deleted by creator

This is a good example of the “If you regulate/tax business, they’ll just leave and you’ll be sorry!” Ayn Rand fallacy.

All this means is that their business model was to gouge consumers, and being barred from gouging cheap internet for their poorest customers revealed that they were (and still are everywhere else) bad faith, dishonest, antisocial actors that have no interest in providing products and services for a reasonable margin.

Just as with any business that would exit a market, or billionaire that would leave the country to prevent taxation back into the commons that facilitated their wealth accumulation to begin with (a preliterate workforce, roads and utilities they disproportionately degrade with heavy use, etc) you demonstrate that you work against your own customers and your own people, so by all means, gtfo.

They still think it’s Presidential to follow pomp and circumstance to preserve the appearance of national normalcy as the nation burns on multiple fronts.

Just as in their Presidencies, they want to be known for promoting social quiet, despite their Presidencies all defending and furthering economic violence in the name of all their wealthy friends who “donated to” their respective parties over the years.

Biden was an og Congressional neoliberal. A prominent one. He helped Reagan convert Republican’s former opposition party into the corpo bribe taking, social inclusion!.. Economic die in the streets… party it is today, locking arms with Republicans to defend our murderous economy from us as they stoke social division between us so we don’t look up at our sociopath owners.

Voted for him out of harm reduction compared to Trump, a vote for quiet not peace, but fuck Joe Biden.

Our oligarchs want us to compete to the death for their ever dwindling relative to inflation and productivity scraps, but they’ve grown too powerful to tolerate competition themselves.

Not when they’ve gone to all the trouble of normalizing monopolies and duopolies at home.

Has the sun tried threatening potential converts?

Works gangbusters for for the most popular religions.

Hell, they usually steal the sun’s defining characteristic to threaten followers with: 🔥🔥🔥.

Always appreciated, FS. It helps me to improve!

I know it’s not the popular choice, but Last Crusade is by far my favorite of the Franchise. I re-watch it way more than Raiders.

I’m not either. But I find peace in understanding, even if the answers suck, as this one does.

If I had an in anywhere in Europe, I’d leave and never look back.

I phone banked for Sanders twice, but have finally accepted this place would take generations of concerted effort to be anything less than cruel and inhuman. It’s too proud of the core causes of its rot (worshipped sociopathic “free to die in the streets market” economy, pride in individualism over community or society, social resentment of paying into Commons like public Ed, greed seen as virtue rather than character deficit and social ill, etc) to want to change.

Ask any therapist, if someone isn’t seeking change, you won’t get anywhere with them. We want things to get better, but we still want to dream of being millionaires and billionaires, and to remain addicted to harmful social opiates like social media, fast food, extreme consumerism, literal opiates, etc.

Voted for Harris out of usual attempted harm reduction because this place is irreparably destroyed since Reagan, but let’s not kid ourselves, Donald Trump represents the United States as it is perfectly.

Proudly ignorant, proudly greedy, proudly gluttonous, obese, egotistical, explicitly judges others on net worth, perpetually drunk on cruelty and schaudenfreude, obsessed with image and his own ego score, demands loyalty and servitude while providing none aka a devout capitalist, obsessed with economic metastasis at literally any human and societal cost, proudly racist while still insisting he’s not, the embodiment of what Americans disgustingly praise: a hyperindividualist who revels in blaming people not born to wealth for their suffering and insists this is a meritocracy after a lifetime of spending daddy’s money.

Donald Trump is like the zeitgeist of the modern United States somehow took tangible human form. You can try to argue we don’t deserve him, or that we have the potential to be a better society than one that would elect him, but you can’t argue he represents who and what a loathsome society we are. A monument of all our sins.

He’s more American as apple pie or baseball ever was, and he’s at least as American as our current national pastimes of mass shootings and of course disgusting hyper-consumption.

That’s why he illicits such a strong response in both directions. Whether you are repulsed or see your own necrotic heart in him, He is an accurate mirror of the practiced culture of The United States of America.

As an American, let me just say, 🎶 Oh Canada… 🎶

Agreed on all counts my friend, and best of luck to you as well.

