Fucking based.

I was in Moscow around 2015 and while it’s by no means a perfect mirror it did in many ways have “Bizarro America” vibes. Big auth superpower nations just do certain things in common and do them very differently than smaller nations.

Cox Media Group got kicked off Google’s ad partner program a few years ago when 404 Media scooped that they had a feature called CMG Active Listening which did exactly this. They had a slide deck. Audio spying by advertisers is like doping in pro sports, everybody does it and you only get caught if you’re stupid. Remember back in 2013 a whistleblowing NSA contractor told us to put our phones in the fridge if we wanted to have a secret conversation? He had a slide deck, too. The western world is run by a cult of pedophiles, the fact that our phones listen in on us without our consent is not a stretch.

This is just one industry drinking another industry’s IP milkshake.

Some good reading about the National Endowment for Democracy aka NED https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy

I’ve lived here my whole 40 years and can verify that while a significant chunk of our voting class (Because it very much is a class thing) are sheltered enough from consequence that they are either still satisfied with status quo or their disaffection leads them only to encourage debasement, the class living a tenuous and effectively disenfranchised existence is much larger. Did you know that despite our last presidential election having the largest turnout in US history, less than half of citizens and barely more than half of eligible voted participated? Whether disenfranchisement or apathy, neither of those reasons generate from nothing.

But my point above was not that it’s incorrect to point the blame squarely at US voted for their government’s decline (Even though I would probably argue, in a separate debate, that it is), my point is that it’s entirely the wrong tree to be barking up when trying to figure out how to put America back on “The right track”. Thinking that we can just yell at Americans until they vote progressive is to deeply misunderstand the nature of power. Asking why Americans are so disaffected, apathetic, or disenfranchised that they don’t participate in politics is perhaps a good first question, instead.

I don’t think you’re really addressing what I wrote. I’m not saying it’s untrue in a strict sense. I’m saying it’s a disingenuous point. A misleading framing. An uncritical, not entirely applicable, and wholly unhelpful approach to our political issues.

Kinda? Most Americans are extremely low-information on politics, and never proactively educated as to how to find that information or sometimes even why it matters. We are the most propagandized population on Earth, our country has little to no standards for factual information in media and several of our major outlets are just pure corporate spin, while all of our major newspapers are owned by oligarchs. Demographic fact is gerrymandered out of our districts, our default voting method creates perverse incentives to elect popularity over platform and locks third parties out of viability. Individual jurisdictions decide how voting is accomplished and more often than not use this power to make it difficult to do so instead of easier. There is almost no enforcement of laws requiring leave from work to vote. There is next to no oversight of our physical voting machines and little trust in tabulation, while parties can and often do purge voter roles between elections without informing those who they nullified. Ultimately most people didn’t vote for this because quite frankly most people don’t or can’t vote for one of the reasons above, something that I missed, or a tragic apathy created by said trainwreck of conditions.

Saying “The people voted for this” sounds logical but the reality on the ground makes the statement wholly disingenuous. At the very least it’s not a statement that can be built off of for a more productive outcome, in fact it functions as a thought-terminating cliche and provides cover for a class of power who continuously work to keep this set of circumstances cemented in place.

You have complete agency over your own toxicity.

“Host” was certainly poor wording as one of it’s other definitions is literally data center services, I meant to refer only to the siting of software research which the headline calls the “AI brain”.

And yeah I agree on ultimate trajectory, AI offerings are 95% folly and it’s now so big that even countries who haven’t integrated their economies with the sector will feel the pain when it collapses, China will not be immune. Though they will probably just stumble while the US will completely face plant.

Most of that goes toward implementation (data centers) and chip manufacturing. China is making money on compute services and maintaining capability parity on software the good old fashioned pirate way merely to prevent a technology gap with the US, as is their way.

I would reckon that China is perfectly satisfied to let us be the sole host of the thing that is rapidly destroying our economy and trust in all media from the inside out.

Do you think that asking a simpleton gotcha question absent any further explication isn’t a contrarian and socially erosive rhetorical tack which suggests in context that you’d implicitly support any mass murdering sovereign incursion by the US so long they’ve convinced you that their target is a bad dude?

Cause it sure comes across that way, even if that’s not the case. And yes, I’m aware that their ayatollah was a revolutionary replacement of our shah.

OK now who are we installing next to come back and murder in 2050?

You hear that, EU? Lean hard into your data sovereignty, if only to piss off America.

If a public services brings in more revenue than it spends it means the public is being robbed.

It was on the same descending progression we are on now, relatively speaking it felt the same then as now, and if we continue down this spiral without annihilating ourselves the next one will make trump look just like dubya.

> Created ICE
> Created TSA (No fly list, porno scanners, etc)
> Created the Patriot Act
> Created No Child Left Behind Act (Left lots of children behind)
> Lied to invade Iraq (Hundreds of thousands dead, inspired ISIS, Abu Ghraib)
> Lied to invade Afghanistan (Hundreds of thousands dead again)
> Somehow didn’t catch Osama
> Botched Hurricane Katrina response, domestic humanitarian disaster
> Emboldened a wave of evangelicism that dulled American culture for years
> Normalized state torture in the west at Guantanamo
> Halliburton
> Vice President shot a guy
> Greatly expanded NSA domestic surveillance and FISA

These are just the big ones off the top of my head, I could go on.

edit - Damn there’s a big list, dive in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:George_W._Bush_administration_controversies

It’s definitely abusing the present to create a myth of relative harm that serves to sanitize the past. Ratchet effect.

Reads like someone who wasn’t even around for Bush Jr regime.