Lemmy is one of the most intense echo chambers out there. It’s very funny that a self-professed anti-hierarchical, decentralized message board site like this falls in line so neatly behind whatever candidates the corporate media tells them to and then browbeats anyone who dares to consider alternatives. Americans’ refusal to vote third party plays a big role in why the two major parties are so completely unresponsive to the public’s interests and desires. They won’t win, of course, thanks to FPTP, but voting for them pressures the two parties to change their platform to win over their voters.

This is precisely why the corporate media is so invested in vilifying third party voters. Every election from now until the end of recorded history will be “the most important election ever” (or “the last election ever,” as they’ve been painting it recently) and anyone who refuses to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils candidate is a willful apostate who’s worse than a Trump voter. And the masses buy into it, and then it’s naked tribalism and hysteria from there.

Yeah, I’ve no doubt that Höcke is pursuing this for extremely cynical and gross reasons, but the broken clock is right twice a day. “Inclusion" is one of those policies that sounds so self-evidently positive and reasonable at a glance, that people’s brains shut down and nobody thinks of potential downsides to it as a universal policy. A majority of kids who require special education fare much, much better in smaller classes taught by a special education teacher who can move through material more slowly and boil it down to easier-to-grasp concepts. Sticking them in a large classroom with 20-30 non-disabled peers, even with a SpEd teacher present, rarely has a positive effect, and more often than not leads to worse outcomes for all students present. Inclusion is at its core a cost-saving measure (it’s cheaper to stick the SpEd kids in a GenEd classroom than making a dedicated class for them), but it wraps itself in progressive ideology so well that it’s almost impossible for parents or teachers to argue against.

It’s fine. Websites break on it less often than I would have expected and the “nuke your cookies and history" button is a fun feature. I’ve mostly moved to Firefox, though, just to get away from Chromium (although I realize the irony in that; my fingerprint is almost assuredly far more unique than if I stuck to Chromium).