yes I’m aware we are not the literal greatest country on earth (despite frequent claims to the contrary) and are in fact far from it, I’ve had many frequent reminders and am aware, vaguely, of how other countries do things better than we do. But by all means don’t miss the chance to remind the ones in the back who don’t know this, though I struggle to think of how many of those people would be on Lemmy.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but “donald trump cannot [xyz] because [abc]” is not a phrase that has meaning anymore in this country, as far as I’m concerned. It’s worth less than “liberty and justice for all”, and those words are cheap here, nowadays.

Literally how many times does this have to play out before people recognize the pattern? I have lost fucking count.

>talking heads on TV: “donald trump cannot do the thing because it would not be allowed”

>donald trump: does the thing anyways

>everyone: surprised pikachu.jpg

Not to mention, trying to think like Donald Trump, I can think of several actual tangible “advantages” trying to do exactly this would confer: 1. He could recruit the freshly pardoned racist murderer into his personal goon squad of racist murderers, ICE. 2. It would cause needless pain and suffering to the family of Massey, and the cruelty is the point. 3. It would invoke a media shitstorm on the left, while the right would paint it as “owning the libs” and “supporting our brave officers”, the usual horseshit. And finally, it would be further unlawfully expanding the power of the executive branch, something he has been doing literally all year.

If I’m wrong, I’d love to hear how.

how much you want to bet he gets pardoned by the pedo cheeto before serving the lions share of that sentence?

I’m in Pennsylvania and I couldn’t agree more. Do not come here – not just because the personal risk to a foreigner is incredibly high right now, but also because tourism is money and money is the only language these shitstains in office speak.

worse than a liar; a liar makes you doubt everything the liar says, but generally you don’t lose faith in all information as a result of one person being full of shit.

AI doesn’t just lie, it lies often enough, convincingly enough, and is ubiquitous enough now that it dilutes the truth and makes everyone (like OP) question harder the validity of everything they see – or, more easily, start believing in nothing outright.

LLMs are neat tools, if very flawed ones, but image/video genAI is a fucking Torment Nexus that should not have been made.

my god, the 1970s were the malaise era

we’re in the manbaby era

Take it from an American paying attention: if this PP guy I hear so much about takes after Trump so much, yes, this is exactly what will happen

Contrary to what many people may believe, while I’m sure the government has an idea of who has guns and who doesn’t, I doubt that idea accurately reflects reality. There are lots of ways in the US to get or make a gun that don’t involve anything beyond cash changing hands.

It’s only a matter of time.

Sounds like a fine way to end up eating a buckshot sandwich, but I’m not one to interrupt my enemy while they’re making a mistake.

the tl;dr I got from this: he’s extra fucked in the long term (aka: anything beyond midterms and especially after january 19th 2028, not that I think he’ll even live that long) but he can still screw us all very hard in the short term (anything from now til midterms), even if we completely dispense with the possibility of martial law and the attempted meddling in/cancellation of elections around midterms or in 2028 (which is not a bet I’d make).

To the shock and surprise of absolutely, positively, not one single human being with a brain.

I’ll never get over how some people whiteknight for soulless corporations that not only don’t give a fuck about them but actively hold them in contempt, yes, the internet is a silly place.

no, you don’t understand, as Take Two and R* quite happily also take down free mods.

for the umpteenth time, quit making mods for games that are developed by asshats. Take Two/R* very clearly don’t want a healthy community surrounding and supporting their games as evidenced by virtually every decision they make regarding community modding efforts, stop trying to give them one; spend your time making mods for better games. Or better still, go from modding games to creating them and you could develop your vision without the constraints of someone else’s IP. But for the love of fuck stop giving time and effort to these people who will deliberately squander it.

No no, you’ll need slugs if you want to hole-punch any body armor.

Not that I would know what you aim on using your wireless hole-punch for.

Mental acrobatics. Mental Cirque du Soleil, if you will.

Every day, I feel more vindicated in my choice to switch and wipe my windows partition even with compatible hardware.

I take one issue with this, just one.

“They can’t be everywhere”

See, that may have held up in the 1930s and 40s, but we live in the country with the most robust surveillance apparatus on the globe. And almost every one of us carries around a fun little brick full of privacy violations with us, everywhere we go, absorbing everything we do and say and buy, and packages it neatly into a form ad agencies and the government can use how they like. And one of those little bricks we call smartphones, why, not only do we carry them around willingly, they’re almost a necessity to get anything done in the modern era. We have surveillance that the Gestapo would’ve had wet dreams about. And, more, all of the largest tech corporations and their techbro CEOs – Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc. – are only too happy to kiss the ring and give them unfettered access. To say nothing of the countless other devices spying on you – Ring doorbells selling your data to police departments comes to mind. License plate scanners – even if your car doesn’t spy on you (which, if it was made in the last decade, it almost certainly does to some extent). Your desktop computer has been backdoored by Intel’s management engine or AMD’s PSP for well over a decade – if you don’t think they’ve built in backdoors for the government, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. They can strongarm any company in the world they want, especially ones owned and operated in the US, do you really think they haven’t quietly taken them aside and demanded hardware-level access to every computer made in the last 20 years? With how much the people at the NSA would have wet dreams about that? Yeah, no.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily hopeless. But there will be no Anne Franks hiding in the attic if it comes to that point. They can, in fact, be everywhere, and if the hammer falls it’s going to fall hard and fast, there will be no long continuous search for undesirables across the countryside.

If you want my advice? do as much sketchy-looking shit as possible while not actually doing anything illegal. Use a VPN. Look up Kali and Tails and download them to a Ventoy flash drive. Run I2P (even Tor – but preferably I2P) on your computer. Get Signal. Download the simple sabotage manual, expedient homemade firearms, etc. Do everything in your power to make them look as closely at a complete nothing as possible, and destroy their signal to noise ratio – and tell your friends to, as well. They can collect mountains of data on everyone, certainly, and we can’t really stop that now; but it still takes humans to sift through (AI cannot, yet, do that for them with any meaningful accuracy) – make them look for their needle in an ever-increasing haystack.

Oh no! Anyways…