Be prepared to die for the biggest showdown in the history of mankind. Lol
What if I told you... that's a feature, not a bug?
It's far too much to type and way too philosophical for anyone to give a shit about, but, tldr: the US (and arguably the world) is on a freight train speeding at absolute destruction. No one in power is pushing the stop button. (In the US) one party is (sometimes) pushing a slowdown button but the other party is always slamming any button they can find that doesn't say stop on it. They know where it leads, and this is what they want. Everyone "knows" the current institutions and systems are failing, but the only politically relevant (so, in the US, not the actual left) force with power is the far right wingers who desire destruction and their only resistance is the left and right wing liberals in the middle going "noooo the institutions!" but no one actually cares about the institutions, besides other liberals. They lack any ability though, due to their political ideology, to actually fight for the beloved institutions. They can only rely on the powerful far right to "come to their senses" and stop pushing the death button. Unfortunately for them, the far right will not stop without someone stopping them- forcefully. And since the far right and liberals effectively eliminated the far left and even the center left for the most part... there's no one to counter that far right fascistic death drive.
But you don't even need that accurate assessment of things to understand the situation. Just know they want to abolish public education, medicine, doctors, anything related to "science" broadly, any non-Christian religions, non-white people, LGBTQ+ people and anything tangentially related to gay stuff (imagined or real), etc. pretty much infinitely.
These people are the proto-Nazis of our time. Not everything will align perfectly, but it doesn't have to. They want to burn medical information, they want to destroy what they see as "perverted secular society" burn it all away and cleanse the land for some great rebirth of a Christian Nationalist theocracy where white men are elevated above everyone and your white male status plus property owning status is all that matters. I know this all sounds cliche and overstated at this point... but they keep proving it true every chance they get.
The worst part is that ultimately they're the only side making progress towards their goal because their goal is aligned with the way things are going and must go. But the difference is we can arrive at that destructive moment, whenever it is, and come out the other side in some Christian theocracy nightmare world or something much better than we can currently imagine possible. As it stands right now, that nightmare vision seems to be the only viable conclusion. Which is rather depressing...
I used to work for a grocer and specifically in the frozen section, sometimes dealing with dairy, but mostly in the frozen ass giant walk-in freezer. That was always a decent safe place to talk shit on management since they didn't wanna go in there (too cold for their fragile bodies) and the incidental soundproofing.
It just sounded German as fuck with apfelbaum, which is what I also assumed the original name was before her family came to America (or whatever).
But your point is taken and I will edit that portion out.
Fear promoted by... the Russians?
I need a soundproof tube to put my head in where I can scream as loud as possible until my vocal chords rip and no one else can hear.
Either that or a VR type thing where it replicates reality so well that I can feel the pain of clawing my own eyeballs from the sockets. Or, alternatively... well, best not to type that one cough
There's only one country on earth that has couped, rigged, murdered, sanctioned, invaded, whatever else, dozens of countries over the last century... that country was NOT Russia (or the USSR).
So fucking sick of shitty right wing people carrying the torch for US state dept to fire all the libs up and get them in line to support the next horrific genocide or war we choose to do/support.
Ignoring the stupid and outright murderously insane shit in that post...
Are they not aware that Ukrainian men were also conscripted? Ukraine quite literally locked down the borders and wouldn't let men out and said "go protect the homeland!"
I understand the conscripts thing is meant to he demoralizing or whatever like "you don't even want this war! Give up!" but that fails when your own country is also conscripting and begging for people from around the world to come help fight Russia. This wasn't exactly kept a secret either, so it's just weird seeing it used in this way.
Yeah, no shit.
The western capitalist countries are trying to distract their citizens from seeing progress China has made especially in the last two or three decades. They're making a complete mockery of the US and our withering and crumbling ... everything.
If any country is on the brink of collapse I'd put way more bets on it being the one who has alienated itself by warmongering and actively invading and couping countries all over the world for 100 years. A country that dumps every resource it can muster into a perverted fusion of private and public military contract system resulting in overproduction of a worthless (from actual improvement of society) commodities that it then dumps en masse into developing countries.
It's pretty much plainly obvious I think at this point, but if the US doesn't reign in the insanely out of control military bullshit (and that includes funding wars like in Ukraine and funding for apartheid countries like Israel) there's no way the US doesn't eventually (timelines are impossible on this shit) collapse under its own rotten infrastructure. The neoliberals since around the late 1970s have been absolutely fucking dead set on accelerating that rot. I dunno when it gives in, but in the meantime I expect a nonstop deluge of continued warmongering and projections of the rest of the world collapsing.
"Mass transit? Wtf is that? Here's a neat missile!"
"Healthcare? Huh? Here's another $100B for Ukraine."
