This isn’t a “grrr, Russians r bad and evil 😡 USA number 1! 😲🥵🍆💦” statement, it’s a “we know he’s on one payroll, but just exactly how many is he really on” statement. Because it’s been known for ages that he has connections to Russian organized crime. The FBI has been trying to get charges to stick on it since the 80s.

They own a lot of Trump property and he’s been given tons of “gifts” by them over the years - including boats, airplanes, and cars. It’s believed that a lot of his failed businesses were money laundering schemes for Russian crime syndicates (every single one of his businesses except his father’s real estate empire have gone bankrupt). How else do you explain bankrupting not just one, but two casinos? They’re practically designed to print money! And then there was the whole “Trump Beauty Pageant” thing. You know, the one where he would fly around the country in his private jet, just him and a bunch of underage girls. Oh, and Jeffrey Epstein. I almost forgot that he went along for the rides, too. Can’t forget that his favorite part was “when he would open the door on the girls while they were in the dressing room getting ready.”

Anyway, getting a bit off topic there. Not only would it benefit Russia to have an egomaniac leading the country (don’t correct your enemy while they’re making a mistake and all that), but it would be of great use to have a man willing to smuggle confidential documents to Mar A Lago and sell them for the right price in that seat.

The one thing that I disagree with is that most people don’t care about AI being shoved into everything. Studies are consistently showing that the vast majority of people don’t use/hate AI being shoved into everything. 80% of phones users in one study, 90% on another study for DuckDuckGo IIRC, etc.

So it’s like the Meta-verse, but somehow even worse.

Can they, though? How many of them actually changed, and how many simply went into hiding?

One of the biggest issues that led us to this point was the tolerance of the racist uncle, the antisemitic grandfather just because “he’s from a different time” or whatever. Many of these people never changed, we just started accepting it when it was couched in the right social rules.

It’s well known that Trump grew up around former Nazis and active white supremacists. His family’s culture growing up was steeped in it.

One of the things about cults is that followers fall into a sunk cost fallacy that means that the longer they’ve been a member and the deeper in they are, the harder they are to get out until there’s a line beyond which it becomes basically impossible. Because to admit they were wrong is to admit that their beliefs were wrong, that their actions weren’t justified, and that they’re not the good person that they think they are.

“Have you tried just not being a mutant?”

Go where? It’s not like it was when Ellis Island was running. Anybody who immigrated through there would be an illegal immigrant today. Any Americans today whose parents or grandparents went through there are anchor babies who should be deported alongside the rest of their family under the current regime’s stance on immigration.

And it’s not any easier today to immigrate elsewhere. Unless you’re rich or have a degree that makes you a valuable commodity, most countries want nothing to do with you.

I think being a “century off from civil war” is a little disingenuous. Things are too tumultuous right now to predict what things will look like in 4 years, let alone 100.

I think we’re currently in a time of dramatic transition that will go one of two ways: full on opposition from a coalition of states against the current regime, or total capitulation that will likely only be broken by foreign intervention. This of course relies on Trump not backing down or anything that would be reasonably expected to de-escalate the situation, but with him and the current Republican party, I am not willing to give them any benefit of any doubt. I’ve been around Republicans my entire life and fit into the disguise of “straight white guy” very well as a kid. I know what they say when they think they’re amongst like minds. I saw it all the way back in 2000.

I don’t know if you would technically define it as civil war, but I believe the systems are in place for such a conflict to occur if the current situation were to “go hot” and states were to decide to mobilize their national guard regiments/reserves and (for lack of a better word) “nationalize” the military assets within their borders. A schism in the military could very well happen at that point with individual units placing their loyalty with either their states or the federal government. The feds may control the country on paper, but thanks to state’s rights, much of the daily workings are purely at the digression of the states. The highway system is federally owned, but it’s the state DoTs that maintain them and the states that patrol them and allow access for trade and commerce between their borders. As easily as we have checkpoints along the borders with Mexico and Canada, states could fashion along the interstate transit corridors and strangle the flow of goods and people between regions.

I do think the most likely scenario though is total capitulation by the state governments in favor of a justice that will never come from the courts, and I expect to see a growing movement of armed militia groups akin to the Black Panthers and leftists drifting further into militant extremism as trust in any sort of rule of law continues to erode under the continuing circumstances. Weapons are too easy to get or to make here for groups to not emerge. The FBI spends 50% of their time putting down white supremacist militias - or at least they did before 2016.

But I don’t believe that we’re “a century off” from civil war because I think the government will break long before then and whatever exists here in 100 years won’t be the same as the US as we think of it today. It will be a Roman Empire vs Holy Roman Empire kind of thing imo. The same people living in the same dirt, but a government pretending to be a nation that once stood in the same place but has since vanished into the annals of history.

Put a bucket over his head and you can take the entire set.

Gay, lesbian, etc. are sexualities, which has nothing specifically to do with gender per se. Gender is a performance we do based upon what our culture expects of us based on specific labels and (often physical) traits. Think “goth girl” or “punk” or something. When given a label like that, you probably thought of a specific set of physical traits and behaviors, including fashion, hairstyle, and makeup. That’s gender in a nutshell. Sexuality is more “if not attractive, then why x shaped?”

