I mean, thats good, but unfortunately a huge (over-representative?) amount of online leftist discourse is so subsumed by extremely emotionally driven short sighted glomming onto bullying a particular person that they often say things that are basically obviously ludicrous if you either take a few deep breathes and think about what you’re saying, or if you’re not really involved in the often extremely petty nature of discourse around/perpetuated by many popular online leftists.

But hey, Not All Leftists, I guess?

Its frankly deeply embarrassing to accurately describe myself as a leftist and then have less politically engaged people often think I’m like one of these over the top internet personalities, and also infuriating when I describe myself as a leftist to other leftists online, who then usually woke scold and purity shame me for having non ludicrous positions.

Hell I’m still banned from like half the hexbear and lemmy.ml communities for pointing out that maybe Taiwan has expressed a desire for governmental sovereignty, you know kind of like Ukraine, even though its obviously not a perfect society, it doesnt deserve to be invaded or subverted by a neighboring state?

Nah. Verbotten opinions.

I think the latest hexbear community to ban me did so because I posted a response to an ‘enigmatic, therefore funny and awesome’ meme on weibo.

The meme, a kind of wojack meme, boils down to ‘Dengist reforms allowed western influence into China, which has resulted in nowadays Chinese incels pretend to be black men online to pick up chicks because many Chinese basically racistly view black men as all having giant cocks.’

But you can’t even hint that parts of Chinese society might be gasp racist, or even have segments that view women as only interested in big dicked men because this breaks the brains of many online Western leftists that Chinese society is not actually perfect.

Its even more baffling to me that many online Leftists barely ever mention, or tie themselves up in absurd logical/rhetorical pretzels about how just in general many East Asian societies and ethnicities have large chunks that are extremely racist towards other East Asian and other ethnicities, basically because a good number of East Asian societies are nominally communist or socialist, so that must mean they’ve solved racism.

When your highly nuanced and extremely educated political stance is obliterated by an extremely obvious fact that you forgot to consider because you got lost in the sauce of [current hot conversation topic] for [I’m a Leftist!™] identifying individuals.

Well uh when you have the US Navy under your command, and already in the area dealing with Houthis, you know, by shooting down their missiles and bombing them and such, you actually /can/ stop trains and tankers.

You could airlift aid! You could, hilariously, stop ships heading to Israel with a Naval Blockade!

Obviously that last one isnt going to happen, but theres a whole lot more than basically nothing that you could do.

For starters: Cut off a bunch of joint projects between US and Israeli firms, stop sending them large amounts of money for other things, stop fucking shit canning every attempt by the UN to sanction Israel, or maybe even use these aforementioned things as threats and leverage to force a fucking ceasefire.

And now because this is the internet: Am I saying that Trump is somehow not bad, not far, far, far fucking worse by pointing out the rest?

Nooooo!

No, fucking obviously Trump would be a thousand times worse!

But pretending that there’s nothing Biden could do is a joke.

He doesn’t because he is a long time Zionist, and the American public, and particularly political and media figures, have been bathed in Zionist propaganda for so long that it takes an overt genocide for us to figure out that maybe Israel actually isn’t a perfect unconditional ally.

Because rural voters are stupid, because Republicans have spent the last 30+ years destroying public education, especially in rural and minority heavy areas.

This isn’t an insult, its a fact.

When you’re uneducated and have little experience of the outside world… well, youre extremely easy to convince with rhetoric over actual policy results.

Then combine that with the massively super effective Republican media machine (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones) which reinforces the religion + culture + politics of the rural Republican areas, and there ya go.

I dunno, it seems obvious to me, but thats probably because I was raised by a ditto-head (Rush Limbaugh’s term for his followers) who later became a Q Anon, illegal-firearm-manufacturing-in-his-garage wacko, in a poor, technically suburban but realistically rural area.

Why latch on to Trump in particular?

Because he made it ok for them to mask off and hate all the things they hate but have been lying about hating for decades.

Its a kind of catharsis for them, that manifests in collective hatred of inferior enemy groups.

You know, standard fascist shit?

It doesnt matter that Trump himself is the antithesis of what an idealized Republican person would be. What matters is he lets them feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Its insane when you compare the things they hold dear and are most concerned about to themselves personally and the people they support.

They will tell you they are highly worried about secret sex trafficking and millions of missing children, but extremely often they and the people they support are sexually abusing children, or have a history of it.

