I feel like I would be more okay with this is snap didn’t still have a lot of very real flaws.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

So on that last part, residents in areas with a high population of disruptive homeless would feel well within their rights to criminalize their behavior.

I don’t think you understand how the passage of time works. Modern stadiums were built in a world where tailgating culture for sports was already well established.

Considering this is meant to be NYC, I don’t really think that’s relevant.

Look I gotta say I’m not seeing this. Of all the things that would inspire someone to look inwards, I don’t see “not being a good guest host of a late night comedy show” or “booed at someone else’s standup comedy routine” as being good examples. That’s the kind of shit high schoolers think adults care about.

I thought the Cybertruck would be his wake up call, but somehow that is the best selling EV pickup in all of North America.

You can get knocked down without being destroyed. Like if he were just forced from his CEO positions they would be great.

I keep waiting for this guy to be knocked down a peg and it never really ends up happening. The only time he seemed genuinely embarrassed was when he had to back out of that Zuckerberg fight.

Pretending like people who have issues with homeless people camping just hate the idea of seeing poor people in the presence is a massive straw man.

A lot of homeless who choose to camp in heavily urban areas are deeply disturbed, and almost proudly violate every rule of society.

I do want to point out that stadiums in the US are built with parking because of tailgating culture, or more cynically the ability to charge for tailgating culture.

No you see they know it’s a cucumber because ancient Egyptian dildos had a compartment for bees so that users could experience a vibration effect.

The CHIPS bill was a massive disappointment. It was cut down to 1/5th from the intended size due to house committee BS, and then the Biden administration decided to use it as a platform to enact a bunch of wholly unrelated social policies.

I’m not saying that jobs should not offer onsite daycare or have lofty environmental goals. However this was a bill designed to ensure the US maintains an advantage in a critical industry. Maybe put that stuff in another bill.

I’m not saying he wasn’t always an asshole. I’m saying the level of asshole political extremist he is now is a huge departure from how he was previously.

2017 Elon isn’t a good person, but is a lot better and sane than 2021 Elon, who is in turn a lot better and sane than 2024 Elon. His first huge Twitter spat was the submarine pedophile fiasco, and now he says something more deranged than that on a weekly basis.

Look if you don’t think there’s any evidence to support social media and the pandemic leading to both a decline in mental health and radicalization, I don’t know what to tell you. Not only have there been like a million different articles on it, but this is patently obvious to the vast majority of people who lived through the entire thing.

This isn’t exclusively a middle aged man thing, a conservative thing, or even a political thing. A ton of people struggled enormously during the pandemic, sought solace in social media, and left with an extremely weird set of beliefs.

I’m sure I could find some of these sources, but I feel like I’d be trying to convince someone that the sky is blue. This is so abundantly obvious that you’ve either been living under an extremely large rock or are dead set on believing what you want to believe.

Yeah that’s why it ended up aging like wine. I think the writing crew meant it to be legit given the other people mentioned and the overall writing quality of season 1, but it ends up being a great moment of foreshadowing.

I get people are gonna say he was always this bad but I honestly don’t buy it.

While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors. The limited comments he did make on politics were pretty liberal, and usually specific to the environment. He was liked enough in heavily liberal circles to get multiple positive shoutouts. One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.

Modern Elon is absolutely unhinged. He seems to spend more time on Twitter making an ass of himself in ways you’d normally associate with a teenage edge lord. He’s an active and aggressive liability to his companies, both in terms of his persona and business decisions. He’s huge on politics to the point where he tried to interfere with the Russo-Ukraine war for a bit. A lot of times it feels like it’s a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.

I think a combination of social media and covid broke him. I know Lemmy doesn’t think rich people are human, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. While they often have quirks, at the end of the day we’re all human. There are millions of people whose brains became fried due to culture war shit on social media post 2014. There’s no reason Elon would be immune to the same mechanisms that radicalize an average person.

BL1 writing was perfect for the time. The thing that made Borderlands was the 4 player online co-op. Internet culture was full of over the top edgy humor during that era. The writing fit the time.

I remember when Baron Flynn’s intro was just him smoking a joint. Everyone burst out laughing.

Yeah I just think it’s funny a Senator took time out of his day to be like “we need a lobster emoji”