more and more tribal, but on the other hand if such do not exist then how are the even younger generations going to so much as begin the process of figuring out even the tiniest nuggets of truth as they lie buried amidst all of the numerous and insidious lies?

One thing I’m noticing, and starting to hear from others as well, is a shift away from institutions and more towards individuals. So like I’ve avoided CNN, but Fareed Zakaria on the other hand seems to be making some sense - not that I agree 100%, but enough to get me thinking outside of what I would have unaided.

Perhaps in the future it won’t so much where or how we get out news from - like it could just as readily be Mastodon as YouTube as news org - so much as who we choose to listen to.

Which pisses me off to no end, bc now I have to suddenly keep track of individual names in order to know anything at all?! Plus the good ones will burn out, usually somewhat shortly after they get really good, before which they made mistakes more often, leaving only a window of time in-between where they are awesome.

It’s almost like capitalism enshittifies literally every fucking thing that it touches, ya’know!?:-P

Oh well, the trick is to keep up. Somehow.

What is going on with The Atlantic lately? I thought that it and The Guardian were the last hold-outs of news enshittification, but it seems like both have succumbed as well. Is there anything at all left then, besides Jon Stewart obviously but other than him?

I always like to promote cool stuff, and your stuff is so freaking cool:-).

Good point about it not working natively inside Beehaw but I just wanted to clarify for anyone reading that even so, they can still click the link https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/loops@midwest.social and see the loops videos in action - they can’t comment or vote, either on the Lemmy post or for the Loops video, but for read-only mode it works very well.

I don’t have a Loops account myself so haven’t compared the experiences for that vs. Tesseract but regardless it’s kinda neat to be able to do something like sort that community by Top Week or something and then go through the videos one by one, reading comments if desired also.

Ah I see. Fwiw, !loops@midwest.social has this in the sidebar:

If the loop you’re posting isn’t original content uploaded by the creator, prefix the title with [R] for “reposted”. For example, [R] Cute dog.

So that’s at least something to help differentiate them.

It kinda is yeah.:-) Both Tesseract and PieFed have YouTube embedding, but only Tesseract has that for Loops (so far).

That will come but for now it’s more helpful for the beta testing to have a large diversity of scenarios to work with.

FYI Tesseract as implemented on e.g. dubvee.org, an alternative front-end UI for Lemmy made by Admiral Patrick, has an embedded player already, which doesn’t need an account to play the videos. See it in action at https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/loops@midwest.social, or read more about Tesseract at https://dubvee.org/post/2453173. I hope to see even greater levels of integration soon, perhaps in PieFed!:-)