"Public education funding? How about more police? Best we can do."
"Drug addicted, sick, and unhealthy population? Personal problem! Moral failing! What do you except from the government!?"
(Not that person)
1 File transfers can be done via apps like localsend, pairdrop/snapdrop (selfhosted, I wouldn't use the public servers), or simply putting files on a shared server, etc.
2 This is impossible to correctly answer until the new phones are actually out. Reason being we don't know the restrictions (or hopefully not) that Apple will arbitrarily apply to the port. The iPad, for what it's worth, can easily mount USB C drives and other accessories, so, hopefully Apple continues in that vein of sanity
3 no
4 my iPhone is my actual phone phone and the pixel is wifi only.
Freedom ™️ finally came to China.
That sucks though. I hate that Android, which used to be the pride of nerds due to its customization options, is locking down more and more year after year.
Even if people don't care for their phones/tablets, ok, but the "trusted" default companies are all dogshit. Now google is implementing shit that seems like it will effectively eliminate custom roms in the next few years by making it impossible (or very hard anyway) to use apps that use their "security" shit.
I use android and ios (because I'm a freak) and it makes me sad to think that the only reason for using android at all (and I'm not trying to do a fanboy war. I literally use both OS) which is the ability to install basically whatever the fuck I want might be gone someday soon. This mostly matters day to day (and I suspect this is the REAL motivation here) in apps like modified YouTube, Spotify, Twitch, Twitter etc. all for the purpose of removing annoying/no-one-asked features and, of course, the endless deluge of ads. I know "the end of Adblock!" fearmongering has been a constant for at least a decade now, and I'm sure longer, but as these corporations lock down operating systems and apps further and further we may actually be approaching that moment for real. It's very clearly in the interest of the corporations to do it, but obviously consumers hate it, so they've been slow boiling us and at this point maybe finally they're letting it boil. I suppose we'll see. Google still makes the Pixel series for now, but the changes with the trust system (I forget their name for it. Safetynet and all that shit) make loading custom roms possible but increasingly impractical. Just hate to see it.
You know what really feels like freedom?
When you're looking to buy an inexpensive test phone for coding, and you see recommendations for Chinese brands, so you go to their websites and such... and a hour later and a rabbit hole later you discover your shithole country has banned certain brands for no actual articulable reason. Just some vague "Chinese spyware!" To which my question is always, even if that's true, which I doubt, isn't the bootloader unlocked? I'll just install some other rom. "NOPE, CHINA SPY WARE BALLOONS DONT YOU GET IT?!?"
Land of the free, home of the brave my asshole. Can't even buy the phone you want without Uncle Sam having a say.
It should be worrying to all these FREEDOM LOVING PATRIOTS ™️ that the US is becoming less "free" (as far as private commodity purchases go) but, it turns out, it was never about freedom or not, it was just about racism and nationalism. 🎵 whomp whomp 🎵
Not reading that (assuming) Nazi dogshit.
Let me guess: Workers have no moral right to strike because they see "stealing" value and specifically surplus value aka profits from their magnanimous capital-owning bosses?
Pathetic argument to justify exploitation and (actual) theft. Sad. Baby brained.
Your first point is made irrelevant by the law existing. It doesn't matter what Apple says now, they must comply or face fines for violation. Maybe they'll bring that up at a future court hearing to which I say: I hope the EU imprisons Tim Cook if they try. Why? Fuck em that's why
They'll very likely try some fucky shit. Good news is 1) simply the existence of proper alternatives, even if required to be sideloaded, is a MASSIVE step forward and 2) I assume the EU will pursue them if only to suck money from their coffers. Blocking it to a EU citizen who is outside the EU absolutely violates the spirit of the law and the EU should come down on Apple with all their power if/when that happens
I personally use Fennec and Bromium whenever using Android (I'm a sick fuck who hot swaps between an iPhone and a Google Pixel phone). Fennec for a lot of stuff is fine, but much like the default Firefox, it's still slow- although better. Bromium and other Chromium based browsers on Android, especially on older shittier hardware, are really hard to beat. I find myself using Bromium a lot just because it's simply faster. Firefox/Fennec with native support for actual ublock origin though... nothing beats that browsing experience as far as replicating real desktop browsing. Bromium can't keep up and Google doesn't want Chrome to. Brave can offer a similar blocking experience but at what cost? I fucking H A T E crypto and even their features that you can turn off, just seeing references to them and such pisses me off. Honestly wish someone would spitefully fork Brave anonymously and remove any crypto references. Last time a team did it openly Brave got pissy and tried to get the project taken down... Even though it's open source. So, fuck them.
Do you have ublock origin installed? It eliminates all those popups in my experience.
