Then why is it one hour?

Why, did they add a week-long quarantine in baggage check? It’s an airport. The whole point is to show up and leave. Even if the wait lasts longer than the flight.

If your ass in there longer than 24 hours, the wifi should be considered an apology.

Why’s it need to be temporary, anyway? It’s an airport. Nobody’s sticking around.

Jesus Christ, the usability nightmare of this website is worse than the goofy animated GIF they think is an exaggeration.

www.wired.com##.sticky-box to get rid of the autoplaying video go fuck yourselves, www.wired.com##.journey-unit__container to get rid of the assorted gigantic flyover bullshit.

People are welcome to stop acting like tribal cultists whenever they want to. Every moment is the right moment.

“Both sides,” says one side.

I absolutely stole that from somewhere else. It had a similarly revelatory effect and has been wedged in my brain ever since. (Oh hey, I made a note of who to blame: r4b1d0tt3r, MD.)

Not to speak ill of the dead, but… there’s every chance the reasonable bastards you knew would update their bullshit and be even worse. I think your professor did you a disservice in exactly the way I’m sore about. Fascists are conservative. Fascists are hyper-conservative. That never means they’re extra-vigilant against change. They openly demand transformative destruction of existing society, so they can reinvent something that’s always been around. If that sounds contradictory it’s a side effect of how it’s total fucking nonsense. They’re just saying words. It’s not a rational worldview. It’s the innate tribalism of the human animal, cranked to eleven via modern rhetorical gimmicks.

“Branding” is the only place conservatism makes any goddamn sense, because it’s a story they tell. They’re lying. They’re just saying words. When you were in college their reputation was bullshit they made up about times before you were born, and when you were born their reputation was bullshit they made up about when your parents were young. Right now they’re surely selling bullshit about twenty-odd years ago. I’m sorry to say I haven’t paid much attention on account of US politics being such a dumpster fire that your worst scandals seem quaintly desirable. We’ve got people wistfully apologizing for George W Bush’s rainbow of doom and torture prisons, or the Gingrich-era witch hunts against against homosexuals and liberal activism, or the goddamn AIDS crisis under Reagan. Even here, you’re hand-waving that absolute scumbag Richard Nixon did one good thing under intense duress because he expected it to flounder. This is a con job that has been pulled on you. And us. On the world, really, at scale and continuously, to this day.

The traditional branding of conservatism is “we did everything good, but now we’re angry.”

That myth of eternal innocence as justification for outright violence is the only consistent story of this tribalist mode. It is pure ingroup-versus-outgroup storytelling. Good things in the past? Us us us, fuck them. Bad things now? Well they must have stolen the good things from us. (Nevermind who was in charge!)

When you find yourself saying ‘by this definition of conservative, leftists are conservatives,’ that is a shit definition. My apologies to your professor.

Nobody says shit like “communists want community” or “egalitarians love eagles.” But that’s constantly happening for conservatism. People will bend over backwards making up what reeeeal conservatives must surely want… in complete denial of what the visible super-duper-majority of self-identified conservatives actually say and do.

Federated sites overlap with leftist-adjacent interests. Software freedom, opposition to Facebook, weird illustrated porn, that sort of thing. Even if we’re not leftists - we’re the people who heard about Lemmy and went “oh, like Mastodon.”

Many leftists were also familiar with Mastodon, because they saw Twitter as a harassment engine. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results. Even before Elmo took over, Twitter was a continuous source of misery by design, if not on purpose. Now it’s definitely on purpose. And it’s been tilted against leftists, specifically, for a long damn while.

Some people are here because the mainstream options were a threat to their physical safety.

Meanwhile, right-wing assholes aren’t leaving Twitter until they run out of victims. They just want an outgroup to yell at. They don’t even like alternatives made for them specifically, because they can’t stand each other, either. When they get tired of suffering their own company they’ll migrate over to Threads. And then endlessly whine that Threads is “bias” against them, no matter how blatantly Zuck ignores their abuse and silences their victims.

Reddit was in a damningly similar situation, long before Spez decided to burn down every scrap of trust and goodwill. Some of us have been waiting on a better alternative for ten fucking years. There wasn’t one. There still isn’t. The bastards in control just made reddit itself worse, in ways that make even passive use feel like a failure and a betrayal. Spez could personally hunt me down and kick me in the groin, and it wouldn’t leave me any less likely to waltz back in with a smile on my face. Dumb bastard made insane demands, killed the best interfaces, told us stupid lies, threw away our money, declared protest powerless, and threatened the people who do all of the fucking work on his empty box of a website… then says ‘they’ll come crawling back.’ Nooo shit the first people out were principled self-organizing curmudgeons.

That aside:

People here reasoning from what they pretend “conservative” must mean are actively doing harm. Political conservatism obeys none of the other dictionary definitions. It’s just a label. It’s the label chosen by generations of influential public figures whose general philosophy is “Well someone has to be the king.” That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default. That’s why dealing with it is such frustrating bullshit.

Politics being genetic, of course.

What?