He said he won’t ask Trump for a pardon since he doesn’t think he’ll be granted one.

But this is Santos we’re talking about. He’ll definetly try.

Legally the only way he could run again would be to modify the Constitution which is simply impossible since the Democrats will never agree to it.

Which means he’ll have to do it the Trump way by forcing things. => 2028 comes up, he announces he’s going to run again and his fanbase will support him.

=>The Republican leadership will then have to choose between supporting him again or not supporting him and splinter the party. They will probably choose to support him which will trigger probably the biggest constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

=>Democrat states and maybe a few Republican will refuse to put him on their ballots and the Supreme Courts has to get involved. A Supreme Court that is dominated by 6 Republican appointed judges at the moment (3 of whom were appointed by Trump). If more Democrat appointed judges die during his current term, then there’s a fair chance he’ll have complete control over it by the 2028 election. They might actually reinterpret the Constitution to let him run.

I’m honestly very concerned for the US. Maybe he chokes on a chicken wing and we can avoid this whole mess.

They were never defeated.

When you say “defeated”, what exactly do you mean? You mean that they should cease to exist to be considered as such? If that’s the case then I would say it’s an unrealistic expectation.

I would say that they’ve been largely contained. If I remember correctly, back in the '50s almost half of the American population used to smoke. The percentage of people smoking has been consistently decreasing over the years thanks to regulation and increased taxation. Tobacco companies are definetly not as influential as they once were.

Doing nothing at all and just letting kids access anything they want on the internet is not a solution, and hiding behind “freedom” as an excuse to abdicate social responsibility is lazy.

Encroaching on privacy and hiding behind the idea of “protecting kids” as an excuse to take away from your liberty and private life is lazy.

If you want to protect your child from what they might find on the internet, then spend time with them. Don’t pawn this off to the state.

The solution is to give those laws teeth. Harsh regulations on platforms that serve unmoderated content open to everyone. Enforce transparency on content serving algorithms. Massive penalties for security breaches. Ban platforms that don’t comply.

Alright. Then get every single country on Earth to pass the same stringent regulation and invest in measures to enforce it. If you can’t do that, then you can’t effectively protect kids against stuff like this. Taking away rights with the pretext of security for every little thing is how democracies fall.

Don’t make me choose between subjecting children to a stream of unregulated bullshit and the right to privacy. It’s a false dichotomy propped up by our need for digital convenience.

Don’t make me choose between my privacy and someone’s lack of responsibility. I shouldn’t have to give up my rights just because someone can’t supervise their child. Like you’ve said, technology is here to stay. I’m not going to limit my freedom like that over a non issue like this.

I’m just curious… How did you sign up for internet service? Can you walk me through the process?

Sighs. Signing up and giving personal informations to a few services is fine. Your ISP, your bank, your doctor. That’s fine. You know who they are, you remember them, you can keep an eye on them.

Doing this for every possible service on the internet is not. I guarantee you can’t remember all the sites you’ve made an account to and that you probably didn’t read the ToS for each one. If you add a requirement that each one of these sites to verify users through ID or face verification, it massively increases the risk that your data will leak to undesired parties. The state can’t keep track of all of them the same way you can’t do it. They’re just too many. It’s possible that at one point one of these companies will have a data breach or will break regulation. Then your online data (in this case your face and your ID) is up for grabs.

What if a police officer were to randomnly stop you on the street and check your pockets to ensure you’re not carrying child porn? What if they suspect you’re hiding child porn in your underwear? Should we make a law giving the right to police officers to strip you naked just so we can make sure you’re not doing anything illegal? We have to protect children right? Nothing is more valuable right?

You used to have to show your ID to rent a movie in person, why is doing it online any different?

Because that data is stored and passed on to third parties in most cases. Because data breeches are a common occurrence nowadays. Because gorvernments and companies can use that data against you later on.

“Oh, that person has a nasty burn on his face? Why don’t I save that and pass this information to a face cream company?”

“Oh, this person is a refugee from another country? Why don’t I just pass this information to the government so they can see what they’re watching?”

It’s most definetly not like buying liquor when you briefly show your ID to the cashier.

If you (rightfully) are concerned about data collection and surveillance, push for legeslative protections on that topic

The EU and California have already done that and the results are rather poor since it’s difficult to properly enforce. You can slap fines on said companies, but that’s only a setback. It doesn’t stop them especially when you have a weak government like the US has right now.

This is a completely separate issue with a very clear root cause.

No, it’s not. You’re sacrificing privacy and liberty for everyone just to fix mostly a parental issue.

He didn’t say that. Social media companies should be punished and regulated to a certain extent, but saying that they’re the only ones to blame here is frankly bollocks. It’s the same discussion we’ve had with violent video games.

Ignorant parents use this to excuse their lack of action for their kid’s use of social media. What they could and should do is to not allow kids access to it or to monitor their traffic. This however requires willpower, time and effort to understand and implement this into daily life. Which either they don’t have or don’t want to do. This brings us to one of the causes of the low fertility rate for younger generations: it takes more nowadays to raise a child and younger generations are more responsible about raising kids than older generations.

