This entire story is another stupid distraction designed to hook the emotions of both sides of the political spectrum for views. Anyone who gets engaged with these kinds of stories, no matter what side you’re on, are being victimized by manipulative media trying to drive up views for advertiser revenue.

We need to burn our entire capitalistic, profit-driven media hellscape to the ground and make something new that has actual oversight and regulation.

It’s the FCC and the FTC that have a say and they are supposed to be politically insulated.

Agencies soon to be replaced by Elon Musk’s Grok and a group of 17-year-olds with punisher skull stickers on their macbooks.

This is the KGB handbook in effect.

Spend enough time amplifying the loudest, worst takes on both sides of any and every social and political issue, and eventually nobody knows what’s real, everyone is exhausted with the contention, and people just tune out and default to believing whatever the state tells them is real, because the alternative is time-consuming research, and people rarely read news past the headlines.

We’ve been sabotaged and have the receipts, yet I still get angry leftists and liberals scolding me that this is conspiratorial nonsense, and it’s “problematic” to try to pin all our social issues on Russia.

And they’re right, it’s not just Russia. It was also North Korea, Iran, China, and probably a thousand different smaller groups for assorted agendas.

But nobody wants to admit how vulnerable they are not just to misinformation, but the ancillary effects of a misinformation climate.

A few old-fashioned morons go a parent-teacher meeting and scream “We never had all this psychotherapy bullshit when I was a kid!” And everyone mummers to each other that yeah, we can’t impose our reason-based evaluation of reality on someone else’s ignorance, that wouldn’t be American!

I absolutely condone the use of violence against fascism.

hell fucking yeah brotha. We did it before, we should keep doing it.

Nobody understands a thing you’re saying, I think you don’t grasp the concept of “context” like so many internet drones. I’m blocking you now, have a good day

I say let it stand as a testament.

I know you’re joking around, but I’ll take advantage of the moment to rant on a tangent for a bit. I legit saw this attitude spreading through the moderator space on reddit a decade ago, as they started getting influenced by users to let slide more and more horrible takes so that “the community can judge for themselves” as tender, shut-in lads and lasses who were trying to manage our largest discussion forums without pay were suddenly being bombarded from all sides by people trying to subvert the subreddits and control them for their own agendas.

And largely, it worked. Many, many times I’ve seen subreddits and forums on other sites fall because the mods got compromised, the other mods got too burned out or emotional to keep doing their tasks, and as a result the conversations started allowing more and more incel-bait, tired tropes of persecution and misogyny, foulmouthed, delusional teenagers who have never left their houses suddenly making profound statements about the state of gender dynamics, and a whole ARMY of foreigners pretending to be normal Americans or Europeans on both sides of every argument, just screaming their nonsense louder and louder until the only users left were the ones who agreed with the delusion. I wish people understood that some of the most famous horrible subreddits and sites started as jokes and were gradually co-opted and hijacked to become unironic hate-spaces.

This was the plan all across the internet and it worked. We are all so tired of every argument and issue that most people don’t engage anymore. We don’t even try to correct anyone because we assume either other users know better, or will sort it out for us, or who cares anyway, what’s even real? Just tune out, keep scrolling.

So now I say, no. We need to be far less tolerant of intolerance, we need to burn them out of their nests and dens. Reddit didn’t go nearly far enough with banning the incel subs, they should have banned incel ideology, they should have banned redpill rhetoric entirely. I once would have balked at that kind of “censorship” but I’m now watching my nation dissolve under the stupidest movement ever created and I’m somewhere between shaking with rage and shaking with exhaustion.

Social division as a result of people not socializing anymore has driven a massive wedge between the diverse and beautiful spectrum of people who used to find appreciation and joy in each others differences.

Now every time you meet someone with different feelings than yourself, the internet has trained you to feel attacked.

This is why we’re all alone, we’re afraid of being attacked, and somehow our definitions of what an attack is has been radically subverted.

I get called a conspiracist for linking the actual reports and investigations into this, but this was by design.

