About 7 million Americans tried to vote in 2024 and couldn't because of common county level voters suppression tactics. Combine that with the flood of Russian propaganda and we were pretty well fucked.

When your crackhead neighbor who owns a fuck ton of guns is going through a thing letting your other crackhead neighbor fuck with him because you're hoping the two of them are going to off each other is not actually a sound policy. Because instead of getting two dead crackheads you usually get one of them killing the other one and then you've got a crazy crackhead running around without anything to keep it in check.

A better solution would be a intervention. Maybe help your neighbor get off the crack. But on the other hand you'll probably hoping that your neighbors going to kick the bucket and that you can take advantage of that for a quick buck.

They don't really give a shit about privacy and they're just going to have their own homegrown companies rape your privacy and push billionaire propaganda it'll just be more local billionaire propaganda as opposed to international billionaire propaganda.

The point I'm trying to make is this isn't your upstanding up for privacy or the rights of children or any of that this is just standard run of the mill international politics enacted by the same ruling class we should be getting pissed off at but we never actually do.

Of American social media companies that have become propaganda arms for billionaires.

Not that the ruling class of Europe really particularly cares about billionaire propaganda but they aren't going to let foreign countries billionaires spread propaganda inside their borders because what kind of fucking stupid person would allow that?

I mean besides America.

This is always been how Facebook survives. Young people inevitably bail on Facebook because they don't want to be on the same social media Network as their parents and Facebook just buys up any competitor they move to.

But if you ban social media for people under 16 you can't do that and they won't get into the habit of using it so when they turn 17 they won't bother. Already we see social media use dropping because of all the bots and Nazis but if you haven't gotten used to using it and made it part of your daily routine you're going to log on and be slapped in the face with that nonsense right out the gate and without all the kiddy filters that were at least hiding the Nazis, mostly.

We here in America will be invading Canada and I'm not joking. Every failing empire does the same thing. You put incompetent corrupt psychopaths in charge and they burn through the treasury. Trump for example has added 25% to the national debt in just 5 and 1/2 years. That's 10 trillion dollars in debt from the king of debt. It would not be a problem except instead of putting adults in charge and raising taxes on the wealthy and doing sound policy to grow our economy we are likely to double down on more crazy pedophiles.

Every single failing empire does the same thing they start to use military expansion to loot other countries in order to fill their coffers. America will be no different. We will switch over to a wartime economy and begin a draft and we will start by taking Canada and Mexico and then the rest of South America.

From there we will take Greenland and then try to use that to take europe. We don't care if somebody has nuclear weapons because the people who are going to be making these decisions are going to be desperate to have a war going in order to stay in power and they're going to have to bite off more than they can chew to keep that pyramid scheme going.

It won't be like Russia because we're not going to put a competent psychopath in charge we're going to put another Trump or one of the dipshit billionaires like muskrat.

The problem is that this kind of bullshit is so far outside of what people are used to seeing because we've had at least moderately competent adults albeit sometimes ludicrously corrupt ones in charge for so long that the idea of everything just going to shit is impossible for people to comprehend

There is a nuance between an AI apocalypse and significant job losses hurting young people in the economy... And you too by the way because your social security and Medicare are going away.

We stopped caring about long term in the 80s. All that matters now is who's the next trillionaire and protecting the sanctity of women's sports

Why should i? I'm right. And I think that's what pisses you guys off the most. Because you're scared of what's coming but you're also too scared to actually get out of the way and let guys like me fix the mess you made. Or too full of that useless macho pride. You know the kind the kind you didn't earn and don't deserve.

If it's one thing I've learned about guys like you it's that you had everything handed to you in life on a silver platter and it infuriates you when people point that out. A bunch of Nepo babies and socialists for me and not for thee and the last thing on Earth you want is having to think about that. About how if LBJ and FDR didn't save your ass you'd be living in a rickety shack down by a river or something.

They overwhelmingly have the political power because they are much more numerous than everyone else so yeah it's their fault. It's also the fault of the older Gen x that side with the boomers on bad decisions. So it's your fault too.

Guys like he will talk all day long about personal responsibility but when somebody asks you to take some fucking responsibility for the mess you made you get all pissy like you are now. This mess is on you and you refuse to fix it. When we ask you to get the fuck out of the way so we can fix it you just make things worse.

Your Gen x so you're not going to die before the shit hits the fan most likely. And I think you know that but I don't think you care at least not right now. So have fun with that. You can go do another watch of death wish 3 and pretend you're going to be a tough vigilante or something when there aren't any cops around because the tax base collapsed because you don't understand how the keep an economy functional and you won't get out of the way for people who do..

Like we can reason and stuff and learn from the past. We don't have to keep repeating the same stupid fucking mistakes over and over and over again just because Grandpa did it.

Here in America we are in the process of becoming a fascist Nation and we even have tried building death camps a few times. The only reason we haven't is the morons in charge of it all are so incompetent that they screwed it up.

