Crazy, right? You look at his picture and that word just selects itself.

My Trump translator just interprets this as, “Waaagh, I want it!” Just a baby having a tantrum.

But what else is new.

Guess I’m an outlier. For me, games were the way to disconnect from the stress of relationships. I’ve been an introvert since the beginning, and so games’ positive associations for me are a safe place away from social pressures.

I also imagine every “retro” generation thinks its games are the best. Like, there was a meme post about joy at finding a PS2 torrent recently with strong implied nostalgia, and that’s ok. People usually experience video games at an age where the games teach them archetypical feelings of intellectual pleasure, the first time they experienced joy at solving complex problems for example. That becomes a core association through life.

So I think we’ll all have strong feelings linking the systems we played at our formative years. And again, that’s ok. That we can form such strong associations is an expression of the basic human value of video games, as an art and modern cultural necessity.

It’s dumbfounding. But my expectations for people are low - they can be, and are, manipulated. Full stop. I’d love to fix that, but for the moment, this is a media problem. Clicks, views, engagement - all are supercharged by creating a perception of violence.

I’m sure many of these reporters are trying their best, but as you note, the simple recurring editorial adjectival choice of “violent” instead of “peaceful” can move the needle significantly. We’re walking on a razor’s edge and the smallest breeze is all it takes to lose the country - if only the mass media understood this.

Yup, the entire culture of Google has nearly changed. It used to be coder- and innovation-driven, and open-source was a natural thing to support. Make more money by growing the pie, creating markets with new tech.

Now it seems it’s middle managers and MBAs calling the shots, and their strategy is generic business zero-sum mindset - lock down, restrict, extract. They still see the PR value in open-source, but that’s it.

Just becoming 1990s Microsoft or 1980s IBM.

The Xitter post cheering the speech caught my attention, so I clicked through to the X user, “iAnonPatriot” and just have to say, wow.

It starts off with his bio image being literal hands goatse’ing through the virtual Matrix grid, and it only gets worse from that level of basic. Just a red-pill Nazi fever dream in feed form. 610K followers.

Videos of protestors getting abused are his favorite, apparently. One top one is police firing gas into apparently peaceful protestors. The protestor kicks it back, walks back and is just standing there doing nothing threatening, and then apparently gets shot with a rubber(?) bullet and lies motionless for a moment before someone picks him up and he walks off. The caption this guy gave is “HOLY SH*T Perfect shot… 🤣🤣🤣”. Anti-LGBTQ posts feature as well. General concentrated bile into a convenient feed.

So I guess this “influencer” is what Gen Z is getting fed by algorithms and told is normal day-in and day-out?

The reason I found the article interesting is because there were multiple quotes - anecdotes, not statistic, sure, but first-hand - of kids using LLMs and lacking critical thinking to even understand how to check it. You need to have a model in your mind of how things should be to check it - this seems like it may be replacing the model in kids’ minds.

So I really do wonder if there will be a generational divide, with analytical and compositional skills dropping precipitously. I don’t know, but thought it interesting enough to post.

Speaking at an anti-vaccine rally in 2022, Malone spread dangerous falsehoods about mRNA COVID-19 vaccines: “These genetic vaccines can damage your children. They may damage their brains, their heart, their immune system and their ability to have children in the future. Many of these damages cannot be repaired.”

Malone aligned with the anti-vaccine crowd during the pandemic and has become a mainstay in conspiratorial circles and an ally to Kennedy. He has claimed that vaccines cause a “form of AIDS,” amid other nonsense. He has also meddled with responses to the measles outbreak that erupted in West Texas in January. In April, Malone was the first to publicize news that a second child had died from the highly infectious and serious infection, but he did so to falsely claim that measles wasn’t the cause and spread other dangerous misinformation.

In a newsletter post earlier this week, Malone proclaimed: “Some people still believe that the term anti-vaxxer is a pejorative. I do not—I view it as high praise.”

The phrase “the lunatics have taken over the asylum” never seemed more apt. I know, we’ve lived in an asylum for awhile. We had a lunatic fringe, but even if we had to interact with them at least sane adults were in charge. Those halcyon days are over.

I just think COVID and social media have allowed people’s historical “well-rounded” selves - the crazy bits getting sanded off by friction with sane people, which they’ve steadily now removed from their lives - to slowly disfigure until so many in the country have become grotesqueries. Superficially well-rounded people but when you turn them a bit, you see bizarre outgrowths of insane propaganda-fed mutation. And all of those people coalesced this election around Trump.

My neighbor is a nice, friendly person, but was talking about moving out of state during COVID because she didn’t want her daughter to have to get the vaccine. I’m sure she is cheering this move. And goddamn, it’s depressing.

Edit: A word.

I think you’re onto something important there. COVID broke all daily routine habits, good and bad. I could imagine that resetting these kids’ ideas of what it means to learn, at exactly the wrong time.

