I was in court a few times when I was younger. Nothing too major.

The first time, it really disgusted me seeing person after person get up before me and try to tell the judge how they hadn’t done anything wrong with just transparent horseshit. My turn came up, the cop testified to what happened, the judge asked me for my side, and I just said that it happened the way the cop said. The judge was legitimately a little taken aback.

What the fuck, what am I supposed to say? Maybe it would have been different if it had been big charges or if I had been less naive or something, or if there was some wiggle room in what happened, but I just didn’t see the point in wasting everybody’s time and making myself look stupid and dishonest.

(Note: Do not do this. Court reality is different from everyday life honorable reality. Get a lawyer, don’t say shit, fight to negotiate a better deal and threaten to waste their time and resources making them prove it if they don’t work something out with you. That is what a person will do if they want a good outcome. My priorities were different, I guess, I don’t know. I will say that in this case it didn’t wind up getting me in any more trouble than I would have been anyway. Mostly I’m just telling what happened to me and how I reacted and why.)

This is going to be a fucking bonanza for a lot of places in the world.

There might be a little bit of a brain drain of natives from the US, although it’ll be diluted and made more chaotic by a corresponding drain of people who really aren’t that brainy but think they are. But I think the flood of people who used to come to the US to do their educational or scientific efforts, finding some other place in the world to go (or to flee to) instead, is going to really be pretty significant.

America: We’re going to make a whole department, we can’t just have unauthorized cats everywhere

Mediterranean: “Hi, I am street cat, I’m gonna commandeer your beach towel and eat the fish I caught. Later we can hang out if you want.”

Oh, the dipshits will arrive. Don’t you worry. 😃

And yes, I agree, I like the culture of Piefed. Let’s see how things play out.

Chin up lad. This is just the boss fight. After this, it gets easier again.

(And yes, the people who figured they were doing a big favor for Palestinians and American Hispanics by not voting against Trump are foolish people who helped to cause all of this. I’m not mad but I am disappointed.)

Lol what that person said absolutely isn’t true. Sorry, you’re jumping in the deep end of Lemmy drama. So posts on lemmy.world which are (for example) trashing the Democrats for participating in Trump’s takeover and being mainly concerned about preventing the “shutdown” as if that’s the worst thing, or posts criticizing Israel for, you know, trying to wipe a whole race of people off the map, are super-popular.

For example take a look at this post. You will find a majority saying “about fucking time,” and a minority saying Bernie is pro-Israel and that’s a bad thing. You will find no one supporting Israel in any capacity (which of course is as it should be). The pretense that there’s anyone on lemmy.world who is pro-Israel aside from a tiny handful of angry shouters who are probably trolls, is just that.

So that parent comment is actually a perfect example of what I was talking about setting up rules about “factual claim” for the politics community. In my perfect world, if someone comes in and says some kind of out-of-pocket stuff like that, and someone else asks “What are you even talking about how is lemmy.world pro-Israel, can I see an example?” and the answer is more or less “blblblblblbllblblblblblfdglfdglblblblb fuck you,” that first person gets banned. I feel like that will reduce the temperature of the overall conversation a lot more than a lot of the things lemmy.world mods spend their effort on. It might be complex in practice but I want to try.

Why it is that people constantly make this type of accusation, I don’t know for sure, although I have some theories that I find compelling.

I kind of did it in a self-service fashion… a while back I unsubscribed from !politics@lemmy.world and !world@lemmy.world, and I had a much more enjoyable Lemmy experience, and then every so often by accident I would find myself in some kind of comments thread where everyone was angry, shouting at each other, accusation of “blue MAGA” and “oh you’re just saying that because YOU’RE OKAY WITH GENOCIDE YOU’RE A FUCKING ZIONIST” and things like that. And I would think, what the hell happened here? And then I would see I stumbled into lemmy.world somehow.

Some of the smaller communities are fine, they can actually be quite nice. But the big ones are just a big pile of doo doo. And then the mods are just kind of wandering around tripping on their dicks and banning people at random, which doesn’t add anything of any real benefit.

I will hope, but it seems a little unlikely. Somehow, the most craven ones seem to escape justice most of the time. It’s the true believers who rush out to the front, people like Stephen Miller or Alina Habba, who tend to start to catch some strays as the shit hits the fan. The dude who’s sitting in the back quietly doing 100 times more damage seems to eventually get away on a boat to the Seychelles or something. He might get impeached in 5 years, or he might live out his days secure in the knowledge that he can drive his fucking RV around and do whatever he wants.

Hm… so part of my concern about the “everything else” politics community is that I feel like it is guaranteed to not really get used all that much. There’s always going to be !ukpolitics@feddit.uk or !europe@lemmy.dbzer0.com or !canada@lemmy.ca, I feel like pretty much all the political content that is put up by denizens of whatever part of the world is going to go into a region-specific place, and the “everything but the US” community just wouldn’t get used.

