If you protest the government or attempt to unionize, and then the government disappears you or threatens to disappear your family, it’s a dictatorship.

China can do it faster because it’s a dictatorship that simply takes the land on which it wants to build rail and pays the previous owner. In the US, there are far more legal hurdles for the government to acquire that land. Too many hurdles IMO, but going full dictatorship in order to have rail built faster is not the way.

Haha. I used Lemmy.ml for a little while, and I noticed that it had a lot of pro-China posts and tankies, to the point that I found it likely to be state-sponsored propaganda. It’s reassuring to hear that someone else noticed the bias.

The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves.

This is so true, and I hate it. I actually find Nextdoor quite refreshing because people are posting as their real selves, and nobody wants to be known as the local asshole. (Before someone makes an assumption, I’m not suggesting that we de-anonymize every social media platform. I just like having a platform that isn’t anonymous.)

This looks like a job for… The Defedestrator