They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s some long-running scheme to get Trump into power or whatever. More that he happened to be the right idiot on the payroll when the shit hit the fan.

Trump’s ties to Russia have been known forever. The FBI has been trying to pin him for his ties to Russian crime organizations for decades, with all the “gifts” of yachts and planes that they’ve given him and all the real estate that they own in Trump Towers and the like.

I think he just happened to be there when all the greed and flaws in our system finally broke under the weight of actual schemes to foster extremism in the population for various reasons and the short-sightedness of corporate interests looking to wring the country dry.

I’m in Massachusetts and can report much the same here. Outside the cities, there’s plenty of MAGA maniacs. You could see “Trump 2020” flags still up all throughout Biden’s term in spots.

Half of the people who voted*

Trump got about the same number of votes this time as he did in the previous election (marginally less, I believe).

It makes little difference to point out, but it’s good to remember that the Dems are a bunch of feckless corporate shills who lost the support of their voters, and about a third to half the country simply doesn’t vote.

Trump is a symptom and the end result of deeply systemic and cultural issues here, and as an American, I hope you guys make it hurt. Maybe then we’ll wake up to the problems here. I doubt it, but at least the economic collapse here will hopefully spare the rest of the world from a dementia patient with daddy Putin’s leash on his collar swinging the biggest military budget in the world around like he’s got something to compensate for.

Any YouTube channel in general has to to some extent to simply get people to click. It’s crazy how the psychology of it works, and people need to exploit it in order to just not disappear in the sea of YouTube videos.

I remember somebody talking once about why so many video thumbnails have the person’s head superimposed on them, and it’s because people are like 46% more likely to click on a video if it has a person’s face on it than if it doesn’t, even if it’s the exact same video.

Cruelty like this is a learned trait, too. These kids didn’t come up with this on their own, they learned the hatred at home.

This country was a mistake…

Yes, but the internationally recognized name is the Gulf of Mexico. It has that history behind it that even Americans agree with. Trump might as well have decreed that it should be called the Gulf of Trump and that the state of New Mexico is now South Colorado.

The implication behind it is that the US owns the Gulf, and nobody wants this change, especially Americans. It’s chaotic malicious, along the lines of claiming ownership over the Panama Canal (which he also did) and Greenland (did that one, too).

You’re both right to some extent. Both sides are guilty in this. As MLK said, the biggest threat to equality is not the white supremacist but the white liberal who cares more about a negative peace than true justice. If the 50% of voters who never vote did something, we could not only have kept Trump out of office, but we could vote out the corporate Dems who prevent any actual change from occurring.

At the same time, those corporate Dems keep pushing the right farther and farther into extremism with their strategy of “vote for me because I’m not the other guy” and take for granted that people will vote for them anyway. It’s the oldest campaign strategy out there, because it works, but when you fund the most extremist of your opponents and appeal to the middle, you just end up pushing the entire political spectrum to one side. And that’s exactly what the Dems do. They even go so far as to fund the most extremist candidate in their race to set up an easy win. A lady wrote a book on how she did that, and then she lost to that same extremist in the very next election.

Protest votes are ineffectual, and so is not voting because at the end of the day, the leaders of the Dems think that they’re safe and the status quo won’t change, and it doesn’t matter whether they got less votes than last time, so long as they’re in office. We need a sweep of radical leftist candidates to shake the very foundations of the party if we expect to see any change.

I think that’s what they mean. The history of protesting in the US has been white-washed to the point of ineffectiveness with the obsession on peaceful protests done “in the right way” (out of sight where they can be ignored), and the crackdown on protesters is merciless and cruel. Thus, they’ve been neutered.

Thanks, I have no idea why my phone auto corrected to James.

The only way it could be better is if it had a couple of more lanes. Would be more realistic that way.

Definitely look into it, you never know what you might be able to get for it. I worked with a girl in high school many years ago who somehow managed to trade in 3 cars in a row for more than she paid for them. She managed to pay off the loan on each one and get a better car out of the deal than the one she traded in, and it still shocks me enough that I still remember it to this day.

I have a friend who’s really into serial killers and cults, like, he’s listened to the recordings of the final moments of the Jamestown Massacre where you can hear them forcing the Flavor-Aid down people’s throats as the rest gasp and choke and die in the background, and he says that Trump sounds just like Jim Jones. From his speech patterns to the tone of his voice, it gives him chills just how alike they sound.

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

And if you voted for Trump, you supported the Palestinian genocide and the genocide of American minorities through the silent violence of the oppression of Project 2025 (as well as everything else in there such as the destruction of the American educational system), increasing the global power of Russia by appointing a known Russian asset to the presidency of the US (and all the other Russian assets that he was going to put into power through his cabinet), and the murder of potentially millions of Americans through another pandemic event, like Trump did during COVID.

And if you voted for neither? You were okay with either option happening. You didn’t care enough about genocide to prevent other genocides from occurring as a consequence of the election.

Your message is true, but your stats are off. Trump only got something like 15% of the total voting population in the US and won by like 1.5% of the vote. Studies say that historically, 60% of Americans are more liberal than the government - and that includes when Democrats have been in power.

Conservatives are a minority, and the MAGA crazies even more so. They just shout really loudly to convince everybody that they’re a majority. The real issue is that 50% or so of Americans simply don’t care enough to vote against fascism or care more about maintaining the facade of order than freedom. Like MLK said, the biggest threat to equal rights isn’t the white supremacist, but the white liberal who cares more about a negative peace than true justice.

Very true. I was just saying that you can also blame enshittification for it going down like it has as well. Burning the candle at both ends and all that.

This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.