I agree. Nevertheless, people here prefer arbitrary decisions based on rules that are so broad that they only encourage arbitrary decisions by the moderators. From this, I can only conclude that even the people here would rather be entertained than face the adversities of reality.

For me, that is unacceptable - so I’m moving on.

I’ve tried so many comms by now that I’ve lost interest. From now on, I’m just not going to post anything anymore. I’ve said this to myself many times before for the very same reason, but the downvotes on this post confirm it unequivocally. I obviously have no business being here.

Feel free to take a look at my profile to decide whether I really am such an unpleasant person that I shouldn’t be allowed to express my views in any community with some viewability.

This struggle is simply not worth it to me. I’ve also cancel my financial support - I’m sure you’ll manage well without me.

Here’s an example: I posted on /c/unpopularopinion that it can’t be right that even a well-known actor like James Van Der Beek is becoming impoverished because he can’t afford the cost of his cancer treatment. I posted there because I know from experience that this would not be allowed in other communities because it is supposedly a political post - even at unpopularopinion, the post was removed by the moderators.

Therefore, I believe that this arbitrary rule is completely absurd.

Go back to reddit please.

I’ve been here for more than two and a half years, trying to contribute something because I thought it was important. I’m starting to think more and more that it was a wasted effort. Thank you for pointing that out so clearly once again.

So get a decent block list…

You can already hide such posts without any problem by excluding the relevant terms. As this post here suggests, it should also not be too difficult technically to let users decide which content they want to hide using tags.

However, hiding posts in the most popular communities for everyone by moderators is nothing less than plain censorship - and you even like that, because you can’t be bothered with reality…

And so I’m supposed to leave it up to some random person to decide whether to allow me to speak?

How absurd is it that /c/unpopularopinion has “no politics” as its first community rule - as do most of the Lemmy communities with the widest reach? This achieves nothing but opening the floodgates to arbitrary censorship. And why is that? For the simple reason that people would rather be entertained…

Why, it’s the truth. The US is ruled by a third-rate TV personality who could only become president because his father was a billionaire. That’s a fact.

The man was a megastar in the 90s… With a hit TV series that ran for six seasons during the heyday of the medium. He also starred in various Hollywood films. I really don’t know what else there is to relativize.

Edit: But hey, maybe you still have to sugarcoat it somehow because the US president is a third-rate television personality, just like most of his cabinet. These people are actually forgettable, but because they have rich parents, they are the government, rape children under state protection, and get away with it completely unpunished because the US population lets it slide.

The “destruction of civilization” is what the US regime is pursuing: Not only is it doing everything in its power to reverse all civilizational progress in its own country, but it is led by an organge-colored rapist whose only ambition is to enrich himself and protect himself and his degenerate co-conspirators from prosecution for the most repulsive crimes imaginable.

A transatlantic alliance with such monsters, who are even openly threatening a war of aggression against Greenland because they can’t think of anything better than such an idiotic bluff?

GTFO!

Cool, it’s meant for magical potions, right? The friends you got the bottle from must be powerful wizards or witches…

The man owes his entire career to cronyism with the business world, especially his close ties to US corporations. Since he is much more of a US business lobbyist than a politician, his neo-capitalist drivel is self-explanatory.

Friedrich Merz (born November 11, 1955, in Brilon), the tenth Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany since May 6, 2025, has been the federal chairman of the CDU since 2022. A former business lawyer and long-time top lobbyist, he has held leading positions in a number of companies and business-related interest groups and networks. [1] Until the end of 2021, Merz was vice president of the CDU’s business lobby group, the Economic Council, and a guest member of the presidium of the Small and Medium-Sized Business and Economic Union (MIT). In 2022, the MIT welcomed Merz’s election as CDU chairman and stated that he was the first chairman to be a member of the MIT.[4] Armin Peter, most recently deputy press spokesman for the Economic Council and press spokesman for the then Economic Council Vice President Merz, has been deputy spokesman for the CDU and personal press spokesman for Merz since February 2022.[5] [6] Merz continues to be a member of the following organizations: Founding member of the New York section of the CDU Economic Council,[7] lobby organization Society for the Study of Structural Policy Issues,[8] Ludwig Erhard Foundation network, which brings together lobbyists and top politicians. Merz worked as senior counsel for the law firm Mayer Brown LLP until the end of 2021; prior to that, he was a partner for nine years.[9] During his time at Mayer Brown, he advised clients on corporate law, M&A transactions, compliance, and banking and finance law. According to research by CORRECTIV, he represented BASF as a lawyer on several occasions in 2010 and 2011. [10] He was a member of the board of directors at BASF Antwerp for almost a decade, where he headed the “Paints & Pigments” division of the BASF Group. From 2009 to 2019, Merz was chairman of Atlantik-Brücke [11] and from 2016 to 2020, he was chairman of the supervisory board of the German branch of asset manager BlackRock, for which he mediated relationships with important clients, authorities, and government agencies in Germany. [12] He was active in the Market Economy Foundation as a member of the Political Advisory Board of the Tax Code Commission. [13] In connection with his candidacy for the CDU party chairmanship, Merz ended his role as chairman of the supervisory board of Blackrock at the end of the first quarter of 2020.[14][15] At the 2021 CDU party conference, he lost a digital runoff election to his rival Armin Laschet. At the party conference on January 22, 2022, he was elected chairman of the CDU with 94.62% of the delegates’ votes. [16] On September 23, 2024, Merz was officially nominated as the CDU and CSU’s candidate for chancellor in the next federal election. [17]

