The hard part would be doing it in a way that pulls in the kind of people who listened to Alex Jones.

The funniest thing to do would be to turn it into either a legitimate leftist new site or a leftist themed nujob conspiracy mill (though I don’t know how that would work).

I think Facebook had an advantage in originally being targeted at college kids (I think you even needed a school ID to make an account originally) before becoming open to everyone. This meant that the userbase was a little older than that of most social media at the time and it worked as a way to stay in touch with people after you graduated. Then, when they opened it up, it became a way to stay in touch with family as well, which got the parents onboard with something that they had just considered a fad before, like MySpace.

This could turn into a thread of its own of people just recommending stuff, but I’m curious if you’ve looked up any of the current more popular series like Chainsaw Man, Dungeon Meshi (aka Delicious in Dungeon), Jujutsu Kaisen, and the recent Netflix animes like Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and Terminator Zero. I’d say all of them feel like the late night anime that was aired on Toonami back in the 2000s.

I also recommend the movie Redline to everybody because it’s such a visual and audio treat. It’s like if Hanna Barbera had hired somebody like Studio Ghibli to make a Wacky Racers movie.

States’ Rights only matter when Republicans agree with them.

They mean “socialist” in the Red Scare way. So exactly like you described, just worded in a way that would make the MAGAs cry.

10 is the last version of Windows I’ll be using, and I don’t want to have more full screen ads for 11 pop up on top of whatever program I’m trying to use. The previous time it happened is what prompted me to do it in the first place, and I’m definitely not gonna let them force update my Windows version like they’ve done in the past.

Stuff like this is why I disabled the TPM on my computer. No TPM means that you’re “not eligible” for 11, meaning I don’t get nagged by the random full screen pop-ups.

There is an alternative that I wish I could think of the name of that communities have been using for a number of years now to set up cheap, small-scale satellite internet networks. I looked into it once as an alternative for my neighborhood to dealing with the bullshit that is Comcast and Verizon, and ended up getting an ad for milsec strategic level network infrastructure from Boeing or something. Regardless, it’s a known and proven alternative that’s cheaper than the big guys and has hit a point where some places have set it up as a part of local government run infrastructure.

Exactly what I was referring to. It’s one of the reasons that the CIA requested the FBI inquiry into Trump that resulted in the raid on Mar a Lago.

Trump has been a Russian asset since the 80s. His ties to Russian criminal organizations have been known since then, but the FBI has never been able to get any charges to stick.

The CIA believed that he gave Putin information about current intelligence operations and agents against Russia during his presidency enough to request an inquiry which led to the FBI raid on Mar a Lago, where they found confidential documents on CIA activity amongst all the other confidential documents illegally held there after his term.

He will side with Russia, guaranteed.

Aye, as an American, I have only a limited view of the big picture, but my understanding of it is that while it was definitely a politicized issue across the globe, a lot of the far right extremists were emboldened to make it such a big issue by the actions of Trump and the Republican party in the US.

Like that convoy of Canadian Trump rioters who can’t even vote for him if they wanted to because they live in Canada. Trump’s been a poster-boy for crazies all across the globe.

Trump made masks political, so wearing one is a political statement to these people.

They have made their political beliefs their entire personality to compensate for their low self confidence and so have to aggressively display their beliefs like a peacock anytime they think somebody is challenging those beliefs, regardless of how benign or irrelevant it is.

Ignorance ultimately doesn’t excuse or justify their actions. Your beliefs aren’t as important as your actions. Not to say that they should be dragged behind the shed and shot, but that actions have consequences and they need to be held accountable for theirs. If somebody votes for a fascist leader and supports a fascist political party, they’re at least collaborators in fascism.

You have to treat these people like they’re in a cult, because that’s what’s happening here. Trump’s rhetoric this past year has been eerily similar to Jim Jones near the time that they all drank the Flavor-Aid (almost identical, even). And when dealing with cultists, it’s important to remember that not all of them can be saved. After a certain point, even if they recognize that they’re in the wrong, most cultists will double down rather than admit that they were wrong - because they’re in too deep and to admit that they were fooled would be to admit that their entire life has been wrong and that what they did wasn’t justified.

Hope that you can make them realize why they’re in the wrong, but be prepared to grab the knife that they might pull on you. Because that’s probably the more likely scenario.

Optimism, realism, and pessimism.

Big Carrot is coming for your stew

If you’re watching something on TV, record it and watch it later instead of when it airs. Even starting it 15 minutes later would probably let you fast forward through many of the ads.

True. I even added the “probably” after writing it for that reason, but that’s still giving them too much benefit of the doubt.

I’m sure the IDF soldiers feel very bad about all the women and children that they’ve driven bulldozers over.

And yet, that still doesn’t justify killing civilians randomly.

And Israel has been running a military campaign to exterminate Palestine since the 1950s. It’s hard to claim their hands are clean in any of these conflicts.

I still remember when they were offering Israeli citizenship with the purchase of former Palestinian homes to American Jews in the 2000s.