There simply shouldn't be any billionaires.

It would be enough if there were (once again) reasonable top tax rates and if monopolies were broken up. The situation we find ourselves in today is a direct consequence of deregulation dating back to the 1980s.

There is nothing political extremist about basing one’s views on reality.

Anyone who still believes that the U.S. is a democracy should educate themselves.

I'm afraid you completely misunderstand what dictatorship means. The U.S. has been an oligarchy for a long time, because the citizens have allowed it and continue to do so to this day. Now, as a logical consequence, the screws are being tightened. If there were still one last chance, resistance would be called for right now. But since that isn't happening, it will come down to what you're already mistakenly assuming.

I’m sorry to have to say this, but the current situation is only the beginning.

A system that appoints supreme constitutional judges for life and without even halfway serious democratic checks and balances seems to me the perfect recipe for disaster and corruption. But hey, I'm from Europe, so what do I know... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I find it quite strange that "old and weird" seems to work better than "corrupt and criminal".

Yes, that was indeed a very interesting story:

Zimmermann challenged these regulations in an imaginative way. In 1995, he published the entire source code of PGP in a hardback book, via MIT Press, which was distributed and sold widely. Anyone wishing to build their own copy of PGP could cut off the covers, separate the pages, and scan them using an OCR program (or conceivably enter it as a type-in program if OCR software was not available), creating a set of source code text files. One could then build the application using the freely available GNU Compiler Collection. PGP would thus be available anywhere in the world. The claimed principle was simple: export of munitions—guns, bombs, planes, and software—was (and remains) restricted; but the export of books is protected by the First Amendment. The question was never tested in court with respect to PGP. In cases addressing other encryption software, however, two federal appeals courts have established the rule that cryptographic software source code is speech protected by the First Amendment (the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Bernstein case and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Junger case)...

(Source)

Has it gotten so bad that you have to send stuff to the manager to get it printed?

That's true, but unfortunately it won't be solved, at least not in the US. Simply because private prisons are such a profitable business there.

That's cute and all, but it's also pretty much what Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Spotify and all the other tech giants are doing when they're joyfully tracking what people are doing without their knowledge or consent.

That is exactly what Lizzy Magie, the inventor of Monopoly, wanted to achieve. However, she had assumed that people would realize how utterly wrong the rules of the game were once they had finished playing.

Unfortunately, this has never been the case, as evidenced by the fact that instead of Magie, an unscrupulous scumbag named Charles Darrow became the first multimillionaire in the board game industry because he bought the game idea from her for a ridiculously low amount and without any royalty rights, and then sold the publishing rights to the Parker brothers, who made even more money with it.

This explains why Monopoly, instead of being a game critical of capitalism as originally intended, became a propaganda tool for capitalism.

It couldn't be more absurd, but that's how our world is.

I won't set foot on US soil again as long as Trump or any other conservative is running this country.

It's not even just about how you get shafted at the border nowadays. I simply don't want to visit a country that is ruled by misanthropic fascists.

And I think that many people will probably feel the same way.

I am firmly convinced that most of the problems facing humanity can be traced directly back to billionaires like him.

It’s quite simple: you can only become that rich if you are an utterly inhuman, unscrupulous monster. Unfortunately, it is precisely these monsters who rule the world, and they have created systems that require you to be a monster in order to succeed.

The only soccer team I'm a real fan of is the Fuck Fifa Team.

It's interesting that this regime is already behaving as if the dictatorship it clearly aspires to has already been established. They obviously feel quite confident about their cause.

Well, they can afford to be, because it doesn't look as if they have anything to fear in the way of consequences. Every day, I read alarming reports about abuse of power, open corruption, systematic racism, absurd policies that run counter to the interests of US citizens, blatant disregard for the law, and the involvement of high-ranking government officials in prostitution and pedophilia. But I never read anything that would suggest that those responsible are being held accountable.

I therefore assume that the establishment of a dictatorship à la Russia is already so far advanced that it won't be prevented - and by that I mean a transformation of the plutocracy that has long been the norm in the US into an unvarnished autocracy, including all the associated methods of repression, in other words, the transformation of the US into a full-blown dictatorship.

Here, too, the sheer ridiculousness of the regime once again obscures its criminal intentions.

Statements such as these are then completely ignored:

We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.

Pete Hegseth Source

This obviously means that all moral conventions, humanitarian principles, and international agreements are being thrown overboard—in other words, absolute ruthlessness, Israel-style.

This is the face of America today: a grotesque grimace of fascist malice.

In other words: Now that he’s no longer getting any money from Google, he’s suddenly upset that no one is visiting his site anymore, because most of his former visitors now find the answers to their questions directly on Google—the very company to which he sold all of his website’s content.

Well, he could have figured that out sooner. What a moron—but hey, he’s already pocketed the money for all the content he stole from his own users.

It’s a good thing Aaron Swartz doesn’t have to witness all this, especially since the greediest of all corporations are now raking in money with complete impunity for the very thing he was supposed to go to prison for years—even though he had no intention of enriching himself at all.

I find all these people disgusting — but Kid Rock... I can't even express how much I despise this talentless moron.

Given how often headlines claim that Maga has imploded, melted down, or been slammed, one would think that nothing would be left of it by now—but unfortunately, none of this has any consequences.