Its the cognitive dissonance thats the insane part, the extreme hypocrisy.

Gaetz is almost certainly a person who knowingly paid an underage girl for sex. The person who facilitated it basically already plead guilty and may be cooperating with investigators, though the proceedings of this seem to be going quite slowly.

This is even more insane given that Gaetz is one of the most Q-Anony of the lunatic Republicans in Congress. Kind of their whole thing is largely based around saving children from being sex trafficked.

What this tells you is that a man who spent a huge chunk of his life working for corporate cannibalization companies thinks that Trump would be so bad for the economy that even predatory corporations would suffer.

Its not like Romney ever had any actual policy positions based on anything other than political expedience.

'Course Republicans these days dont even seem to be pretending they have any coherent policy positions beyond ‘we hate immigrants’ and ‘women dont deserve basic human rights’.

Bleck.

Youre looking at this from the perspective of the consumer, not the business side.

I dont disagree at all that YT streaming is not up to par with Twitch.

But theres no immutable law that says ‘there must be an easy to use internet video streaming site.’

I think that Amazon shifting toward Twitch needing to be more soley responsible for its own profitability will reduce its growth in user count, and eventually, as with so, so many other online websites with huge upkeep expenses but very little income stream… this will inevitably lead to death of the service/site.

I could be wrong about the amount the growth slows down by, but yeah I certainly wouldnt expect Twitch to be around, at least not without huge amounts of monetization compared to what there is now, in 5 years.

Giant tech firms are actually /notorious/ for investing huge amounts of money into basically experimental/risky ventures, and then pulling the plug.

Google in particular… Stadia, Google Places (or whatever was the name of their attempt at out Facebooking Facebook).

MSFT has done this a bunch… even a lot of non really ‘Tech’ huge corporations do this as well, with increasing regularity since the Mergers and Acquisitions trend started in the 80s.

The way they are able to do this is that they have core business branches that are able to functionally internally subsidize these risky ideas, with the math on it all only making sense if the risky idea that needs to be subsidized can remain subsidized until it either turns a profit on its own, or is absolutely essential to a syngergistic business plan between other business lines under the same corporate banner.

However… as a large multi faceted business such as this faces as economic downturn?

Generally what happens is all the top management starts getting nervous and wants all of their sort of sub businesses to be more self sufficient.

Now Twitch in particular is basically a burning money pit, a black hole.

Amazon acquired because they assumed it would keep growing rapidly.

But… when you start making the average Twitch user have to pay more money, view more ads, etc, to use the site, this functionally starts a death cycle.

Making Twitch have increased responsibility for its own profitability necessarily slows down the growth. And the growth rate is required for running Twitch to make sense in the long run.

Tl:dr: Yeah, they saw a path to profitability, overall, for all of Amazon, and now that path includes more monetization for Twitch which will necessarily lower the growth number of Twitch, which makes that original overall profitability plan look more like it doesnt include Twitch than including Twitch.

Just popping in here to toot my own horn:

I called this happening when whatever his name is, Twitch CEO man, gave the public speech/stream being very, very appreciative of Amazon for their support.

When you do /that/ it means your business model is a failure.

EDIT

https://sh.itjust.works/post/12652127

(no clue if this is somehow against some rules or some kind of lemmy instance feud, but heres the thread with my original post)

Anyway, Twitch is quite likely to ultimately basically kill itself with this move, and Amazon will either spin the employees off into existing Amazon sub sections, possibly but not likely do some nonsense like keep the twitch brand name but dramatically re orient the site, or, most likely, just slowly lay off more and more twitch employees and formally pull the plug, while retaining the brand rights and web url, all that kinda stuff.

I give it about 2 years before one of those scenarios comes to fruition. Could be faster if insanity twitch drama gets even more insane than normal.

Well that would make you the actual only person I have ever met that has said any opinion I have about politics is too /optimistic/.

I have spent my entire life being called overly pessimistic about the political nature of America, and while I have been wrong about some things and learned /why/ and then learned more, you are again the only person who has ever said I am too optimistic and this is both baffling and in a weird way sort of validating.

For my full actual outlook for the future, I am basically educated guessing that while the financial elites of America have been so far successful in convincing a good number of non poor people that the economy is in a sort of low growth holding pattern, this will fall apart due to the now for several months ongoing military/piracy fun going on near Yemen.

