The median age of the senate is 65. The article is just cherry picking.

“What do you mean people are naturally shy and antisocial when it comes to their finances?!”

7 points ahead in PA is not “doomed” lol

Tell that to the countries participating in the BRI.

If the Saudis disinvested from the dollar and started selling oil in yuan, it would severely weaken US soft power around the world. At the same time, seizing the assets would remove a bargaining chip from potential peace talks. And those assets likely wouldn’t be enough for Ukraine to win anyway.

Turns out when you steal other countries’ assets (as with Venezuela), other countries stop trusting you with their money and start trusting other countries (like China) with it instead. If they wanna speedrun losing a second cold war, that’s the way to go.

This is random and nitpicky, but can we talk about that ad’s soundtrack?

Maybe things have changed and I’m out of touch, but I thought the thing was to put suspenseful horror movie music over attack ads, you know, like the classic Michael Myers theme. The music they used is like, kind of dark, but it’s more like an action movie, like the way the bass drops at 0:33 is the part of a trailer where they’d so some really cool stunt, and around 0:50 the pace is picking up to where it’s like, trying to hype you up to see the movie. Like, it’s not that far off from the soundtrack in the trailer for Inception, where it’s like, yeah there are some dark aspects to it, but it’s still supposed to be fun and entertaining. I know I’m not the target audience, but this just left me wondering when the Kamala movie dropped, and not like, worried about some sinister plot.

The whole thing feels kinda disjointed tbh. At first the message is, “Biden is senile, Kamala is really running thing, and she’s gonna let the immigrants in, be afraid,” but then by the end the message is, “Haha, Kamala is saying all this incoherent stuff, she’s a joke!” It’s like they got distracted and lost the plot halfway through a one minute ad. I guess they’re just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks, but it’s very unfocused and low effort.

There were lots of little niche forums where you could find a lot of different perspectives. I remember as a kid going to nuklearpower.com, the home of the 8-Bit theater webcomic, and I found a thread in the forums about religion and it was kind of my first real exposure to ideas about it outside of what I’d been raised to believe.

Most early memes were lolcats or epic fails, and I remember going through pages and pages on cheezburger.com with my friends. There were also “demotivational posters,” like this was the height of comedy.

4chan existed and was pretty bad even then but it was more common for somewhat normal people to go there, they loved their slurs and gross out humor but it wasn’t full nazi, it was edgy teens. In general slurs and homophobia were a lot more common, but a lot of the edgy, “you can’t tell me what to do” energy was directed at the religious right, the “moral guardians” who wanted to take away your violent video games. The left was very weak and didn’t have the sort of cultural presence it has today, instead you had a lot of energy directed towards libertarianism, with Ron Paul being the anti-war, pro-weed candidate, and you had liberals with ACLU type values. Things weren’t cut as neatly along party lines back then.

Fewer people were on the internet back then. Lots of young people used it but not as many boomers. There weren’t as many big pillars like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit, there were more subcultures and you never quite knew what you’d find (for better or worse). Algorithms were a lot less polished and you didn’t have as much SEO, Youtube looked and felt radically different.

The indie game Secret Little Haven captures some of the feel of that time period of the internet, from the perspective of a transfem, it gets heavy but it’s good.

Nothing he revealed was a shock, I was joking with my friends about them listening in on 2009 if not earlier.

Yeah, but you didn’t have proof.

The real world impact of the leak was a net negative for Americans.

Absolutely ridiculous. You just can’t distinguish between the state’s interests and the people’s interests. So what if the US’s global image is damaged? That doesn’t affect me. If anything, I’m glad, when the US’s global image was better it meant it could get away with getting involved in stupid imperialist wars that made life worse for everyone but the ruling class. Their interests are directly opposed to mine and hurting them helps me.

Had he been willing to go to jail for it the issue would have stayed in the for front and people would have put a lot of effort into getting him released, and I would have been a supporter of that initiative.

Again, this is literally the only reason you’ve given for why he should’ve done that, that you personally would’ve liked him more, which I don’t believe for a second. Nobody gives a shit what you think, certainly not enough to do something stupid and self-destructive. Snowden would’ve been an idiot not to protect himself.

I could respect him if he was willing to pay the price to do what he thought was right

That’s stupid. There is literally no rational reason to do that. You haven’t given a single reason why he should have, other than that you personally would respect him more, which I don’t believe for a second. You’d just find some other excuse to hate him if he had. His real crime was expose you to a glimpse of reality.

There is nothing inherently gay about sucking dick.

Oh, excuse me.

Haha yeah imagine sucking dick like some kind of WOMAN.

Snowden is a traitor, nothing heroic about him

The traitors are the people in government brazenly violating the law and persecuting the heroes who reveal their crimes to the people. Real treason is treason against the people, treason against a government that is oppressing the people is heroism.

All this blacksite bullshit is a strawman. It’s far more likely he’s a Russian agent than it is he would have been disappeared and or killed.

Lol.

Unlike you, Snowden was actually intelligent enough to know what would happen to him if he didn’t make arrangements for his freedom. I have no idea how it’s possible to be as naive as you, but I guess when you’re completely focused on licking the boot, you don’t have much awareness of anything other than that. In fact, your main problem with Snowden is that he made you aware of uncomfortable truths, you’d rather remain in comfortable ignorance so you don’t have to worry about the fact that you no longer have civil liberties. Just don’t move and you’ll never notice the chains, right? You’re too cowardly to face the truth.

Haha yeah imagine sucking dick like some kind of GAY.

Snowden is one of the bravest and most heroic Americans alive today, and he is alive because he was smart enough to take precautions instead of letting himself get Epstein’d in some blacksite, like you want. What kinda idiot gets himself killed or imprisoned when he could be free? What the fuck kind of logic is it that says you have to submit to the judgement of a brazenly unjust and oppressive regime? Fuck that shit.

It’s thanks to him that we’re at least aware of the movements of the enemy of the public that is the US state. Braver than any troop. Die mad about it.

Fulgencio. The dictator who was in power before the Cuban revolution, with connections to organized crime, under whom Cuba’s economy was mostly casinos, drugs, and brothels while the people were poor and illiterate. Plundered the country bad enough to spark the revolution that drove him out and brought literacy and education and economic development.

Stop trying to make Trump look cool. If anything, he’s more like Batista.

Slurp slurp slurp 👢😛

The New York Crimes is a garbage propaganda rag. They don’t deserve a red cent from anyone after pushing their transphobic agenda, (and responding to widespread criticism by publishing an article defending JK Rowling) or after they blatantly lied and published a fake news story about Hamas conducting mass rape in an attempt to sway public opinion to be in favor of Israel’s genocide. If you have a NYT subscription, you are paying people to lie to you.

You can go to archive.is and put in the url of a news story you want to read in the second box and it will usually let you bypass the paywall.

Sell their land to a shell company (pun intended) which leased the land back to the main company at inflated rates as part of a convoluted financial scheme to embezzle money, and then blame the endless shrimp.