Sorry, Captain Ron. Gorillas are native to equatorial Africa.

Surely this will not go over well with President Elon “Free Speech Absolutist” Musk, right? RIGHT???

Elon Musk (after buying Twitter): “Comedy is now legal.”

Elon Musk: “[the] Left found nothing funny, wanted to make comedy illegal.”

Trump tried to get DOJ to go after Saturday Night Live for mocking him

“As president, Trump briefly attempted to get Justice officials to twist campaign finance laws and the federal equal-time rule to declare that anti-Trump material broadcast by Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others was somehow illegal,” the publication writes.

“During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party — in the form of jokes and on-air satire.”

While career officials at the DOJ ignored these orders from Trump during his first term, the publication notes that they could actually become a reality should Trump win a second term given how much his allies have worked to weed out anyone who might be disloyal to his agenda.

“There are no guardrails,” Yale scholar Jason Stanley told Rolling Stone of Trump. “He already has control of any institutions that might stop him.”

This story is so depressing on so many levels.

First and most obviously, we have a biological male entering a women’s bathroom to harass and threaten a biological woman because he doesn’t want biological males entering the women’s bathroom to harass and threaten biological women. Dumb redneck stared into the abyss and it stared back, as it always does. Congrats, dickhead. You are the thing you claim to hate.

But then we have this shit:

Dani Davis, who is queer, took to social media on March 24 and wrote a post about what she said happened while she was at work. The incident occurred on March 14 at the Walmart in Lake City, Florida. She noted she was a nearly seven-year employee of Walmart and holds several other part-time jobs, including the “joy and privilege" of tutoring "special-needs children as requested,” describing herself as a hard worker who has never been in trouble.

How many more reminders do we need that Capitalism hates us and our employers don’t even see us as human? A person should not have to work “several part-time jobs”, one of which is with the biggest private employer on earth, just to get by.

Does anyone else remember the ‘Hey Mon’ sketch from ‘In Living Color’ about an immigrant family that all had like 10 jobs each? It was supposed to be a joke to have to work that much to make ends meet. We weren’t supposed to make it a reality for everyone.

I hate this world.

Yeah they’ve come out and said recently that even interacting with any content or comments that could so much as be perceived as being related to Luigi Mangione is a violation of Reddits policies against promoting violence. People have been getting warnings that their accounts are in danger of being permanently banned just for visiting certain subs. Not for posting. Not for commenting. Not even for voting. Just for visiting.

Car salespeople work longer than 8 hours. More like 10, especially nowadays where pickins are slim. Still a bunch of bullshit numbers no matter how you slice it. This really gives the same vibes as Trump inflating the value of his properties by lying about the square footage. I would bet there’s some kind of financial gain being made from this claim.

Glad someone else got it.

This is mafioso protection racket language.

“Be a real shame if someone came into your shop and busted up the place… Howz about youz guys let us take ownership? You can still manage the joint and we’ll protect it as a favor to youz. We take all the risk.”

I was thinking of the Jesus “let me in” one. But this one is good too.

I had two main accounts. My oldest account got permabanned for a joke about Nick Fuentes. After his address got doxxed and he pepper sprayed a woman who rang his doorbell back in December of last year, I said “hey as an incel he should be happy that the ladies know where he lives now so they can share a cocktail with him”, and I added a cartoon gif of a Molotov. It was obviously a joke, but they said it was “promoting/glorifying violence”. I ate the bullet on that one because they were technically right, even if they were a bunch of humorless twats.

My other account got banned about a month ago when I up voted a comment that was just a picture of Luigi Luigi (the Nintendo character) smoking a cigarette. Again for “promoting/glorifying violence”.

Elon Musk is a weak little crybaby and Steve Huffman is a pathetic coward.

This is the correct answer. Once Youtube and other platforms figured out that the only thing that sells better than sex is hate, they built algorithms around feeding their viewers a constant stream of hate to keep their eyeballs glued to the screen. It’s yet another example of how Capitalism will always gravitate towards Fascism.

Yeah Pewdiepie was an entry point for kids. There were a ton of them back in the early 00s that did video games and other seemingly innocuous stuff on YouTube, but would slow-drip the racism, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry, while promoting the “heroic death” trope. I have two nephews who loved those TY channels, and luckily my brother caught on real quick to their game and made some changes. Now I have two full grown Leftist nephews.

For some unknown reason though, younger Zoomers are ignorant, prudish, too easily contented, and weirdly conservative. I have yet to understand what happened to cause the divide,

The online manosphere/tradtube spent the past 10-15 years raising these kids while their parents fucked off. That’s what happened. These are the kids who made people like Andrew Tate famous, and made Joe Rogan way more relevant than he has any right to be. It’s a great lesson in why people need to pay more attention to the media that their children consume.

Even more interesting is that her mother (VP Vance’s mother-in-law) was instrumental in advancing DEI at the university she works at (UCSD).

I would pay a lot of money to see a journalist ask JD Vance if he approves of his mother-in-law’s work in promoting DEI. Just knowing how awkward that next family gathering would be would make it worth it.

We’ve become so complacent. A unified community would have intervened, violently if necessary. I would love nothing more than to see a crowd of folks popping out of houses and cars and surrounding these terrorists at gunpoint.