Almost every authoritarian/fascist uprising on record has started with the indoctrination and isolation of young, sexually insecure, lonely men who feel disenfranchised with the system because they’re depressed, horny and have mixed-up ideas how to be liked by others. It’s incredibly easy to peel off a massive chunk of this population and get them to start blaming the government, society broadly, science, knowledge, literally anything but their own need to improve their social skills and gain some emotional intelligence.

These are our dumbest, angriest, loudest men, and thus become the major influencing factor on their peers, online and off. They set the tone and everyone else just kind of goes along with it, or leaves them to grow and gain power in peace.

This is unhinged and nonsensical, either you have poor English reading comprehension or this is a troll post. I’ll let mods decide.

It impacts different people differently. I’ve seen people blow hundreds of thousands of dollars up their nose. It was known as a massively addictive and expensive substance for a reason.

I was never impressed by the shit, but stimulants aren’t my thing either.

I’ve seen entire families torn apart by cocaine though, for some people it’s so completely overwhelming in their life it becomes all they think about.

I saw cocaine destroy a lot of lives, including my own parents and family and connected people.

It is not a “safe” drug in the same way that caffeine or cannabis are.

I agree that it’s “as safe as alcohol” because the people who’s lives were destroyed by cocaine were also deeply addicted to alcohol and alcohol alone kills more people than “regular” drug overdoses every year and climbing.

As a species we’re not capable of handling responsibility in the face of addictive substances. We’re just not. We can’t handle marketing and politics, how are we supposed to make better decisions about substances that make us feel pleasure?

I don’t think that means prohibition and drug wars are the better alternative, but we can’t just give everyone whatever they want without some kind of barrier or they will literally destroy themselves.

If you don’t combine this with massive efforts to set up mandatory education on addiction and health, and create the same resources that other countries have who have decriminalized drugs, such as rehab centers and single-payer healthcare so people can get treatment immediately and without question, we’re just going to see them used as another addictive tool to acquire and consolidate capital, and with lethal impact.

In the US particularly, people are too dumb, numb and tuned-out to handle pretty much anything responsibly. We already have tens to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths a year, (not counting alcohol) so I could easily see that spiraling out of control if people had access to even more ways to harm themselves while feeling pleasure.

The entire criminal justice system needs a revolutionary overhaul, drugs are just one part of it. If we remove one thing without checking all the other things, we tend to just make pocket-vacuums that other horrible things fill.

While I don’t care about people who want to do drugs, I don’t believe for a moment that if cocaine didn’t become legalized for recreational use that it wouldn’t cause massive amounts of harm.

Speaking as someone who saw his father snort millions of dollars up his nose so he could appear functional while drinking like a fish all day, every day, and the damage it did on his family and future and prospects.

Our species isn’t ready for responsibility. When left to their own choices, people do not make good choices for themselves or others. We absolutely need shepherding by organized institutions and groups of thinking people who can make plans for our continued function and growth.

I don’t know if prohibition at all works for saving people from themselves, but I think we need a much larger effort broadly to get people to understand how their own minds and bodies work if nothing else. People still broadly have no clue how addiction works because they have no idea how their own brain works and the difference between feelings and facts. We’re dumber than ever as a species, and getting dumber. We are too easily compromised by outside influence to make good decisions for ourselves or our communities. It’s not going to get better. Nobody is coming.

The left has no issue with rming themselves

The last decade of the left withdrawing to their own spheres of niche ideology-sub-spectrums has resulted in nobody, even the left themselves, really knowing what “the left” is for or against anymore on a broad level. This is why there’s so much infighting and disagreement and confusion about who believes in what, and of course all the endless purity testing and tribalism that comes with it. Some of this is because of deliberate social sabotage by paid agents, some of this is because of sociology and the nature of our brains. Either way it needs to be identified and understood as an obstacle to unified action.

