This guy will now say anything, regardless how stupid.

Using a corporate website that may or may not spread your message depending on its content and the promotion of a for profit algorithm has nothing to do with "free speech". You're still entitled to say what you want. Maybe you'll even go say it somewhere which isn't filtered.

Because what would republicans masturbate to? Gotta keep them busy somehow, god knows it's worse for everyone if they actually pass legislation.

Yeah, or in one of the many countries with peaceful protests. Why do you mention France specifically? What agenda are you trying to push?

No I mean like the open network that routes data from A to B with complete neutrality. I mean like your ability to run decentralised communication on open protocols. I mean your ability to serve content across a network without anyone's algorithm saying otherwise.

No it's not, it's a school hall with the principal deciding which conversations are allowed, and which get squashed. It's the Agile meeting where the scrum master decides what is important to share and who should shut the fuck up. It's the carefully curated shareholder meeting where an agenda is in play and any attempt to disrupt results in people getting kicked out.

Social media is nothing at all like a town square. Not everywhere people gather is a town square.

Clearly you did not understand my argument at all. My front lawn is not the town square, it's my turf and if I don't like you I'm going to kick you the fuck off it.

Millions of dollars stolen is a tiny fraction of just the money Trump got to sell pardons.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't stop fraud but if all you can come up with is a few million bucks there are much better places to go after fraud. Like how the IRS will go after you for forgetting to include the right paperwork for a deduction but they'll cheerfully let Elon Musk skip paying billions of dollars of taxes he's owing.

This is not an accident. People in power have long since set things up so that they don't have law enforcement against them but you do.

Fascism requires an in group that the law protects but does not bind and an out out group that the law binds but does not protect. If you're reading this you're in the out group

Per week. A relatively minor political forum called white people Twitter does 650 k views and 42k posts per week. The bigger rage bait forums do millions of views and tens of thousands of posts per week.

A lot of those are probably bots but advertisers treat them like they aren't. Data is data.

I guess what I'm saying is rage bait and outrage porn drives a lot more engagement than lawn Care.

Also those kind of subreddits like the lawn Care One require massive amounts of maintenance and moderation to be barely functional. Otherwise they instantly get overwhelmed with garbage.

I don't know about the lawn care one but the video game one's especially the retro video game ones are fucking useless because they are filled with nothing but karma farming posts from bots trying to drive up their numbers so that they can post on the political forums

I listen to them because they're very powerful and they get to make decisions about my life.

I am through pretending people with nearly limitless money don't get to decide how I live my life. I'm tired of coping with how bad things are I want them to either get better or I want them to just end in a global firestorm. But I'm tired of everything just getting worse because people refuse to deal with the shit that's happening and pretend instead that they can just ignore it.

I get it though. Voting is a fucking drag. My ballot this year was full of bullshit designed to trick me into voting for bad things that would hurt me or bad people that would hurt me and it was a good 40 or 50 minutes spent sorting that out. And that's after I had a lot of experience with politics and could quickly find who was tricking me and who was just probably going to line their pockets a little bit without completely fucking me in the ass.

I don't know what you do with that. The first couple of times I had to actually sit down with a ballot and sort out all the lies took a couple hours and even now I've barely got that time in half. On paper it's a couple hours of my life every other year but fuck it's annoying.

But if I want to have my hobbies I don't have a choice. Tech Bros are taking away everything good. I want to go back to being able to afford a fucking video card. And that means I have to deal with politics I can't just pretend guys like Sam Altman can be ignored

Honestly he's probably barely cracking the top 100. There's over 2,000 billionaires on this planet. Sure he's a sociopathic monster but I mean we've got over 2,000 to choose from. And for some reason we give them limitless power and then we pretend that they don't have the limitless power.

He has billions of dollars and nearly limitless power. Whether you care what he thinks about your PC or not he gets to decide whether you get to have a PC or not.

You can't keep letting people have limitless power and then just throw up your hands and say I don't care. You can't live in an alternate universe where they don't exist and where they don't have power over you. And you can't just go somewhere they aren't because virtually all the land capable of sustaining human civilization is full of people already and those people have to listen to Sam Altman and guys like him who have the billions and billions of dollars and limitless power people refuse to take away from them.

Politics affects your hobbies and your life whether you like it or not. I don't care doesn't make that go away. It's just cope.

When this funding manages to somehow politically override any 'fraudster' problem brought to light, you'll know how deep the corruption really goes.

Root cause, involves finding the actual fucking root.

The reason to get a fake ID today, involves crossing a moral and legal line most would not cross in order to get alcohol (which is clearly not popular among teens) and/or drugs (which they're already medicated. Have been since single-digit age.)

Yes. That is correct. The majority of teens, do NOT have an illegal fake ID.

It's stupid to assume most teens will go get an illegal fake ID simply because "social media" when the peer pressure to get a fake ID today isn't enough to convince the majority. You're going to have to go better than that.

You're basically ignoring our entire Financial system and how it's built and designed. If any of what you describing is successful in your life then you have a 401k because we heavily encourage them through a combination of tax write-offs and in the case of employers matching contributions as a benefit to attract employees.

You can't just say, just ignore the entire system and live outside of it and be successful outside of the system you're born in. I mean you can but frankly that makes you an insufferable twat. Speaking of which, how are the libertarian primary debates this year?

It won't even slow it down if anything it will accelerate it because in the panic people will vote fascists into power like they always do. Democracy does best during stable times and struggles the most when money and food and shelter are in short supply.

It's one of the things the left wing really doesn't like to think about. Like how the biggest gains in the civil Rights movement happened in the 60s and 70s which happened to coincide with a period of economic prosperity.

It really really pisses off the left wing that people under Financial duress can do nasty evil things without really thinking about it. What the cool kids call the banality of evil.

It's because that fundamentally clashes with the left wings belief that people are ultimately good.

It doesn't really if you understand what's happening. It's not the people are experiencing "economic anxiety" and then becoming fascists. People didn't vote Trump because they were worried about the economy but doing just fine which is frankly what the phrase economic anxiety has come to mean in American politics.

The actual problem is that when people aren't doing well financially and are struggling to feed and shelter themselves they don't react to that by being smart and rational. When human beings are put under pressure we make bad decisions. We fuck up. A lot.. pressure doesn't make diamonds it makes garbage more compact.

It's not that people are becoming evil or even just plain assholes, it's that they're trying to solve the problem and they're fucking up because people don't actually perform well under bad conditions no matter what TV and movies tell you.

And that's the basic problem the left wing and frankly most people have. Too much TV too many books too much anime and video games and you start to believe that shit. It's especially bad for the left wing because they are kind of insufferable and they get really into the whole art imitates life bullshit.

If you've been heavily invested in a 401k for 40 years and are nearing retirement or already retired, a big short-term bounce doesn't really affect you all that much. You gained a lot of money on paper and then lost it all, leaving you back where you started. It's only younger people who likely have their 401k witholding maxed that really got hurt because they bought on the upswing and that investment is now gone.