I had it drilled into my head as a kid. When I left home I forgot most of it. Then as an adult I brushed up on it to argue with the kind of people who drilled it into my head as a kid.

They believe that only God can be the one to create paradise on earth. A primary pillar of their faith requires earth to be in a constant state of suffering until then.

“Join the IDF - We put the infant in infantry”

Not gonna lie, it’s pretty catchy.

If i had to guess, it’s probably less money (certainly right now that’s the case) and more to do with all the bureaucracy.

That Forbes article is 6 years old. Money has been the issue for a long time. On top of a dwindling and almost nonexistent middle class, traveling abroad from the US is just more expensive than traveling abroad from a European country because we have to cross huge oceans.

You can wake up tomorrow and drive all the way across america, with basically no paper work. I would be surprised if many people in america even had valid passports to be honest.

With travel to Europe being so expensive for Americans, our foreign destinations of choice have historically been Mexico or Canada. Americans didn’t used to need a passport to travel to Mexico or Canada, and even some Caribbean countries, as long as we went by land or by sea (flying always required a passport). We could just drive or take a cruise there like we were going to any other state. After 9/11, the government began pushing the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and in 2007, passports became mandatory even for driving to Mexico and Canada. So instead of going through the hassle of getting a passport, a lot of Americans are just choosing not to travel outside the country at all.

Not to mention all the work you have to do in preparing overseas accommodations. And potential language barriers. Traveling outside of the US has got to be like 10x more difficult than traveling inside the US.

It really is. And since we don’t make it mandatory to learn a foreign language in school (unlike most European countries), the language barrier is a big deal.

I also imagine that if people DO travel outside, they’re going to go on a big trip, to see a lot of things, and it’s going to be more expensive. It’s just how that kind of thing tends to work. It’ll be some shit like a wedding, for example.

Which puts overseas travel out of reach for most Americans.

If you think of the government like a restaurant, it makes more sense. Pretty much every restaurant has to deal with vermin, to varying degrees. Most of the time, the restaurant keeps it under control through regular cleaning, but you still see a roach every now and then. Maybe even a rat. So you set traps and you kill the fuckers. If it gets too bad, you hire a professional to come in and exterminate. If you’re diligent, the rats and roaches are extremely rare, your food is protected, and the customers never see vermin. But if you walk into a restaurant and see a rat crawling across the dessert display in broad daylight, that restaurant has a HUGE fucking problem. They have an infestation. The rats are eating well, and have become unafraid of being seen.

These monumental fuck-ups like Pete Hegseth are vermin. They are rats and roaches that are brazenly crawling all over the tables, out in the open in broad daylight. If this is what we the customers see, then what’s behind the walls and in the kitchen and in the dry goods storage is a thousand times worse. The American restaurant is infested. It needs to be tented and fumigated.

I see a legislative and legal way out. impeach trump for breaking the law

Sorry, I should’ve been more clear. I meant a legal or legislative way out that’s realistic. Even when we had the numbers to impeach Trump twice, we still didn’t have the numbers (two thirds) to convict him and remove him from office. The Schumer-Pelosi gang of octogenarian Dems isn’t going to control Congress with those numbers ever again. It’ll be at least a generation before the Democratic party has that kind of power (if it ever happens), and Trump will be long in the ground by then.

More laws and amendments to enshrine civil liberties and to clearly limit executive power. laws to limit money in politics and make clear that coporations are not persons. stuff like that.

There are two ways to ratify a Constitutional amendment. The first way is to get two thirds of both the House and Senate to vote in favor of the amendment, and then to ratify it you need three quarters of all state legislatures to approve it without changing the wording, otherwise the whole process starts over. The second way is to have two thirds of all states petition Congress for a Constitutional convention (34 states), and again have three quarters of all states approve of the amendment word-for-word (38 states). No amendment has ever been approved by the second method.

For perspective, in the 111th Congress of 2009 following Obama’s historic crushing win against McCain, the House was 255-D and 179-R, and the Senate was 57-D, 41-R, and 2-I (who caucused with Dems). This was the strongest the Dems had been since the 90s. To get a Constitutional amendment passed and ratified in 2009, Democrats would’ve had to convince 33 Republican Representatives and 9 Republican Senators to vote in favor of an amendment, and then assuming that every single Democratic state legislature is 100% on board, they’d have to pray that all 8 split legislature states and at least 3 Republican state legislatures approve it for ratification without changing a single word.**

For even more historical perspective, the last time Democrats controlled enough of Congress and state legislatures to theoretically pass and ratify a Constitutional amendment without any Republican support was between 1937 and 1939, and they still didn’t do it (though they did get a ton of New Deal stuff done).

Nothing would make me happier than for the midterms to turn into an alcoholic moment of clarity for the American working class, where “we the people” finally sober up and vote every one of these feckless do-nothing weakling scumbags out, and elect people who will impeach and convict Trump and all his cronies, and amend or straight up rewrite the Constitution to enshrine laws in favor of the people, instead of the monied class. It’s just not realistic.

dirty tricks for good though is impossible to fix the system.

I agree. You can’t fix the system with dirty tricks. But you can crush Fascists with dirty tricks. It’s not ideal, but it may be the only way to get them out. But like I said, coming back from that is the hard part. Once people in power get used to playing dirty, they never willingly stop. They have to be stopped.

**someone check my numbers in this paragraph, it’s 4am and I may not be mathing properly