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This is also going to start some knees to jerking, but he’s also technically correct that inflation specifically hasn’t been that bad, if you actually look at inflation rates it’s not particularly worse than what we’ve had in other decades, the 90’s which we associate with a bountiful economy had higher inflation rates for a longer period of time.

What’s making all of this untenable is companies doing everything they can to avoid paying livable wages and most of all price gouging. Which they’re doing with eggs for good reason, but we also have to understand that anything that uses poultry is also going to take a hit, and then, like magic, a variety of other companies and services use these specific gouges as a justification to raise their own prices beyond inflation levels, even if they sell things that have never touched a chicken, like fucking mortgages and medical care.

We used to have bureaus and departments to keep this kind of thing in check. You can argue their effectiveness but at least we had them.

He should be sieg-heiling instead of pointing. It’s amazing how many people out there don’t realize he’s a full on fucking nazi.

What reddit does is it attaches a cookie to your browser that associates your IP/emails with your current IP, then ANY login you make will get flagged and you will either be immediately banned for ban-evasion or you will be shadowbanned and nothing you submit will ever be seen.

To get around this, you have to purge ALL your cookies and browsing history associated with reddit on all your browsers going back to the start of time. Then if you have a regular broadband connection through a normal ISP (cable, DSL, anything that goes through a router/modem in your house) then you likely have a dynamic IP that resets regularly. Unplug your router for a few minutes, then plug it back in. This will reset your IP.

Next, you need to make a new Email, and it can’t be a “disposable” email either, many of the free email services out there will be immediately flagged and shadowbanned by reddit. Gmail seems to work fine, so far Google doesn’t seem to share the phone-number you use to verify your new gmail address so until they do, you can use gmail. I haven’t tested others. Use this new email to register a new account, make a few throwaway comments on some subreddit like /r/memes or one you know that doesn’t block new users. Establish a little bit of normal comment history and then within 24 hours you should have full visibility and access again.

There are a lot of hazards now though. If you ever log into reddit while using a VPN, you will get your ass shadowbanned permanently and you will have to do all the above steps over again. You can also get shadowbanned for almost any kind of political contention depending on what community or combination of communities you visit. They do have bots that monitor users and will try to assume what your agenda is by where you post.

If you or anyone is reading down this far and saying “why the FUCK would I want to go through this much hassle to chat on reddit” then you’ve figured out what their plan is. They don’t want human users. As it is, about 1/4 to as high as half the users on many subreddits are already simulated, having simulated conversations and chatting in ways that seem completely human, even using timely cultural references and populist talking points.

If they can replace all the users with bots, they can simulate what “normal reality” is for any particular group, fed specific communities and content as determined by the algorithm, and then someone just needs to adjust the dials a little to turn that simulated conversation into a sales pitch, a political endorsement, a call to action or a call to inaction. Once you look at reddit chat through this lense it becomes a lot more sinister and you realize just how vulnerable we are to this kind of social manipulation.

They don’t want human communities, they are filling the entire site up with bots, a large percentage of the conversations you see there are simulated. They announced they would be doing that a while back and people didn’t quite get what it meant.

I lost my account of 12 years when I quoted some random misogynist for calling a woman a slur, the mod or automod banned me for making the quote (which I did so he couldn’t edit his message and I simultaneously reported him anyway) I figured it was just a simple mistake, but they didn’t listen to my appeal, I tried to talk to other mods and they were all unimaginably obtuse assholes, so I got banned from that particular subreddit that I was a well-liked regular contributor on. To keep talking to the people I knew there I used an alt account for a while and then got lifetime IP banned for ban-evasion.

It’s not that hard to make a new account and erase your cookies and reset your modem, etc etc. But now they have more and more tricks for removing humans, like shadowbanning anyone who ever says anything contentious, which is what they really want, completely synthetic communities of bots talking about whatever narrative they want to seed into the public narrative.

I estimate about 1/4 to half the users on the larger communities are all AI/bots. Once you realize it and look at all the posts and conversations in this framing you realize how utterly twisted and insidious our tech oligarchy has really become. They seem very human, they even make populist-sounding, human arguments and follow popular sentiment, which makes their narratives and concessions stand out.

The internet isn’t just dead, it’s a reanimated corpse cursed to follow the will of its lich-lords.

This administration has been a great view into our manufactured political division.

To say it very clearly and bluntly, our governing system has been hijacked by corporate interests, it’s been this way for a while, but for most of the modern age they’ve been good at “hedging their bets” and supporting both sides of the political spectrum, because they know society swings back and forth with regularity, and they just want to make sure they’re always on the winning side.

When people checked out of political involvement in the last couple decades, it’s allowed the most corrupt and motivated thieves to organize and consolidate power, and yes the money followed them, and they are far less careful about showing their intentions. We had the whole panel of oligarchs attending the last inauguration like they’re one of the branches of government. They are treating this broken election like a mandate and they just totally abandoned the Democratic party and it shows. They have no money coming in, no marching orders, nobody is keeping their fire lit for the next shift because they’re going all-in on the idea of a fascist takeover of the country. Because that would be great for profits.

The reason we don’t have a US rail system is because of the constant, unending efforts by automotive industries to dismantle all plans and dreams we’ve ever had for mass-transit. And every other possible public offering or social service that we pay taxes for.

Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)

The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.

They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!

Then it will come at the worst possible time.

I was watching Arcane on Netflix with wife and her family a couple nights ago. The very beginning, where it deals with loss of family, I just immediately lost it, like I had been shot. I don’t even remember what the show was like, I just cried with my face buried in my hands the whole episode. Totally came out of nowhere, I was fine a moment before.

The room was dark, so nobody saw but my chest was heaving and I couldn’t even try to move to excuse myself because I knew I was about to let out a loud screaming sob. I sat there for a full hour hyperventilating, worried someone was going to turn on a light or hear my breathing.

I have spent a lifetime being “the guy who takes care of everything” and the stoic fighter, always the one encouraging others. I couldn’t deal with the fallout of freaking out everyone, they already know I have anxiety disorder and really, really don’t understand mental health, so if I started acting erratic everyone in the family will start walking on eggshells around me.

So to those browsing down here: “Why do men keep everything inside?”

Because of how you react when we don’t. Your ideas of what it looks like to express emotion as a male is not connected to reality.