They want a backdoor so they can use it, but so can everyone else if they know where it is. In some ways, that makes it worse than having no encryption at all because it gives you the illusion of safety when in reality, if people know how to jiggle the handle of your door the right way, they can walk right into your living room at any time.

I’m in Massachusetts and can report much the same here. Outside the cities, there’s plenty of MAGA maniacs. You could see “Trump 2020” flags still up all throughout Biden’s term in spots.

Half of the people who voted*

Trump got about the same number of votes this time as he did in the previous election (marginally less, I believe).

It makes little difference to point out, but it’s good to remember that the Dems are a bunch of feckless corporate shills who lost the support of their voters, and about a third to half the country simply doesn’t vote.

Trump is a symptom and the end result of deeply systemic and cultural issues here, and as an American, I hope you guys make it hurt. Maybe then we’ll wake up to the problems here. I doubt it, but at least the economic collapse here will hopefully spare the rest of the world from a dementia patient with daddy Putin’s leash on his collar swinging the biggest military budget in the world around like he’s got something to compensate for.

This country was a mistake…

Yes, but the internationally recognized name is the Gulf of Mexico. It has that history behind it that even Americans agree with. Trump might as well have decreed that it should be called the Gulf of Trump and that the state of New Mexico is now South Colorado.

The implication behind it is that the US owns the Gulf, and nobody wants this change, especially Americans. It’s chaotic malicious, along the lines of claiming ownership over the Panama Canal (which he also did) and Greenland (did that one, too).

Hostages are taken from their homes or jobs with the express intent to threaten their lives, and exchange them for a political outcome.

While this describes them perfectly.

Some instances have very different rules on them that would affect your experience. Like not allowing downvotes, for example. Blahaj users can’t see downvotes or downvote anything themselves.

And if you voted for Trump, you supported the Palestinian genocide and the genocide of American minorities through the silent violence of the oppression of Project 2025 (as well as everything else in there such as the destruction of the American educational system), increasing the global power of Russia by appointing a known Russian asset to the presidency of the US (and all the other Russian assets that he was going to put into power through his cabinet), and the murder of potentially millions of Americans through another pandemic event, like Trump did during COVID.

And if you voted for neither? You were okay with either option happening. You didn’t care enough about genocide to prevent other genocides from occurring as a consequence of the election.

Your message is true, but your stats are off. Trump only got something like 15% of the total voting population in the US and won by like 1.5% of the vote. Studies say that historically, 60% of Americans are more liberal than the government - and that includes when Democrats have been in power.

Conservatives are a minority, and the MAGA crazies even more so. They just shout really loudly to convince everybody that they’re a majority. The real issue is that 50% or so of Americans simply don’t care enough to vote against fascism or care more about maintaining the facade of order than freedom. Like MLK said, the biggest threat to equal rights isn’t the white supremacist, but the white liberal who cares more about a negative peace than true justice.

Pretty sure they mean “actual leftist” as in “not just liberals and moderates.” Because there are plenty of instances with an axe to grind against Hexbear for their bad behavior.

Very true. I was just saying that you can also blame enshittification for it going down like it has as well. Burning the candle at both ends and all that.

This brings up an interesting point because my first thought when I read “inundated with sexualized media their whole lives,” my first thought was, “In this Puritan culture?!” On the one hand, ads are all about using sex to sell products, while on the other, advertisers want nothing to do with anything that isn’t ‘kid friendly’ content. You just need to look at how sanitized the internet has become by corporations to see that at work.

But I think there’s something to be said there, and I think it goes deeper than just “the kids these days live in a Godless society of homosexual perverts” or whatever. I think the normalization of sex and availability of information about sex and sexuality has probably influenced it. I’d also say that the current state of the world and the stress of daily life have as much of an influence on this as the amount of sexualized media in their everyday lives. It’s been a noticeable thing with Milennials having less sex and fewer kids from stress, both financial and otherwise, and I see no reason that wouldn’t continue to trickle down to other generations. And even the amount of media out there, regardless of type, has just as much of an effect. If you have books to read and movies to watch, you’re less likely to pop out kids accidentally because you were bored and got frisky.

But how do you keep making the line go up, especially in a “market” with such a guaranteed drop-off point in user retention? You can do what these companies do and fill your apps with bots to keep engagement metrics up and users coming back as they fail to date your fake users. I’d call that enshittification, and it probably makes everything worse in this case.

Is Gen Z becoming the new Millennials?

“Gen Z is ruining the Dating App Market!”

The cis male urge to:

Posted the wrong one before

Edit: Wrong one

The cis male urge to:

Rouge vs rogue is another good one. Also, aluminum vs ah-lu-mini-um.

As an American, I can tell you it’s true, and we don’t realize it in large part because portion sizes in the US are crazy. A medium-sized beverage here would be a large in most other countries. Restaurants traditionally serve huge portions of food, supposedly originally so that no matter how big your appetite, everybody would get enough to eat and have leftovers to bring home. But now people just eat it all.

Add in all the sugar that’s in our food (thanks to a health propaganda campaign that convinced people fat was bad, most fat is replaced with sugar - especially high-fructose corn syrup), which is way more fattening than actual fat, and the lack of pedestrian access to most things, and you’ve got a perfect recipe for an obesity epidemic of people who eat too much, drink too many sugary drinks, and don’t exercise enough.

It’s part of the propaganda. Richest country in the world, they say, but you pay a lot more for basically everything because there’s few government regulations keeping prices in check, and a number of things that are done by the government in other countries are run by for profit corporations here (healthcare).

Although, $10.50 for the mail is pretty pricey. That’s no letter that they’re sending. I run an Etsy shop and frequently send stuff in padded envelopes through the post office, and those cost me like $4 to send across the country.