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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: October 5th, 2025

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  • Agree that the problems predate social media. Also agree with your assessment of the courts and insider palm greasing. To the dumbing down of the populace: there has always been an undercurrent of conservative white people trying to maintain the county’s wealth and power for themselves.

    But this:

    widespread ridiculous amounts of Nationalism >switching of people’s critical thinking about their >country and the purposeful stupidification of the >populace

    Was made infinitely worse by the media environment post-9/11. Since at least 2005, it has been apparent that there was an intentional effort to sell conflicting versions of events to the people so that they could not discern what was true. Yes, all of the American media at the time contributed to the garbage decision to go into Iraq. Initially though, the worst of the confusion of facts was largely driven by Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News. All of the Internet has greatly exacerbated this since then, and it has been asymptotic post-2020.

    Yes, American culture has (always?) been narcissistic and obnoxiously self-aggrandizing. But America had been a gigantic population of wealthy consumers for decades. So it draws all the avaristic psychopaths from around the world like moths to a flame. Are the local people to blame for the machinations of Rupert Murdoch, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk? Saudi Arabian and Russian wealth underwrote Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, even if you count him as one of “the local people”. To the headless beast that is social media now, you have Russia contributing millions of dollars via Tenet Media in the 2024 campaign.

    Obviously there are plenty of American bad actors in this stew of billionaire-owned manipulative media, but most of them act with an agenda that does not involve ripping the country apart.







  • I’m on the fence on this one. How old are they?

    On the visit home over Christmas, the idea crossed my mind of retiring there, and I got fairly homesick. I miss the arid, rugged climate. I hate the cold. Being close to family would be nice, and Texas could use more hard-headed, angry liberals. But it’s too dangerous until my uterus is old and broken down and while I’m responsible for other people with functional or soon-to-be-functional uterii. Texas also has water shortage on the near-term horizon from shitty resource management, so it’s best to wait and see where that goes.

    But my point is, everyone wants to go home to die, right?