No amount of financial fuckery and op eds will be able to mask the downturn which I estimated several months ago now would cause such significant logistical strain on basically the global capitalist machine in general that it would result in an actual negative GDP print for the US economy in either Q1 2 or 3 of this year. The UK has apparently already had that happen.

What this means is the economy will officially shit itself and basically barring Trump literally being incarcerated, he will win over Biden.

If Trump /is/ literally incarcerated, enough Republicans will lose their minds that they will basically attempt to secceed even harder and basically do something like another insurrection and/or mass wave of basically domestic terrorism to the point that it will be obvious that the US is balkanizing.

While I consider this Trump being incarcerated scenario overall less likely, if Trump wins he will basically end American democracy and his total inability to have any kind of policy that makes any kind of sense will basically lead to horror misery and further impovershment of the masses, while he basically just orders his goons to order their goons to direct the idiot violent followers of his to be brownshirts.

Either way, the climate has now basically indisputably passed the 1.5C threshold, is actually basically trending closer to the worst case scenario envisioned by the last IPCC that actually bothered to model such things, possibly even worse, which means we are guaranteed basically everything most people need to routinely purchase becoming more expensive, more failing infrastructure, more unchecked corporate greed, hundreds of millions of climate refugees in this decade alone, and we in America will basically either be having a civil war or being crushed under an authoritarian boot while this happens.

There.

Am I still too optimistic?

I agree, but then you have to have a discussion about what actual voting fraud looks like, and also involve climate change.

I have attempted to do this with a few Republicans these days.

It generally ends with them become irate, loud, angry and throwing out insane nonsense.

He has already broken it.

Welp, I was wrong!

Wait until his second term and you will probably agree with the lowest possible rank for Trump.

Or you can make the sort of detached cynical and dehumanizing raw numbers argument that without Trump doing basically everything he could to fuck up handling covid and spread insane misinformation, he is largely the most responsible of all people in America for covid deaths beyond basically the first wave, roughly 9 times more people than were killed/displaced/genocided than Jackson’s trail of tears.

I dont even want to attempt to get into some kind of moral argument about which of those things is worse, so there ya go, numbers based.

… Who are you referring to?

Possibly Nikki Haley, who basically would never stand a chance in the Republican Party of today or basically ever without going by a nickname as her first name because a huge amount of Republicans would never vote for her if they are too cognizant of the fact that she has a foreign sounding first name?

You cannot possibly mean DeSantis, can you?

Well uh definitely no likely Trump voters and likely about half of ‘independents’, so something like 60 ish percent of American voters?

You must either be European or otherwise blissfully ignorant of American society.

For me, Trump is ultimately the last president who could possibly have enacted and globally promoted actual climate science based reforms that at least might have stood a chance at preparing America and the world a way forward through what is going to be an extremely challenging next few decades.

Instead he was an incompetent idiot criminal mobster bully who crystalized nascent fascism, religious extremism and anti intellectualism into an unstoppable political force, and in the process broke basically the brains of all of America in one way or another, utterly destroyed our reputation to the rest of the world, and has left an utterly catastrophic political situation in his aftermath, that basically only FDR could possibly hope to do any better than mitigate.

Say what you will about exact placement of other Presidents but Trump very obviously deserves the bottom spot.

The fact that having this ‘opinion’ outloud in a bar in basically most of America would get me assaulted is further proof that this collosal evil doofus is essentially the best argument against American Exceptionalism I can think of, but I am again literally likely to be assaulted for having it.

Anyway, tl:dr, we’re doomed now, thanks Trump.

Dont worry though, it’ll be approximately a decade before the general public realizes this is not ‘innovation’ and is basically stagnant monopoly/oligopoly behavior.

I personally know many people who think and say and agree with things along Mr. Just Poop Outside’s kind of rhetoric.

They are most often not actually aware of the obvious contradictions and logical contradictions of their rhetoric.

Then, when you point it out, they get angry and violent.

The more clever and more demonic ones will be aware of what youre saying and usually lie about it in public but admit to it privately.

But the vast majority of them are too stupid to realize the contradiction in the moment.

Which makes sense, because conservatives brains are statistically more susceptible to fear and rage and othering groups they dont identify with.

Yes, the more evil ones are consciously aware that their rhetoric just is rhetoric fueled by hatred.

But the vast majority actually are the dumb sheep that they call everyone else, easily herded into worldviews by obvious lies and emotional reasoning overtaking their logical faculties.