But those morons will keep trying and you would think we would have learned that back in the 40s but nope here we are doing it all over again only this time it's the largest Nation on earth. Yeah we're getting our asses kicked by Iran but that's only because the current administration doesn't have enough political power to issue a draft yet. Assuming something drastic doesn't change in the next election or two that won't be true anymore and it'll be time for world War III and it'll be getting really drafty in here.

Again we've seen this pattern multiple times before. A child should be able to tell you it. And yet here we are doing it all over again. It's like how nobody knows what a fucking moral panic is even though we all grew up with at least two or three of them going on at the same time...

I mean Christ just fucking learn why don't you. I'm not asking people to learn particle physics or something I'm asking them to learn the basic patterns that happen in their lives.

If you don't let them track you. Big sites use fingerprinting as part of their fraud protection systems and they will just flat out block you if you trigger one of them. For a while I couldn't buy anything on the PlayStation Network because Sony decided I must be a thief. The customer service can't be bothered because there's too many scammers hitting them up.

It's easy to say just go somewhere else but increasingly there are fewer and fewer somewhere else to go to. Market consolidation is a bitch and nobody cares to bother with antitrust law enforcement. It's too complicated and too abstract for the average voter.

The Panama canal has had to slash the number of ships going through it.

One of the things that really pisses me off about the older generation is they spent their entire lives telling experts to go fuck themselves about climate change because reasons and they got all the benefits of living before the shit hit the fan and now they're going to kick the bucket and leave the rest of us holding that bag.

They got to enjoy the benefits of the new deal and the Great society and all that socialism while rapidly expanding without considering the consequences and if you point this out they get pissy and bitchy and start pretending that they had it harder than kids today even though 30 minutes on Google would prove that wrong. Hell fuck 30 minutes 30 seconds.

It's classic I got mine fuck you pulling the ladder up behind them. And their final fuck you is the end of democracy. What a bunch of fucking Jokers and assholes.

And if you think your grandpa wasn't one of them remember the Reagan democrats.

But you'll say anything to vote for a pedophile. The question is why?

All I'm saying is I think you would be very upset if certain authorities got a hold of certain digital media in your possession...

The problem is once you accumulate that much money you have a ton of power. The only way to do away with too big to fail companies is to do away with billionaires and trillionaires.

And you cannot get the public at large to understand that just because you aren't going to let Elon Musk have a trillion dollars doesn't mean you're going to steal their house and give it to one of "those" people (insert whichever those people you prefer here).

Seriously I cannot get people to understand that just because Elon Musk can't have a trillion dollars doesn't mean you can't have a toothbrush. I think the problem is that people have a hard time understanding the difference between the couple million dollars they have saved for retirement and the trillion dollars of power that Elon Musk commands that lets him casually drop a quarter billion dollars on the midterm elections...

If it's one thing I've learned in the last few years though it's Americans hate nuance. Even if the nuances slapping them upside the forehead.

Because bringing them into the country lowers the local pay rate. Supply and demand works both ways.

The proper way to do this is to implement socialism so that the economic benefits they're bringing to the country are shared by everyone and no one is Left behind. Also you do away with billionaires because that's too much power for any one individual to have. Basically you can have as much money as you want but when it's not money anymore when it's power we take it away from you that's the line.

We aren't going to do that because that is way too complex and nuanced for most Americans to grasp and half the people on this forum are freaking out with me just suggesting it.

So what we probably need to do is a 10 or 20 year moratorium on new immigration of any kind because that's a dead simple solution that the sort of person who calls themselves a swing voter can comprehend.

It would also cause a massive Japan style permanent recession for exactly the same reason but it would also mean we have some social stability which is what we need right now. Basically we are going to intentionally impoverish ourselves as a nation because we aren't big-brained enough to actually think our way out of this problem.

Like the old Winston Churchill quote, you can always count on America to do the right thing after they've tried absolutely everything else.

So now we've got to go try everything else before we can actually do the right thing. Or like I mentioned on another thread we can build death camps. But nobody likes to hear about that either. They like to pretend it can't happen here. If only there was a saying about that...

Get rid of the pedophile in the white house and my mental health would improve substantially. Get rid of the weird creepy couch fucker too and that sell out mother fucker running the House of Representatives and keep going down until we hit a Democrat to take over the White House and then maybe impeach six supreme Court justices and I think then I could stop Doom scrolling.

But we're not going to do any of that. If I'm really lucky the Republicans will lose the House of Representatives and the Democrats will slow down the damage until 2028 and voters will somehow both be allowed to vote and can stop freaking out about trans girls long enough to not let fascists take over the country and then maybe just maybe I can die in peace.

Because right now dying in peace is the American dream. It's all the trillionaires left us. Well that and raging against trans girls and complaining about ethics and games journalism. Of course in a few years we won't have video games because memory will be too expensive but whatever.