This is pretty much what happened, yes. I'd offer an important expansion on "innovative features" though. Chrome was objectively faster at everything. Loading pages, starting up, all that stuff. If all you care(d) about was a super fast, modern-feeling browsing experience then Chrome was all there was.
I was one of those "fuck Bill Gates!" dudes circa 2008 or 09 or whenever Chrome came along. I had been using Firefox for years because, I dunno, nerd shit. All my nerdy buddies used it and said I should use it, so I did.
And then Chrome came along and like you say Google was the cool kid on the block. They were building out Google Fiber (remember that? Feels bad), "taking it to the man ™️!" in the form of ISPs. Oh God, how I wish they had won that fight... Even the might of Google proved incapable of breaking the collusion of government and corporations that empower the ISPs in the US...
Anyway, Google was, if I'm being fair here, doing an amazing job with PR.
They were building up and out Android OS, providing an actual competitor to Apple's (basically) first to market iOS.
Mozilla simply couldn't keep up. It was already pretty niche pre-Chrome, but post-Chrome it was just IE/Edge and Chrome basically. Firefox was left far behind by the general public, forgotten and, if remembered, remembered only as "the browser for nerds."
I'm back on Firefox now after Google's billionth threat to end adblockers in Chrome. That plus Google's clearly unethical practices. I don't agree with everything Mozilla does/has done and some of the stuff that comes prepackaged in Firefox is unnecessary in my view, BUT there's little point in denying their superiority over the competition in many ways.
I let people play on my lawn just to bring balance to the universe. Unless they don't clean up their dog's shit. Then old man mode erupts.
Normie is incredibly common online in general. It’s not just relegated to weird right wing sites either.
I’m in my mid 30s and even I gotta say… you sound a bit like “old man yells at cloud” with this take. Just chill out a little bit. You’re making the rest of us approaching-middle-agers look bad.
And if you’re somehow younger than me then I gotta say… actually, keep it up. Your apparent lack of being terminally-online (oh no, I used a recently coined term…) is definitely healthier than whatever the fuck the rest of us are doing.
It’s actually crazy to think how much power the US President has. World wide, of course, but that isn’t my interest. I’ve been saying for a long time now if Biden gave half a shit about anything he’d just simply arrest all the conservative SCOTUS justices and members of congress and hold them under military guard. Who’s gonna break them out? The cops? Random hogs? Good luck. I hope they try and simultaneously I get to see an Abrams tank get molotoved by some hog who watched a TikTok and immediately see the tank blast a squad car into fiery pieces with roasted chunks of ham and squealing nearby piggies Actually this sounds amazing.
He could hold, it’s easy enough to claim it’s protecting against an insurrection following Jan 6. I mean Trump quite literally handed Biden the excuse to purge every republican from every office and have them all lined up in front of a firing squad day 1. Who the fuck would argue that they didn’t all openly engage in a conspiracy to stop his election? No, I don’t actually think the US is a democracy nor do I overly care about the liberal democratic processes and all that BS- but their rules which we all supposedly live by, all the Republicans, to some degree, are guilty. So do the damn thing and save us all a bunch of asspain.
Of course Biden didn’t do even 1% of that because he’s a pussy first and foremost. And additionally he serves bigger masters than any of us. What Trump did ultimately didn’t threaten capital’s interests too much. Had he succeeded, things might’ve been awkward for a bit, but a few purges later everyone is going about their day again probably. That’s why there’s never been a real effort to deal with him. Had he actually been any sort of real threat to capital he could’ve been dispensed of immediately and any day since. People die in car accidents all the time… he serves capital though by providing a convenient entertaining distraction for hogs and libs alike. He passes bills capitalists want passed. He speaks out a small amount against the MIC but does nothing to actually end it. So Biden doesn’t actually care, capitalists don’t care, maybe we care, but unfortunately we don’t have tanks. I don’t anyway.
Revanced has sponsorblock though and has for a while
I know memories are tiny and all that, but has the concept of mutually assured destruction completely left the "journalist" class's brains? They do understand China and the US both have ICBMs and thus any aggression from either side may well escalate to thermonuclear war and the complete destruction of the earth... right? Like, everyone knows this. So when you type out anything along the lines of "prepare for US war against China" you're also writing "prepare for nuclear holocaust."
This warmongering against China is completely deranged and if I were writing a fictional book, which I am, a completely fictional and made up book, one of the fictional characters protected under the first amendment (allegedly) would advocate, again, in a book, that anyone with a meaningful "platform", Chinese citizen or American, who instigates war between the two countries be summarily executed. A couple Fox News idiots and Elon Musk, in a book, being shot live on tv would be far preferable to whatever the fuck is happening. These pieces of dogshit aid the military and CIA in every. Single. War and whatever else bad and nothing or very little ever happens to them. A fictional character seeks to change that.