I feel like the two obvious options are:

• !politics@piefed.social which is for “anything” with a specific focus on political news, and in practice is 99% US politics
• !uspolitics@piefed.social, which is for US politics only, i.e. the same thing but we have to have little disputes every now and then about whether something like Petro wanting to move the UN belongs there or not

I went with the first option. I really am fine with renaming it to !uspolitics@piefed.social, completely up to you. If it’s the second option I feel like just deleting !politics@piefed.social unless someone has a use for it, to keep things clean, is probably better.

I do get the concern from the rest of the world that it’s annoying to have US stuff as the “default” and everything else get put in its own region-specific “non default” category. Maybe uspolitics is a little more forward thinking in terms of getting away from that thinking (especially as the years go by and the US collapses in on itself like a rotten pumpkin, geopolitically speaking).

(And yeah, !world@quokk.au is fantastic, I like it. I sort of bounce between quokk.au and piefed.social currently in terms of my “main” account.)

Yeah, I get that. But also, 2 of the 5 stories I posted were not US politics stories. I would like to be able to post stuff about what’s going on in the world without needing to sideline it if it isn’t US stuff.

I do get what you’re saying. Like I say, I’m just going to defer to letting the person who’s organizing the top-level communities on piefed.social have the final say. I did add a “US Politics” flair, to make it a little easier to block US Politics stories if that’s what people want to do, but I feel like more likely the people who don’t want US politics in their feed are just going to block the whole community regardless which is completely fine (and I categorized it topic-wise accordingly).

Like I say, I do get it, I’m just deferring the decision to someone else instead of you and me arguing back and forth about it.

Why do you want to refer to Rimu about the name, while you didn’t consult him in the first place to create this community?

Because I wasn’t intending for it to “go live” yet, I just didn’t fully grasp what it would mean to leave the box checked to publish to other instances. I mean it’s fine, I don’t see a reason to delay now that it’s published, but I had intended for more discussion and populating it with content before making it fully live.

It didn’t even occur to me that the name would be an issue. I’m open to the idea. Like I say I think it should be instance owner’s call at the end of the day, since “politics” is kind of a naturally heavily iconic community. I was actually a little bit surprised that there wasn’t one here already. I’m fine changing it if the judgement is that it should have a different name.

Oh, I didn’t realize it was going to make a public post about it before I had a chance to populate it lol.

Hm. I’ll defer to @rimu@piefed.social about the naming. To me, “politics” while allowing politics from any country is fine, but I’m American so maybe that is just my exceptionalism. I generally follow the Beehaw conventions, they seem to strike a really good balance of short concise names without being overly chauvinistic about it.

I 100% agree with this. Lemmy is infested with politics communities but somehow every single one of them seems like it has some kind of flaw or other. !politics@beehaw.org and !politics_no_um@lemmy.world are probably the best in my opinion, but I think they are maybe not ideal only because they’re both not federated to big chunks of the community. !politics@lemmy.world is absolutely godawful for multiple reasons. I actually was talking with @blaze@lazysoci.al about having half a mind to create one, to try to do a better job with it.

I just made !politics@piefed.social because your post inspired me to do something about it. Take a look at the sidebar rules and let me know what you think. I’m sure I am signing myself up for some kind of pain, let’s see how it goes. How well does what I put there line up with what you were thinking in terms of how you wanted to organize the rules? I actually put specifically to allow video / image posts because of what you were saying… I might change my mind about videos just because there are already a couple of “political videos” communities and it really is a much different type of content.

The structure of the republic and the Constitution required political agents acting in good faith for the good of the citizens.

There is a 0% chance that that keeps happening. The structure of the republic required the ordinary people of the United States to be vigorous about making sure that their political agents were acting for the good of the citizens, and putting them in danger (electoral or otherwise) if they were not.

It worked, and we got complacent because things were working, and so we slid away from that and into this idea that they’re supposed to just because they’re supposed to. And look where it got us.

Consultant: Hey you guys are losing in basically every election by like 23 points

GOP: Yeah don’t sweat it

Yes but the next and final phase of it is starting now

It’s starting

Good job. Keep going. Overextend to your heart’s content, I’m sure the country’s law enforcement and courts will be positively impacted and it’ll help with your future endeavors.

It is far from a garden variety of corrupt bureaucratic bullshit which it might at first appear to be. Corrupting the fed carries with it a huge amount of invasive control over private individuals’ and businesses’ money all across the country, which Trump is pretty much guaranteed to start abusing if he’s allowed to get away with this.

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/09/trump-federal-reserve-control-unchecked-power/684279/

Anyone who’s ever had an abusive stepdad will recognize the “abuse -> backlash -> cowardly backpedaling -> more abuse but passive-aggressiver now” pattern