From my perspective, being disloyal to my country’s attempts to monopolize the information I imbibe, and being counted as part of that mass movement directly is again more important than also rejecting receiving the social media of another evil empire that, again, would simply be seen as patriotism/nationalism/nothing at all. It doesn’t actually meaningfully benefit China, but it does very publicly, as a movement of people not just me, work as a demonstration of undermining the authority of the evil empire I do have some tiny insignificant influence in.

They’ll ban it of course, and there will be another one. And that continuous “We don’t respect you or your authority because you arent on our side” does over time diminish the misplaced faith some still have in our captured institutions. Unfortunately signing up for Lemmy over reddit’s greed or some scandanavian social media doesn’t send the same message.

It has to be an enemy evil empire for the powerful of our evil empire to take notice and be concerned at all. Otherwise, it’s akin to “protesting” with a permit at a designated protest zone out of the eyeline and profit operations of those you’re protesting, aka masturbation.

China is and has committed genocide.

The US is and has committed genocide.

That’s not a point in either’s favor. That’s a moral wash.

I’d rather both nations failed, so something more humane can potentially take its place (and revolution over and over until that happens) but as an American, rejecting China means nothing, just as a Chinese citizen rejecting America means nothing.

Rejecting evil empires begins with undermining the one that you’re expected to support and be a loyal cog of. A Russian openly hating America or a Chinese person openly hating Russia is indistinguishable from patriotism/nationalism.

I can only hurt one empire materially, the one I materially live within. The Chinese have to reign in China, and the Russians Russia. The best I can do is my part not to strengthen or support the evil empire I was born under to the best of my ability.

Not with a ten meter cattle prod for me, anyone willing to indulge Zuck’s midlife Nazi crisis deserves him.

Why should I care about who the US sees as the enemy? I was born here and I’m seen as nothing more than livestock for our capitalists, when they aren’t funding and supplying a genocide against poors halfway around the world.

No way I’m going to rejoin Metabook after 10 years now that they’ve gone full Nazi.

Downloaded Rednote. Cool app. Fuck the hometeam that chose to be the opposite of a society. It’s only the home team if it’s a team, it’s been made clear to most Americans that we’re just a bunch of rugged individuals at each other’s throats for oligarch scraps and we can get fucked and die to profit healthcare scammers.

I’d rather have my clicks profit our supposed enemy than us at this point with “friends” like my country.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2vwdw7zn2o

That is fucked up. Multimillionaires and billionaires, in this case a nepo heiress, losing their third and fourth vanity properties is an inconvenience they will underpay people to suffer for them.

We have Americans dying of exposure in the streets every day by choice for the crime of being defective capital batteries for the people that live in Malibu. Go cry a river for people who have massive blood drenched investment portfolios in the exploitation casino, you’re less than human to them.

That’s hot 🔥

Honestly, this is better.

Corporations, especially publicly traded corporations are amoral. Sociopaths. If they could make moar money murdering you painfully, they would every time.

When they give to charity, they donate 100k to the charity and spend 3 million advertising they gave 100k to charity, as it’s a marketing ploy.

They don’t see poors as human, regardless of identity, you are livestock to them. I like my sociopath capitalists out in the open. They’re even more dangerous when they convince you they have basic decency. They don’t. Sell your products and services, if I absolutely need it, I’ll buy it, if I don’t I won’t.

But we’re half a century past the point of pretending the relationship between the oligarch capitalists and their labor consumers is a cordial, or even respectful one. I’ve long considered these campaigns to be patronizing to a cartoonish degree. They never gave a shit about trans or LGBT who aren’t also affluent. They also don’t care about the hate speech they’re condoning, they just put on whatever false face they believe will maximize profit.

It doesn’t have to be like this, but this is what our economy rewards, sociopathic greed. We’d have to change the shape and priorities of our economy to reward prosocial behaviors and vocations, and punish individualistic greed based vocations, if we wanted that to change. That would require painful revolution as our government is completely captured, and we’re sadly too chickenshit.