“Hey, if some caked-up mud pie got on your face, would you just wipe it off with a dry piece of tissue and call it a day? No! You’d wash it. So why is your butthole any different?” - Detective Allen Gamble, ‘The Other Guys’

This is the kind I have, and I will never not have one again.

I sometimes have this weird fantasy where Trump is an actual genius, and his plan all along was to destroy the Republican party. I imagine him sitting on the crapper with a McDouble in one hand and his phone in the other, trying to come up with the most insane tweets he can, getting frustrated that his plan is taking so long and thinking to himself “why are these people liking this shit? It’s obviously bat shit crazy!”

Then I come back down to this Hellscape reality and sigh as I accept that the world is just full of stupid, greedy, selfish people, and Trump is an avatar for all the worst human impulses, and that tens of millions of people would gladly follow him off a cliff so long as they get to drag the rest of us over the edge with them.

I truly hate this place.

You are working under the assumption that these “pedo hunter” groups are all acting in good faith and on good information. I encourage you to do some reading. There are many cases where these groups pretend to be 18 year olds, lure an unsuspecting person into a meeting, and then lie to their audience about the age they originally claimed to be online, as Xatolos has pointed out.

Lots of them do it to lure in and attack LGBTQ+ folks, while others act on false accusations they receive from third parties:

Innocent dad tortured and killed by group of chainsaw-wielding ‘paedophile hunters’
A gang of vigilantes tortured and killed a father of eight as they tried to force a confession out of him for crimes he didn’t commit.
The case of the brutal torture and murder of Bradley ‘BJ’ Lyons, which shook Australia in December 2018, is once again under the spotlight as a jury has brought to justice the gang leader, Albert Thorn, and some of his mates who helped during the hideous attack.
Mr Lyons was referred to the gang by his wife Jana Hooper, who had falsely accused her husband of sexually assaulting two of her teenage daughters.
Thorn, the leader of the vigilante gang with a specific hatred for paedophiles, was found guilty this month of the torture, imprisonment and murder of Mr Lyons. Later this year, he will face a pre-sentence hearing.
Two other members of the gang who took part in the ordeal, Jordan Bottom and Rikki Smith, were found not guilty last week of the killing of the father.

And I can’t tell you how many times they just straight up confront the wrong person. Here’s one example, and here’s another, here’s one more, and here’s yet another.

These are not professionals. They are YouTubers looking for fame and relying on outrage and violence to get it, and they all-too-often don’t care who gets hurt or killed in the process.

Some of these “pedo hunter” groups have attacked completely innocent people where the accusation of someone being a pedo was completely unsubstantiated. This is the problem with monetizing vigilantism: It creates a demand, and if that demand is not being met by a supply of actual criminals, then it will be filled by vigilantes criminalizing innocent people.

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.”

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.

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.