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.

Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.

More like

"Ivy, you know who I am at this point. Let me attest that most of these people don’t actually do shit. There are layers of layers of management and shareholders that allow the average generational wealth billionaire to extract extreme amounts of wealth without doing shit. That’s honestly a good thing in your case, because anyone who actually has the ability to make obscene money in this universe is either a superhero or supervillain, and you would have just walked into their secret hideout.

If you do kill him, the best case scenario is a collection of hedge funds you never heard of divy up his controlling shares and keep business as usual flowing. The worst case is Luthor buys the company and makes everything a million times worse as step one in a convoluted plan to kill superman via kryptonite laced micro plastics. The most likely thing is one of those technically secret society orgs seizing control because at this point they just need some win. My money is on the Owls. They’ve been humiliated so many times they’ve been officially downgraded to “community advisory committee”.

I honestly don’t even understand where this is coming from. You and Freeze both have blank checks from both WayneTech and Star Labs to continue your research. Either of you alone could reverse large portions of climate change. If you really wanted to go the vigilante route, you could have just mind controlled him. Darksied is planning an invasion, there are no less than three evil AIs rolling around, I’m dealing with two separate split personalities, and I haven’t heard from the Joker in a while which means we’re all probably fucked. Even if I did notice, it would take me literal years to get around to actually fixing it. It feels like you are doing this because on some level you want to fail, because that’s easier than doing the hard work required to fix the systemic abuses of our system "

“…So I take it the Therapy’s working, huh Bruce?”

“Sort of. It’s Batman”.

“Actually technically right now you’re Nightwing. Care to explain that?”

“It’s a long story. The short of it is that I’m pulling double duty because Dick somehow forgot how to fucking Jump and Jason took Damien out for “Beer and Cigarettes”, which I can only hope is literal because anything it would be a metaphor for would involve no less than two dozen corpses.”.

“Jesus Christ and Harley said I was carrying too much stress. I’ll come back next week, get some rest Bruce”

“Batman”

"Nightwing "

“…”

I constantly hear laments about how broken our prison system is. How it’s focused on punishment instead of rehabilitation. How inmates aren’t safe. How the steps they have to take to survive on the inside turns them into hardened criminals and almost guarantees they’ll end up back after release. How the entire thing is inhumane and the fact that they’ve lost their freedom is punishment enough.

Then you have posts like this where tons of people are cheering the very things they claim to hate.

You guys are such complete fucking hypocrites it’s hard to take anything you say seriously.

I think most urban liberals would ban hunting given the opportunity, but have enough self awareness to realize that’s an untenable position.

That’s a great anecdote, but your wife is in the minority. Statistically speaking, Texas enjoys high rates of inflows in terms of domestic migration while upstate NY suffers pretty big outflows.