I mean, someone literally drove up to one of their softball games and tried to kill them all, and they still didn’t support gun control. It won’t be until the majority of their billionaire oligarchics tell them it’s OK that they’ll start supporting it.

Sure, Congress will act, but the Supreme Court has spent the last 15 years making sure that even the most moderate, milquetoast gun reforms get struck down. I know the current Justices are hypocrites that make a mockery of precedent, but considering they’re the ones that created the precedent (particularly Alito, Roberts, and Thomas), it’s going to be hard for Congress to write a gun control law that doesn’t force several Justices to either strike it down or invalidated their own opinions.

A constitutional amendment isn’t impossible, but I think the NRA would still have enough juice to prevent Congress from reaching a two-thirds consensus, and definitely enough to stop three-quarters of states from ratifying it. The billionaire class has spent a lot of money making gun control extremely difficult, and I think that’s about to bite them in the ass.

You really think this is over? Columbine was a shocking, once in a lifetime event when I was in middle school. By the time I was in college, school shootings were a fact of life. The only difference is that people weren’t rooting for school shooters. They may have caught this guy, but a new era of gun violence is just getting started.

I’m mostly saying it because I don’t know the mods on this sub or if/when they’re gonna start nuking posts and comments like the News mods did. But also, I don’t want to be responsible (or at least feel responsible) in the unlikely event that an unhinged person sees this and does something stupid.

Like…look, am I weeping because a man who profited by denying people healthcare is dead? No. Am I happy to see billionaires suddenly afraid of the people they’re exploiting? Yes. But does that mean I want people who see this meme to start gunning people down in the street? In all seriousness, no, don’t take this as a call to violence.

I know there’s some hypocrisy in that statement, but that’s kinda the point I was getting at with the post: “I can’t condone this action, but damn, it appears to have been very effective at enacting change.”

Basically, BCBS was only going to reimburse the amount of anesthesia that government medical agencies estimate a procedure requires. So, an appendectomy is estimated to take an hour, but your surgery takes an hour and a half, then you’re on the hook for the anesthetic costs for the last 30 minutes. There was a lot of backlash to that decision, and I guess they’re taking backlash pretty seriously…for some reason.

I’m saying that framing a meme post as the fight against evil is a bit much.

One of the things I remember Snowden saying about the NSA’s data collection is, something to the effect of, “It doesn’t even make sense. If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, the answer isn’t more hay.” I was still outraged by the government’s collection of my meta data, but it did make me feel a little better about their ability weaponize that data competently.

To me this is, “rock my edgy older sister listened to.” Gave me a nice nostalgia hit too.

Yeah, that’s about what I’m getting at.

I mean… I’m not willing to risk that for a meme post.

I don’t disagree, but I don’t want to get on the wrong side of any of the ToS. Or wind up on a government watch list.

Oh damn, I don’t think I’ve heard that one in since I was in middle school.

I certainly agree with that, but that agreement is not a call to violence, and definitely not an incitement of violence…from a legal perspective.

Well, I definitely can’t agree with that…in writing.

Well, at least he got to be played by Robert De Niro in a movie…sort of. That’s something.

It seems like there was a largely unspoken agreement among the wealthiest in the West throughout the middle of the 20th century, particularly in the aftermath of the Depression, World War II, and the rise of communism, that they wouldn’t try to extract the absolute maximum of wealth from the workers and try to keep a stable, happy middle class and even lower class that had a relatively comfortable existence without feeling too at risk of losing everything.

Actually, the richest people in America were terrified of FDR and the New Deal, and even attempted a fascist coup in order to overthrow him. Fun fact, George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, was implicated in it!

• It is instantly familiar in operation to anyone who has used Twitter. It looks and feels almost the same to use in a way that Mastadon doesn’t (arguable whether that’s a good thing or not, but it makes for a comfortable transition).

Yup, pretty much. I tried Mastodon and found it very unintuitive, but BlueSky was immediately understandable as a former Twitter user. I don’t really use either that much, but I’ve spent way more time with BlueSky.

Honestly, it’s the same with Lemmy. I tried a lot of Reddit alternatives, both federated and centralized, and I landed on Lemmy because A) It has the only decently-sized user base and B) my preferred Reddit app, Sync, moved to Lemmy. Lemmy is similar enough to Reddit on it’s own that transitioning over wouldn’t have been difficult, but having Sync just made it that much easier.

No, I’m saying that the map labels Louisiana the crappiest state, but it isn’t because it has New Orleans. Otherwise, the OP’s map isn’t bad.

Crappiest state is either Mississippi or Alabama. Louisiana at least has New Orleans. Otherwise, not bad.