I don’t give two shits what specific brand of marxism you believe in, or if you’re just a working liberal who wants things to go back to normal, or if you’re some deeply sheltered and naive pacifist who genuinely thinks we’re going to have some idealistic solarpunk future if we just did X, Y and Z. You all need to get armed and get prepared and probably do a lot of things you’re either emotionally or ideologically uncomfortable with. Such is the nature of conflict.

• Get armed. If firearms really scare the everloving shit out of you, or if you’ve already painted yourself in a corner by preaching against guns around your peers your whole life, then get a fucking crossbow, I do NOT care, as long as you have means to put holes in someone from a distance. At the very least, you need pepper spray, tasers and other personal defense items and you need to practice how they’re used and be ready to deal with multiple people who want to hurt you. Take self defense classes if you can.

• Get your shit together. If you’re unhealthy, depressed, or have a list of issues that are preventing you from doing X, Y and Z. Now is the time to get that shit managed. Get to a doctor while you can, if you can’t or they can’t help, then do the very best you can on your own as soon as you can. You’ve been putting off the changes you know you need to make, now is the wake-up alarm, time to do that hard thing you’ve been waiting for “the right time” to start on to get your life managed.

• Save money. Freeze your credit cards. Stop ordering fast food or doordash. Stop eating out altogether. Rice and beans motherfucker, do you speak it?? If you don’t know how to cook your own simple food at home, the only thing stopping you from learning how is your own motivation to type “How do I cook my own simple food at home?” into google and actually putting effort into it.

• Kill your vices. Related to above, I don’t care if the substance you do daily is completely harmless to you and something you claim is medicinal and helps you sleep/stay awake, you gotta start stepping it down and putting that cash under your mattress and finding alternatives. This isn’t about ethics or legality, this is about not spending your money on things you can live without even if the adjustment period will be hard. Again, now is the time to make those changes.

• Fix your attention span. It’s worse than you think and it’s preventing you from doing a lot of things you could be doing to make your life better and get healthier. If things get really, really bad, we need as many people as possible who can think clearly and analyze situations from many perspectives. We need people who have read books and can be patient and calm in the face of stress. If nothing else, you will have a better normal life if you don’t need to always have youtube videos of people reacting to tiktok videos playing on headphones before you can even read a work email.

If things somehow get better all around for everyone, then having done all this will only have made you and your life and outcomes better.

Richest man on Earth whines about other people being able to afford to buy protestors?

Funny that’s how he thinks immediately, that movements can be bought and sold… almost makes you wonder huh…

“The elite wealthy who secretly run the whole government”

Oh, you mean you? YOU MEAN YOU ELON???

He is maintaining a stupid stageplay for his stupid base whom he still needs to retain power, as they are basically an army he could mobilize if he has to.

Sure he would probably be happy and make sacks of cash if he got Ukraine to surrender, but nobody expects that to happen. Outside of said idiots who believe Trump to be Stupid-Jesus risen again. Most of them are too dim to understand what’s happening and delight in their own cognitive dissonance. They read a statement like this and go “YEAH BROTHA TELL THEM FREELOADERS TO STOP STEALING AMERICAN CASH” then tell all their friends and family and nonconsenting coworkers how Trump “resolved the ukraine war” like he promised.

If anyone thinks any part of that is hyperbolic, you’re not getting out enough. Ya’ll gotta understand that the quarter of America who worships this orange turd are cheering and partying all day, every day. They’re not worried, they’re not regretting shit. All of that is distraction and pandering. They believe themselves to be winning, and their leader controls the world’s most wealthy and powerful nation.

TPM cup

I googled this and now I’m enrolled in a yacht race… thanks.

I really feel like the linux thing is far more cultural than practical, and if you don’t actually enjoy fiddling around with settings and software, you’re probably not going to enjoy the community either.

I have no idea what I’m going to do, I can’t afford a new PC nor do I have the desire to buy a new PC just because Microsoft says jump through this new hoop. I’ll probably just do a bypass and ask around the docks for a security key “workaround” from the friendly, local, sailors with eyepatches and peg legs.