People have freedom. This includes the freedom to run a Lemmy instance that they own, on hardware they own, and administrate it however they see fit.

I would say it is extremely natural to get a fairly diverse array of different ways to run things, depending on the opinions and feelings of each individual owner.

Being private individuals operating their own private property for whatever reason they feel like, (usually nerdy tech reasons in our case) none of them are under any requirement to be nice or accepting of anyone. It is 100% their choice to operate however they see fit, within the laws of their own country. (which can be anywhere on Earth that has internet)

It is odd to me that people feel they should have some sort of right to go onto someone else’s property and say whatever they feel like. That’s just not how anything works anywhere. You are on their digital property by open invitation, and that invitation can be revoked at any time they feel like.

Impressive piece of journalism.

Good. He’s overusing his “witch hunt” rhetoric, in a situation where it’s unusually easy for anybody to verify the details for oneself.

I would overall dislike giving him one. However, I would honor his wishes to the extent that I would offer a compromise and offer to get him one by a certain not-too-distant birthday if he meets a set of conditions for getting good grades, or some other beneficial goal. He’s just getting to that age where he deserves some give-and-take.

Even then, though, I would let him know there will be limitations on its usage, such as no going to bed with it. (no cell phone starting an hour before bed time or something, it goes into some drawer in the common spaces of the house, maybe no cell phone during meals) Because of your compromise and deal, you should have enough leverage that he will not be too upset about comparatively minor restrictions like this.

The compromise won’t make either of you completely happy, but that can be a lesson in and of itself. For your part, I would try to look for silver linings, like despite cell phones being linked to certain negative health outcomes, these can be mitigated, and with information technology progressing so rapidly, there are potentially benefits to learning how to navigate it fluently at a young age.

I wonder how tempted he was to hit that “report spam” button.

Yeah I know what you mean. It’s tough, because being aware is one of the first steps for fighting back, but you can’t fight back as effectively if it all demoralizes you too much. It’s like there’s a really fine line somewhere between involved and too much, and where that line is fluctuates over time.

For myself, while I am consuming news again, my overall consumption is still down from where it was pre-election. I remember I did this during Trump’s first term as well, where it just started getting to me too much. I feel like I have a good amount of endurance for this stuff too. I wish there was a better answer, but it really is kinda a catch-22. Rock and a hard place.

Yeah I can’t do it either. I took a break after the election, but here I am again. lol I do find it hard to empathize with people that just don’t care about anything.

Bullies get positive feelings for themselves by making others suffer. Who they target with this isn’t too different from how a predator selects prey–choose the vulnerable.

Your sister, for one reason or another, is vulnerable, meaning the bully is less likely to suffer any consequences for picking on her than if they picked on someone else. That “someone else” could have more friends willing to stick up for them and fight back, they could have a really sharp wit and be able to verbally humiliate the bully if they wanted, they could be huge and practice MMA, being able to physically knock all her teeth out with one swing, they could be a teacher’s favorite and able to go to an authority figure to get backup and inflict consequences that way. All sorts of possibilities.

But one way or another, your sister has been selected due to having fewer plausible defenses than any of the potential alternatives.

Best way to resolve that is to bolster her defenses in some way or another, so the bully picks a different, more vulnerable target. Making the bully actually stop bullying everyone isn’t very likely, though. As someone else pointed out, the bully is most likely suffering a lot themselves, and participating in bullying is how they themselves are surviving their own difficult circumstances. The easiest fix would probably be the “sharp wit” route, as verbally tearing into someone in a humorous way is a learnable skill. Otherwise a physical intimidation route, where your sister or another makes them afraid for their teeth remaining in their mouth if the bullying continues.

To answer your direct question, yes, jealously could be a part of it. There isn’t much use in wondering about it, though, there’s no real solutions to be found down this line of thinking, that I’m aware of.

Everyone on the internet gets a different experience, it’s all custom tailored by algorithms to whatever they engage with. I do think it’s gotten a lot harder in recent years, at least partially due to algorithms prioritizing the most divisive content, but some people put a lot of effort into consciously avoiding it. We even see it here on Lemmy, with people asking how to avoid political content, not subbing to any communities that go into politics (which lets be real, is quite a lot of them, including all news communities) and blocking users for bringing up politics. These are the type that probably subscribe to the tech forums, but hate every conversation about Elon. They probably don’t have strong opinions on him either way, because they hate hearing about him and don’t trust most of what they do hear.

Then there’s real life versions too, people that just go to work, engage in whatever their hobbies are, and probably don’t make friends with anyone too interested in current events due to not really liking it.

Some people just like their heads in the sand. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

Just gotta say, that Colorado law is ridiculous. I’m all for good conditions for farm animals, but 1 sq ft per chicken isn’t helping. A single square foot is about the size of a chicken. The thing is still in “a cage”, that cage is just formed of other chickens now.

I wonder if lobbyists got to them to water down the law.

Swing voters. And yeah, people that consume news probably aren’t going to be swing. It’s more often going to be people that don’t watch news, read articles, etc.

Yeah, I think people need to recognize that this arms Kuwait, Tunisia, Lithuania, Oman, Netherlands, Chad, Yemen, Bulgaria, Tajikistan, Rwanda and Cameroon all with nuclear weapons. (Ranks 91-100 if we just go by number of military personnel, active and reserve, an imperfect but very convenient way to measure.)

If I’m not mistaken, two of those countries are currently involved in conflict. (Yemeni Civil War and Rwanda involved in Congo)

Just fyi, the Israelis use their own Merkava main battle tanks, not the Abrams. If I remember right, it’s more heavily armored, with a shorter cruising range.

There is one pretty clear data point that demonstrates their existence, that being people that voted for both Biden and Trump. And yes, I have met some swing voters, they’re folks that are usually not very into politics, but do vote. I find it silly to not believe in something that we have data on, at any rate. Nor do I think it’s very productive to focus in on any singular factor when multiple factors go into an equation.

You don’t need to make guesses based on your own experiences, a quick googling of “swing voters” will pull up a bunch of data-driven approaches at analyzing them.

Gypsum is nice.