Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • ‘When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag a carrying a cross.’

    • Sinclair Lewis

    The Republicans functionally made a pact with the devil in the 80s when they leaned heavily into the Evangelicals, betting they would be reliable voters and knowing they are laughably easy to manipulate.

    And now this is what we get. Theocratic Fascism.

    Even if Dear Leader goes to jail, even if he looses the election and there is not another coup attempt, these maniacal morons are not going away anytime soon.



  • You have no choice.

    The US political system is utterly rigged in many, many ways to prevent the emergence of a third party.

    In order to change this, the American public would have to somehow pressure both parties to agree to pass many laws, at the federal and state and county and city levels to /effectively/ alter the system.

    They are of course never going to do this.

    The only possible way to throw off this deathgrip is to somehow get an ‘extreme’ member of either party to become that party’s nominee.

    This has been attempted twice in my life time:

    Ron Paul was ‘the internet candidate’ of many young people who focused on his opposition to the Iraq War, Libertarian Economic and Social policies, either overlooking or being unaware of his ties to the rather unsavory John Birch Society, and the extremely ideologically fervent but ultimately delusional Mises Institute. Started on 4chan, hundreds of young Americans photobombed any random live newscast anywhere they could find with Ron Paul signs, raised millions for Paul’s campaign, functionally acting as his PR department as he barely had one and it was terrible, and they even raised enough money to rent a blimp, plaster it with Ron Paul banners and fly it around the country.

    It didn’t work.

    Later, Bernie Sanders emerged as a candidate in the Democratic primaries with a chance to shake up the Dem/Rep balance. The Democratic Party basically did everything they possibly could to sideline Bernie, handing the nomination to Hillary Clinton.

    She of course lost to Trump.

    Anyway, voting for a third party in America will statistically nearly never work on the Federal level. Even most Congresspersons and Senators in the past 20 years that have not been an R or D have been an ‘Independent’, nearly always being somewhere in the middle of R and D. You might have some third party candidate actually win on the State and Local level, but this is very, very rare.

    Functionally all the voting for a third party does is remove votes from a more popular candidate with more moderate views.

    Anyway, none of this matters: It was about a decade ago when a study revealed that Congress people of all kinds nearly never advance legislation that is highly popular among their constituents. They nearly always do advance legislation that will materially benefit their donors.

    We do not like in a functional democracy or democratic republic.

    We live in a functional corporate oligarchy, where hot button cultural issues are used to wedge voters, and massive PR and advertising campaigns are everywhere to convince the public that policies and legislation that helps businesses and hurts voters has a function deathgrip on the mind of the average American.

    My honest to god suggestion to you is to either hunker down and form a local group of capable individuals to provide mutual aide to your local community as income disparity continues to rise, more and more become homeless, infrastructure continues to collalse, etc., or to get out of this nuclear armed banana republic with more guns than people, where somewhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of voters are so incredibly delusional and successfully propagandized that they believe a large amount of the Q Anon / MAGA insano-version of real life.


  • Uh ok… well if you had ProtonVPN on, selected an endpoint and both those websites showed that your IP is indicated as coming from the selected endpoint, in another country, that is good!

    Unfortunately that doesnt tell us all that you would need to know though.

    I have to go to sleep, but if you would like send me a screenshot of what both those sites say when ProtonVPN is on, I could probably tell you if you are good to go, or if you need to dive into ProtonVPN settings.

    God help us both if the problem isnt the ProtonVPN config and somehow something with your linux config is fucky, lol.

    EDIT: I mean pm me the screenshot, not post them here lol.

    Also… yeah I used to use ProtonVPN, switched to linux and dear fucking god the non CLI version was so buggy and broken I switched to i think another VPN provider that actually had a working GUI on a debian based linux build, then to a different one that was CLI only, then more or less gave up amd went with Mozilla because at least the fucking GUI worked.