Democracy ended in the US the moment voters felt it necessary to unconditionally support the man aiding a genocide because the only alternative on the ballot is someone even worse.

The Democratic Party will never become introspective and seek to improve in any meaningful way because they know they already have your vote for the above reason. Not only that, but they create the conditions for it by donating to far-right politicians with the purpose of ensuring victories in elections.

If the Democratic party was given reason to think they'd lose support from their voter base, they would actually be compelled to start implementing popular policies. This is something you people could be doing instead of shaming people for not being okay with the backing of a literal genocide.

Nothing is going to improve unless you leverage the power of bargaining. As it stands now you're only slightly delaying America's further descent into Fascism and barely protecting what little you have left, which won't even last as the Overton window keeps moving to the right with each election because of what the Democrats are doing.

If you use the same talking points and terminology ("low-value man" lol) as they do, then I have every reason to draw comparison. The problem lies with the fact that y'all insist on framing this as exclusively a men's issue, and that women are somehow to blame for having unrealistically high standards that you make up and project onto them.

Since we're cherry-picking surveys, here are some for you: https://www.salon.com/2022/11/06/why-are-so-many-young-people-are-having-less-and-fewer-friendships/ https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n-keystat.htm https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years/

Indeed, there is no basis in reality that women have it easier. You can speculate that it's a product of evolution but that at best only points to surface-level differences, while the overall negative experience that has come about from the commodification of dating affects both sexes.

Edit: Also, let's say that it is men who are disproportionately affected, I find it interesting that the first reason you go to are all the things that men are commonly insecure about (height, penis size, etc.) despite those things not being the focus of the sources you provided later.

This is the main reason why I compared your post to incel talking points. Their whole tactic is playing off of the insecurities of men, making them feel bad about themselves, and framing it as the opinions of women despite no input from actual women being present. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what you were doing with your initial post, whether you're aware of it or not.

here's the original source from the artist's own page: https://nitter.snopyta.org/bysau_/status/1490690760718565380

y'know, i really thought lemmy would be better than this but i guess it is just fucking reddit all over again.

this stupid "men have to be chad thundercock or die alone!!!1111 it's so easy for women waahhhhh" shit is just a divisive incel talking point with no basis in reality. you literally just pulled numbers out of your ass too. the incel community is growing at an alarming rate because of all the talking heads on social media who purport this trash and people like you who mindlessly repeat it.

Right wingers and left wingers mean entirely different things when they refer to "libs" though. Righties associate liberalism with anything that Fox News tells them is woke (totally unaware that their politics literally are neoliberal), while leftists refer to the actual political ideology, which is an inherently capitalistic one.

Too bad this instance won't approach federation with Threads in the same manner; I don't think any positive outcomes could be expected from their behavior either.

Okay yeah that's fair actually.

And if I can give one piece of feedback for your reply, it would be to stop telling people how to behave. One of the things that really bothered me about Reddit was this expectation that everyone needs to write the exact same way. We can do without that here. It doesn't hurt anyone to use emoticons, emojis, and anything else that might make a post more fun, so what's the problem?

Thank you for pointing out that this is so much worse than just EEE. Meta has a long history of social and political engineering, and deliberately creating a toxic environment that turned all of our parents and grandparents into deranged conspiracy theorists. They don't just let hate thrive on their platform, they artificially inflate it in the name of engagement and profit.

I see no reason to assume they won't do all of this again, and should they do it all again it's going to impact the entire Fediverse. Even if you just stick to instances that block Meta, if you're federating with instances that aren't, the toxic environment Meta is likely to build will come back to you. If the majority of instances fail to block them, I can't bear to stay here and watch what has become the internet's most healthy and vibrant community rot from the inside.

I honestly don't understand why this is even a debate. If even a fraction of the shit meta has pulled was done by a smaller Fediverse instance, we all wouldn't hesitate to defederate from them.

And to those of you who justify Threads because Meta is somehow the lesser of two evils compared to Twitter, please remember that while Twitter is owned by a raging and incompetent manchild, Meta has eroded democracies and played a major role in a genocide. Don't fucking support these murderers. Meta is more than happy to spread even more hatred and killing in the world if it boosts their profits.