World News

You mean the Republican party? At this point I'm convinced their voter based would elect a serial killer so long as they said they were Republican.

Irony is truly lost on this platform

It seems that our leaders idolize Russia back. 🤣

It's all about this,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

Apparently, Putin's regime is seen as an example for our leaders to follow.

P.S.: Without the direct threat that the communist USSR posed to Western elites, social-democracy faded away as the rich became more and more emboldened.

what's happening is our current system right now is in the process of failing. it's dying, it didn't work and it can no longer sustain itself. Someone once said something along the lines of "When the current system fails, the next one will consist of whatever ideas are left"

So what ideas are left? the ideas of the far right, just like far right ideas are ALWAYS left when a system is about to die. So all these governments, all these wealthy individuals, all these people that have the most to gain are are going start backing the new up coming system. We're seeing it in real time.

But this has happened time and time again. We're a collectively dumb species and love watching repeats. it's always the same song and dance "well lets go this way, sure it didn't work out last time but I don't believe it'll happen to us THIS time".

So it's not so much "what the fuck is this timeline" but rather "well it's our generations turn for bullshit". And it always skips a generation. So the boomers didn't experience it, but their parents did, and now it's our turn. Hopefully our children or our Kids children will be smarter than boomers but...we as humans sure do love watching reruns.

And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails

They didn't just write emails, they actually picked up the phone and called them, non stop. They made it into a problem that couldn't be ignored. Gamers haven't done that, unfortunately.

As someone still in Russia, a bit of the same.

That is, I expected things to get worse, but not "avalanche of shit, cockroaches and rat bones" levels of worse.

Except the idolization part started receding much earlier, when I actually learned English well enough to understand that these are very intolerant societies. Say, where in Russia people disagreeing with you on some key matters would look at you like a fool or just decide to stop this conversation so that neither of you would offend the other, in English-speaking countries, it seems, there was simply no way to survive outside of some echo chamber and God forbid you find none to fit into. But that was like 10-15 years ago, now, of course, in Russia you can get jailed or strongly fined for words.

But I thought there's some deeper wisdom and in those harsher societies people are also somehow better capable to maintain their common freedom and dignity yadda-yadda. In fact that's not what I see.

As a bit of gloating - at least now the "why are you not all revolting against Putin" Western types can be answered with their own regrettable example instead of common sense and logic, these are fine, but an example is more efficient.

Sweden teaches its kids English first now. You'll be fine.

Well US free speech is telling lies and misleading millions of people on broadcast television.

If you could project into the future, you might see that VPNs are a dwindling non-solution to the problem. As this unsettling trend makes waves across all jurisdictions in the world, every VPN's IP will be subject to these new controls.* Eventually normies might need to understand technologies like Tor or I2P. Only problem is, if things get really bad they might ban the use of both outright. I'm not sure if I2P can be detected just as Tor, but I do know Tor users can be detected easily. Which is why if you're in a "censorship" country you need to use some sort of special subset of entry guards. I2P might be better because every node in the network is like a router, none are specifically entry, middle, or exit nodes. Only thing I could think of, maybe some form of deep packet inspection? If everybody runs an I2P router, then simply making requests to other nodes is not enough to determine it's an i2p communication?* It's just distributed computing, the way the internet was intended!