The people cheering it on think it’s patriotism. Then there still seems to be maybe a third of us who think this was just another election we had in 2024.

The rest of us know, and are appropriately freaked the fuck out.

This might be the new high bar for scary action by this admin.

Stupid mother fuckers.

Anyone old enough to remember knows - politicians have been stupid and reactionary about public access to the internet from its earliest days.

Section 230 of the DMCA is probably the only reason social media as we know it was able to emerge past infancy. (You could argue about whether we might want to put that cat back in the bag, but the earliest discussion forums, leading to sites like Lemmy and Reddit, also could not have existed as we all knew them.)

And frankly, this looks like another part of the march to oligarchy to me. When the only social media sites that can exist are those with owners that have big enough pockets to hire enough people to become responsible for what users post and aggressively control it… (or, shudder what if the end goal is literally nationalized social media)

I still have PTSD about the pits in that game!

Older X’er here - I keep telling my wife - for all the shit we’ve had to live through, we damn sure better get first contact with ET in our lifetimes too!

The real brain melter was the societal culture shift.

I grew up witnessing “the end of history” with my own eyes. People were getting wiser and kinder year after year, decade after decade. It was like a feedback loop of positive changes, the only way was up.

Then 2010s hit and I’m still processing the 180 degrees shift.

Fucking thank you! This has been hard for me to put into words. (I’m on the older end of Gen-X)

He and his nation are in a tough spot I don’t begrudge him any decision he makes at this point.

It just grinds my gears that if I go searching (which I refuse to do) I know it will take me 5 seconds to find a maga citing this as evidence that Trump’s bullying is clearly effective foreign policy and that Zelensky’s cooperation represents an admission that everything said to him in the oval office was correct and OK.

Yeah that effing sucks. I really didn’t think they’d bend the knee. I can’t blame them, but it still makes me sad.