Political affiliation is not a protected class, nor should it be.

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One thing that people seem to take for granted is that these government-hosted instances would be open to the public for account creation, while this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Not everyone can get a statedepartment.gov email address. Not everyone needs to be able to get a @statedepartment.mastodon.gov handle. Just leave it to public officials only.

I don’t know Lawful Neutral or Neutral Evil

One additional suggestion I might make is to allow you to report the post to your own instance admins but not the host admins. This would be useful for when you want a post to be hidden or an instance defederated and you don’t want to also send your identity to the instance you’re reporting.

This might be used for:

Reporting spam coming from an instance that is unlikely to delete it.

Reporting CSAM on an instance that supports it.

Reporting hate speech on instances that believe hate speech is covered by free speech.

Etc.

China bad, updoots to the left

Couldn’t you have left this braindead bullshit on Reddit?

Fake news, thinking about baseball would make Sisko misfire instantly

I thought it was the dentist scene from Little Shop of Horrors, but I think that one has another actor that looks kind of similar

I think you’re being overly simplistic - sure, ideas and debates have a place in politics. And “political power flows out of the barrel of a gun” doesn’t mean “Whoever has the most guns wins” (though this is the case most of the time) - but it does mean that a group with no guns has no power.

Like the other commenter said, the quote is partially metaphorical - it just means that force is the basis of political power. The people willing and able to apply the most force will almost always win in the end.

Think about in America. If, tomorrow, 75% of Americans were in favor of abolishing the police, would it happen? Maybe, but probably not - because the people with political power, the people with guns and the will to use them (cops, troops, fascists, small business tyrants) support the police.

History is shaped by material conditions; ideas play a part in this, but material interest is the primary driving force.

Mao Zedong; his quote was “Political power flows out of the barrel of a gun.”

The quote is not a moral statement or a call to action, but a scientific analysis of Historical Materialism: the Chinese civil war was not fought with ballots or debates, it was fought with guns, on both sides.

Ultimately, the people with the guns hold all political power in society.

Elon Musk runs the whole of Twitter like the jealous, power-drunk moderator of a small 5,000-member Discord server.