Translated from German | Source with references

The guy should be forced to resign and put on trial immediately. How likely do you think that is to happen?

Don’t forget Clarence Thomas. He was also heavily involved at the time, in fact he played a decisive role, and he is just as obviously corrupt today as he was then. No consequences, no accountability whatsoever.

As I said, that’s true, of course, but the question is how long it will remain that way. I can hardly see any difference already, and I don’t see how things in the US are going to get better.

The only possibility, in my opinion, is for the people to rise up and overthrow this blatantly corrupt system. They still have the chance to do so at the moment, as the authoritarian regime with its secret police loyal to no one but the organge godfather (in the form of ICE with a budget that compares to the military spendings of a medium sized country) is still in the process of being fully established.

To be honest, however, I have little hope that the American people will do this - yes, there are massive protests, but there are no signs of a nationwide, organized general strike that could bring the regime to its knees. I don’t think these ruthless criminals will be impressed by anything else, because they hold all the cards.

Yes, that may be true for now, but the US regime is currently obviously working to change that - and fast.

I mean, masked fascist thugs are randomly kidnapping and even murdering people in broad daylight, and the highest law enforcement authorities are not only protecting pedophiles, but are also clearly enabling their decades of monstrous deeds in the first place. This has nothing to do with even a halfway functioning system, especially since the US government is trampling on the law as if it was beneath them - they just don’t care anymore because no one is stopping them. This is evident in the fact that even the most heinous crimes do not result in any consequences for those responsible - and this has been the case for quite some time in the US as well.

None of this is even remotely compatible with a democratic constitution.

I would say that mafia state and oligarchy are roughly synonymous.

The difference lies more in the perception of a given country: Russia is an oligarchy because all power is in the hands of a few. It is seen as a mafia state because Russia has a horrible reputation on the world stage, which is why those in power have a reputation for enriching themselves out of pure greed. Of course they do, but so do despots in other oligarchic countries - only here it is sometimes still considered legitimate state action, even if it, in fact, only benefits a powerful elite.

In contrast, a plutocracy is also an oligarchy, but a special case of it, since wealth is the main source of power for the elite who control the country.

However, now that the US elite is apparently replacing it’s sham democracy with autocratic tyranny, as in Russia, the US is also increasingly becoming an oligarchy in the sense of a dictatorship.

I think it is undisputed that both Russia and the US are led by serious criminals, by a mafia, which, however, has so far only been referred to as such in Russia.

But since the US regime apparently no longer has any scruples about openly committing the most depraved crimes and - like Putin’s crew - shamelessly enriching itself, the US’s international reputation will also rapidly deteriorate, as is already the case.

Today, you will hardly find many people in any country of the world who still believe anything the White House says, given the obvious lies coming out of there.

In short, both countries are mafia states, but the US is so powerful that the oligarchs here are much more dangerous because of their disproportionately greater influence on other countries.

Yes, Russia is an oligarchy, no question, but the country is nowhere near as powerful as the US with its excessively inflated military apparatus … hence the question: Should the US be called a super-oligarchy, now that the country’s elite, who are actually its most degenerate citizens, is obviously no longer satisfied with the plutocracy that has long been the norm there?

It’s truly open mob rule in the States … a superpower under the control of serious criminals. What do you call that, actually?

I mean, organized crime probably hasn’t existed in at least fifty years with such blatant, unpunished audacity and probably not with such an outrageous level of twisted depravity either. I’m not sure if the monsters of the world have ever been so powerful since the end of World War II.

So what would be a fitting term for today’s US?

Super-oligarchy? Orange Mega-MAGA-Mafia-Nation?