Do they not sell kids joke books in the check out line at the grocery store anymore? Used to be tons of those.

Well, he’s a Peter Thiel proxy… but Musk is also a Thiel proxy so that can get confusing.

Leading expert on buttons says to use buttons?

It’s exactly what Big Button wants you to think!!! Wake up sheeple!!!1!1!11

My elderly dad called me a few years ago to let me know that we’d have to change up all the security stuff for our family phone plan because he gotten scammed. He said he got a call from someone claiming to be a representative of the phone company who said they’d like to lower our monthly bill. I stopped him and said “well, that should have been your first clue… when in the last decade of us using them has that ever happened? When was the last time our bill went down instead of up?”

Sure, the scams like pig butchering look dumb from the outside, but never think shit like this can’t happen to you. There’s TONs of ways scammers can trick you, but usually they’ll seek out vulnerable people. Sure the gullible are vulnerable, but just because you’re not vulnerable right now, doesn’t mean you won’t be at some point in the future. Desperation can make scholars into fools.

My first thought also. I get people not wanting to get the police involved (i.e. some officers may share the sibling and father’s sentiment), but this is definitely a situation where authorities should be contacted. This really feels like we’re going to hear in like two months a local TV reporter say the words: “from a FOI request, we’ve learned that the two suspects were on police radar for months.”

The blood of their own people is also on their hands… because the IDF and the Netanyahu government uses them as human shields; it’s a fact that they play fast and lose with Israeli lives. Remember that they had intelligence an attack was highly likely around the month of Oct… they still let that music festival continue and didn’t attempt to evacuate or even warn the kibbutz near the walls surrounding Gaza. They wanted any kind of attack to be at least marginally successful so they could justify bulldozing and occupying Gaza so that settlements could commence there.

Had an upgrade while all that was going on. Got a free 50 inch TV for staying with Samsung for my next phone.

Wait… which part of this headline is biased exactly?

American here but, from what I understand of Pan-European politics generally, it’s more of an attempt to unify everyone else and not necessarily to draw away far-right voters.

That’s… that’s a Pornhub category right? “Watching people watching porn” has got to be a tab on that site. It’s sounds too much like a kink to not be a kink.

I think Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro is a good choice, but Michigan’s Governor Whitmer is also an excellent idea. Both states are needed to win and have been looking choppy electorially (to say the least). I don’t think Sanders would take the call (for various reasons, none of which are bad). AOC is too “east-coast” when you’ve already got one of the more progressive Democrats on the ticket in Harris. Besides her time as a DA, Harris is fairly progressive. She was originally put on the 2020 Biden ticket as a nod to progressives within the party… so far as VP, she’s stayed to the left of Biden on most things.

The average American has been convinced that when they are done being a worker for the day, they become something “better” and more important… the consumer. The consumer has no needs other than consumption. The consumer has no wants other than consumption. Their fellows economically simply become their servants as that is the illusion created by the culture of consumption.

Look at most folks making less than $100k/year and who are voting Republican. Ask them why they are voting and they will give you a myriad of reasons, but (in my experience) it mostly boils down to “they’re hurting the other team and I want to be part of the winning team.” Some liberals will give you the same type of response, but it’s less common (or less enthusiastically so maybe). It’s less that our electorate has been dulled to political activity and more that politics has been turned into a participation sport with teams, branding, and merchandise.

In my experience, the greatest example of this are the folks who’ve been completely demoralized saying “both sides are the same.” It is true that both the Republicans and Democrats are the same… if the only way politics affects you is economically (or if you can convince yourself that that is the case). It’s not the politicians or even the parties that are hurting the average American, it’s the Consumer Capitalism all sides of our politics back that’s hurting us. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you a fairytale like “USSR was good actually” or “PRC is good actually.” Just as America and it’s systems have problems, those countries and their systems had/have their own problems.

Being the core of the post-WWII Western hegemony, American politics has problems that are uniquely it’s own; the old adage of “there are no poor Americans, only temporarily embarrassed millionaires” sadly holds true. It affects every level of our politics, culture, and society to the point where no one needs to propagandize to that effect… it’s merely self-reinforces at this point. You work doubles at the Walmart to feed your family and to afford your cell phone plan because you’re just one magic algorithm lift away from TikTok stardom… it’ll happen -any day now- why worry about politics?

As a cis dude who’s asexual, I’ve gotten weird questions from straight dude bros… one asked me if I “had to be super careful” to not get myself pregnant. Honest question coming from a person our country’s education system has failed.

Yeah, more clean but not completely… this is not to mention the amount of damage caused by the bomb. Striking Kiev or another city would effectively decimate Ukraine’s infrastructure and economy for decades. If the goal of the war is to subjugate, you don’t want to be in the hook for all those repairs. A nuke on any of Ukraine’s cities would make that dam break last year look like nothing.

If Russia were to strike Ukraine with a nuclear bomb, first and foremost that puts every nation on a knife’s edge globally… someone else with an itchy trigger finger could launch against Russia in the confusing hours afterwards. Next up, the PRC and India would likely abandoned Russia as waves of condemnation would flood the global media. Finally, the whole goal of the war is to take Ukraine, not to make it uninhabitable… why nuke what you want to own?

Unlikely. There’s kind of only two hard-and-fast rules for nuclear war:

• Never strike first.
• Never strike a non-nuclear enemy.

Blake’s a good guy, but a little off-putting in person. He’s what my grandmother would call “a character.” I have no doubt he believes what he says, but I doubt the versatility of his claims on this.

The British Royal family. I’m an American, living in America, and the number of people here who follow the royals to the point of being sycophants is so freaking weird. I literally do not care about the machinations of a bunch of rich fucks who’s sole claim to fame and fortune is being sprayed out of the correct penis before then falling out of the correct vagina.

I think the most good I could do would be to go back to the mid-1700’s colonial America, probably a center of education like Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. Patient a couple of simple but yet-to-exist technologies like the addiator calculator, rifled gun barrel, etc, but especially the optical telegraph. I would try to leverage these devices/systems into myself joining the Continental Congress as a representative. The optical telegraph is 100% technology that was possible, but not in existence and one that I think could have had unforseen relevance to the founding of the United States. Imagine if long distance, nearly instantaneous communication had existed when the Constitution was being written… think about the implications of that for communication privacy protection. Might even be able to convince the founders to include such a system to be part of the constitutionally mandated post office. I think all it would take would be to point out how important communications had been in the War of Independence: “imagine Savannah has been attacked by Spain. It would take several days for a place like Boston to be alerted to that event… with the optical telegraph the whole nation would know within a matter of a few hours.” After all that, I’d probably try to help get germ theory off the ground and write rebuttals to push back on the various scientific racism theories floating about at that time.