I am mostly judging by the "hot" feed, since I only follow a few people that I knew via Twitter, and to a significant degree you're right-- there was the same kind of drama on kbin and lemmy when I joined. (I checked out threads for ~30 seconds so I can't say about there) I don't remember anything like that on Mastodon, but I'm sure it's there. It seemed more rapid-fire on bluesky. Specifically there seemed to be a lot of hate against the devs on Bluesky for various reasons.
In any event, it's a pretty big echo chamber right now but that's to be expected while it's in invite-only. I'm sure it will settle out when it opens up to the general public.
It's very... dramatic over there, and I know it's supposed to be a beta (trust me, I know) but there seems to be a lot of missing functionality. I pop in every few days and it's like there a new moral outrage about bluesky each time.
Your solution ignores that all we really need to do (and I say that like it's easy but I acknowledge it's not) is remove the parts of our system that prevent an accurately representative government. Stuff like the electoral college, the cap on House seats, and the dominance of plurality voting. The root problem we see here is that a minority of people have more power over the government than the majority of people.
Like I said, this is much easier typed out than done, but it is not impossible, and is much more likely to succeed than "make a fascist country and give it a humongous border with the democratic country that it views as 'the enemy'" Even if there were a clean way to split it up (there isn't: cities are blue, rural areas are red), much of the red state's income comes from the federal taxes from blue states. Do you really think that's going to end well?
He's probably laughing his ass off at this form of "protest". It's functionally equivalent to when people get mad at a company so they buy their product and destroy it on social media.
I feel like Spez doesn't give two tiny rat shits about anything but the fact that this counts as more engagement, which he can leverage to call Reddit more valuable.
I think the person you replied to is still stuck in the mindset of a siloed product, like reddit. Federation across instances means that there's little commercial value in any specific instance, in my view. If any specific instance was sold, and an attempt to monetize arose, I suspect people would simply abandon it for a new instance.
As an aside, lemmy/kbin need to implement a way to export/import follow lists.
I think it's the opposite of apathy. Republicans, as a rule, are perfectly fine with corruption and abuse of power that benefits them. From representatives, down to the random voter in Alabama that lives on welfare and complains about socialism. It's less apathy and more some kind of political nihilism.
Your conclusion is still accurate, though. I don't see the whole country banding together to set things right when half of them don't see anything wrong.
Shapiro relies almost solely on the Gish Gallop debate technique:
The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments.
Having too many shitty arguments for any one person to refute is not how I'd describe "outwitting" someone.