Excessive regulation of social media for kids will massively affect our privacy. Certain European apps now require facial or id verification to use in order to prove you’re old enough. I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell don’t want to give out my ID or let them photo my face just to watch a movie just because some parent isn’t responsible enough to educate their kid.

It’s from the Matrix, maybe you’ve seen it. For those who haven’t here it is without giving any major spoilers: at one point one of the main characters tells the protagonist that if he wants to learn the truth he could take a red pill that he offers to him, but if he wants to remain oblivious and continue to live normally he should take a blue pill. They’re using this analogy to describe how the media peddles as normal what they consider wrong values and ideas like lgbtq tolerance, feminism and so on.

Needless to say, Tate is a big fan of that movie. So much so that he named his “course” the Matrix Academy. One of my former classmates actually paid for that nonsense. It was just a discord server and the lectures were useless. All the information there could be found for free on the internet by just doing a Google search or watching a few videos on Youtube.

I will cut off my left testicle and eat it for breakfast if Judy can name one ingredient in the MMR vaccine.

Water.

My name is Judy.

This… might just be the craziest thing I’ve read since the election

We so far have:

1. Trump turning the White House in a Tesla dealership
2. Trump putting tarrifs on penguins, but not on Russia
3. US warplans leaked because someone doesn’t know how to use his phone
4. The US becoming a crypto bro.
5. The US looking to invade Canada, Mexico, Panama, and Greenland while also looking to extort the rest of the fucking planet.
6. The US stealing the Gulf of Mexico from Mexico.

Just to name a few. We are only 4 months into his term people. I’d say Elon humping everything that moves is just a regular tuesday.

I already own a FP3 and that’s what I am going to use until it breaks.

That’s fair. I can get behind that.

I might consider Graphene in the future, but having to buy a Google phone (even a used one) already pisses me off, compared to a FP (or similar).

You’re not the only one. I loathed that I had to go back to Google to switch to Graphene, but life’s a compromise most of the time.

eOS also tries to be a “noob-friendly” distribution, that you can buy phones with and you never have to mess with the phones, which means people who don’t have the skills or don’t want to mess with their phones might trade the risk with ease of operation, and it might be the right choice for them.

Graphene does that well too. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and I never had to look up guides like I’m doing for Linux.

If these two issues are what prompts you to call a “security dumpster fire”, I would say we at least have very different risk perceptions.

We do. I can’t in good conscience recommend it as an alternative to friends or relatives when even stock Android has improved security. I can’t speak for your social circle, but all the people I know update their phones accordingly. Maybe they delay the update for a few days, but they don’t stay months with their phones like that. Fairphones improve the situation a bit since you can lock the bootloader, but the substantial delay in security updates is still a major risk.

I don’t get why anyone would choose /e/OS over Graphene if they had the option. Graphene offers the highest security and privacy, it works wonderful and most banking apps support it. /e/OS just has the advantage of supporting more models, but if you can get a Pixel what’s the point?

That is not the only issue, it’s just one of the more major ones that shouldn’t be dismissed like it’s nothing. Another major one is the unlocked bootloader. You can take a look at all the Android ROMS here.

I think people should treat carefully when changing the OS of a mobile device. Changing your OS to something less secure just because you want to shove it to Google and Apple is not enough to warrant it. Better to stay with something safe that you know than with something insecure like /e/OS.

Luckily we have Graphene so you can actually switch to a more secure and private OS that is not made by an American corporation hungry for data.

My god, I just checked that site. The whole thing is a zoo. Millions of years of evolution went into this species only to go down the toilet there.

/e/os is a security dumpster fire. It’s even worse than stock Android. Stay away from it.

The EU is the mother of consumers world wide. Some company is taking advantage of you? Get the EU on the line, someone’s knees are about to pop.

I don’t think there’s a financial reason for this. I think he’s willing to lose money on his AI in the short time by doing this just so he can score some points with Trump since the EU is soon going to strike his company with even more fines for breaking EU law. He probably wants Trump to stop this from happening and this kind of stuff tickles the pickle of that dingus.

or be our enemy

That would be a geopolitical disaster for the US. No matter how much he yaps his mouth around, Trump doesn’t want the EU as an adversary. If that were to happen the US would have 2 flanks to defend against instead of one. And the EU is not Russia. Collectively the EU has the second biggest military budget and the third biggest economy in the world.

Trump is trying to get us to increase centralization at the EU level which is great as far as I’m concerned. But that chucklenut is doing it in a way that will also massively sour relations in the long term. As insane as it sounds, if Trump’s successor is going to be like him, China will probably be a more reliable partner than the US. The only caveat is that Taiwan is going to be extremely vulnerable in such a situation.

I’m hoping the US will come to its senses at the next election and relations will normalize. The Americans are pricks, but they are still more ideologically aligned with us than the Chinese.

For you why did fascism emerge in the first place

That’s a broad question that has different answers depending on the time and place. There’s no single answer to this.

why did it re-emerge nowadays.

Again, it’s a broad question with different answers. However, I can definetly say that social media and selection bias play a role in pushing the average person to extreme views such as yours. Which is why I’d like to remind people to take a break and cool down every once in a while.