It gets complicated because people really like to put things into an either/or box when life is so much more than a or b. Originally, sexualities were defined as two states: heterosexual and homosexual. Hetero, meaning other, means an attraction to the other sex (generally thought of as the opposite sex/gender due to a lack of information on intersex folk and the aforementioned two boxes appeal in the human psyche). And the opposite would be homosexual - an attraction to people of the same sex. But this is an elementary level of understanding, like when we teach kids about the 3 states of matter and leave out things like plasma.

Because people have preferences and all straight men aren’t attracted to 100% of women, and then there’s lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and then there’s how gender presentation plays into our attraction like with butch vs femme lesbians or how men and women both can appreciate a girl who could bench press them. And then some people are into femboys and women only while some are into men that belong in the Scottish Highlands wearing kilts and claymores and women who own fainting couches and ball gowns and wouldn’t even glance at anything outside of those 2 groups, and then some people are only attracted to specific body parts (dick or pussy) but are less strict on who those parts are attached to, and then there’s the people who don’t care about anything beyond personality, and then…the list goes on and on.

And then it gets even more complicated when you start talking about romantic attraction, because that’s entirely its own spectrum as well. People can be romantically attracted to the same or different genders compared to sexual attraction. Some people are sexually attracted to multiple genders but could only see themselves dating one specific gender, some people experience no romantic attraction at all or no sexual attraction, or even both together. The human brain is a massive mess and there’s simply no way to easily quantify the human experience - if we even can at all. I saw a post recently that went something like “the brain is 3lbs of mostly fat puppeting a meat suit by using less electricity than a light bulb, and if it can hallucinate algebra into existence then I’m fully willing to believe that it’s also capable of identifying its own gender” and I think that sums it up pretty nicely.

I literally had this happen with my desktop last night, and it’s entirely down to Windows actively choosing to go into sleep mode or not. No activity on the computer, click on sleep, the monitors go off and I started to walk away except I noticed that my keyboard and mouse were still on (the first things to turn off when Windows goes to sleep for me) and the fans were still running. Wiggled the mouse and it had only turned the monitors off. I tried it 2 or 3 more times and Windows kept doing the same thing - putting the monitors to sleep and nothing else. I eventually just straight up shut it down with the power button.

They mistook your comment as disagreeing with their take on how there are real victims of Grok’s porn and CSAM and saying that they themselves were supporting CSAM, rather than saying that you agree and were saying Sweeney is supporting CSAM.

You know those signs at roller coasters that say “you must be this tall to ride”? The US is that, except the sign says “you must be this rich to play”.

Unfortunately for the US, the rich have spent the decades since the Civil Rights Movement convincing the general populace that their rights were won by holding a snarky sign on a street corner and not by burning down entire city districts after the murder of MLK by the government (which his family proved in court, by the way. Unfortunately, no criminal court would hear the case so it was only in a civil court, but the judge was convinced well enough to find the government guilty).

Years of protesting and nothing solid was accomplished. Within a week of billions of dollars in damage to property and big business, the Civil Rights laws were drafted, voted on, and signed into law.

It’s the same as the “basic biology” argument. Twisting something to the point it breaks in order to justify their hate. The Bible has gay people in it.

In the Bible, one of the people that Jesus heals is the slave of a Roman soldier. In the original Latin text, the word they use is for a kind of male slave kept as a consort/sex slave. King David, one of God’s chosen, is a bisexual man who had multiple wives and a male “friend” who “loved him in a way that no woman ever could.”

Being gay or bi was so normal back then that they never bothered to spell it out, not thinking that centuries later some heretics would twist their words to spread their hate.

Unions are the peaceful alternative for negotiations that workers and their bosses agreed upon instead of dragging them out of the factory into the street and beating them to death.

More people need to remember this history.

Even MLK credited the success of his work during the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Panthers being willing to do what he could not, and the Million Man March on Washington - seen today as an example of successful peaceful protest - was a threat to every white American in a seat of power. If he could mobilize a million people to shut down the capital of the federal government peacefully, imagine what else they could do.

Everybody thinks “it could never happen here” right up until it does. We said the same exact thing learning about Nazi Germany in school. Keep an eye out, because I’d say Canada is probably about 10 years behind the US.

Your conservative party has been eyeballing the Republicans as role models for decades, and you had plenty of Trump supporters marching not too long ago. I’ve been watching the Canadian war on science since the conservative administration from 20-25 years ago shut down a decade-long study on the effects of UBI halfway through and sealed the documents because they didn’t like the results that showed that there were noticeable drops in employment in only two groups - pregnant women and students - and that other effects included improved grade scores and graduation rates, increased college enrollment, and a general improvement in the local economy.

So why haven’t you marched down here yourself and taken up the good fight? Or are you just an armchair general making excuses for not protecting freedom and democracy in the world because you’re too chickenshit to actually put your money where your mouth is?

Guess what, everybody’s a hero until it’s their life on the line, and then the truth comes out: the average person is too scared to give up their homes, their food, and their lives. A cornered animal will bite, but if you leave it even one avenue of escape 9 out of 10 times it will bolt.

I was literally just about to post this:

Multiple forms of life evolve to fill an extent niche.

More and more I’m finding that there’s a fair bit of overlap between the two.

Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I’d suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It’s built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it’s an “immutable” version of Linux, which means that it’s a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.

Don’t forget the Nioh series, which adds Diablo/Borderlands style loot and skill trees that unlock weapon skills dependent on weapon type rather than the weapon arts specific to each weapon like in Elden Ring. It also has a cool take on the bloodstain mechanic where instead of seeing how a player died, you can see their gear and summon a copy of them to fight with a chance of them dropping some of their gear.