I’m glad this came to light. It’s not surprising; this is Trump’s whole fake-it-till-you-make-it game with his presidency, from the moment he actually paid actors to cheer for him coming down the escalator in 2015. He’s always, always focused on the appearance of things rather than the substance.

That’s weird. I specifically did NOT check NSFW. It must toggle it because my username is from lemmynsfw? I unchecked it, maybe it does that on the initial post assuming it’s NSFW and you have to edit it out.

The actions come as President Trump and his top aides seek to bend academic institutions to their ideological beliefs. The State Department’s public diplomacy office is run by Darren Beattie, a political appointee who was fired from a job during the first Trump administration after he gave a talk at a conference attended by white nationalists. He has made social media posts on white grievances, including one saying “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” and ones ridiculing Mr. Rubio.

God, every imbecile in this administration is somehow worse than the last. It’s dizzying sometimes, like imagining a paradoxical Ouroboros of incompetence that somehow has eaten itself to completion and is still going.

That’s a reasonable premise, I get it. Borders are just imaginary lines, I agree in theory. But in practice, patriotism (as opposed to nationalism, and I do think we should differentiate) is a positive concept insofar as it overlaps with us - we who are alive now - are making good choices about the direction of our arbitrarily-defined geographic region and being proud of the ones we could accomplish.

I think your issue with how the country was founded gives too much power to those who you don’t agree with and who shouldn’t have power over you. Whether the nation was founded on exploitation, we are not them - you refuse to be constrained by arbitrary geographic boundaries, for the contradictory reason that you feel constrained by arbitrary temporal boundaries, linking yourself and your dislike of American symbolism with what people hundreds of years ago did, with no relation to you except general genetic lineage.

That isn’t to say we deny that it happened, don’t teach it, learn from it - obviously systemic racism is an ongoing effect that is both traceable and related statistically to that founding. We aren’t living in those times, but those times echo in our time. We aren’t culpable, but we are responsible, only because nobody is left to deal with it.

But by refusing to take ownership of America, you are also ceding it. You may feel good about not being associated with the messy parts, but I would argue many who do this do it because they don’t want to take on the burden, not because they are taking the claimed moral high ground.

I appreciate the counter-argument, it’s not wrong in a pluralistic, we-can-both-hold-equally-valid-but-incommensurable-values sense. But I think insisting on that flag is picking a harder battle for no reason.

I think the problem with the optics - and of course, by this I mean, the problem with fascist-accelerating interpretations and not swing voters or Jeb’s feelings - is that the Mexican flag became a proxy for the movement flag. If it was a variety of flags + the American flag, that would convey a message that couldn’t be misused. But when Fox News can plaster a bunch of Mexican flag images on their immigrant-protest-panic news stories, it gives Trump cover to send in the federal military here, which - once established as precedent, as Stephen Miller knows - will now become the accepted norm for future protests, and then for future opposition purges, and then for a future normalized authoritarian state.

And while I get the “don’t cater to racists” principle, we need to think about strategic consequences - if we give the fascists ammunition, they will not hesitate to use it to kill us. In this way the protestors are not seriously thinking about this as the war that it is, as much as their passions and hearts are in the right place - they are doing things that feel good but may harm their cause. It’s, again, counter-productive.

My advocacy (didn’t intend for it to be, but it has turned out that way) to flying the American flag is that it doesn’t give the fascists ammunition that will be used against us. That should not only be a valid concern, but an overriding one to win the war.

Ahh, yes, that was the issue - sarcasm in 2025 Internet begins at the seventh decimal point.

I assume the first sentence was sarcasm, but yeah, this is one of those pure-politics votes that are only meant to injure Democratic candidates by ensuring either the “left” or “centrist” parts of the party are angry at the result.

These people are pretty much all from universally purple swing districts and made a political calculation on a purely political vote.

By talking about this, and getting pissed off, we’re playing to the GOP’s tune.

This is exactly it. There is a literal fight that the protests represent, that some commenters here (no offense intended, we’re all on the same side) can’t see past; and there is a symbolic fight.

The symbolic fight defines how we think of ourselves - which I do think is important, that we are the true voice of the American project - but also how the rest of the country views Trump’s illegal use of military troops. The Mexican flag does not help either symbolic goal. It’s counterproductive.

In other contexts I would burn a flag, sure. The flag is emblematic of the struggle that is our country, and the struggle can mean different things, positive and negative, in context.

At the end of the day, we all live in America. We have an idea of America as a multi-cultural, immigrant nation. That is the correct idea. We have a right to define what the flag means.

Otherwise we’ve already conceded the patriotic high ground. It’s like giving the enemy control of the (metaphoric) capitol of the nation just so we can be the insurgency. You feel better but it’s tactically irrational. Why is it not better to start out with moral ownership of the nation’s core symbol?

I took it more as implying his reaction is to relish hatred, not his physical appearance per se.

The guy is shown repeatedly on video reveling in the pain and suffering he causes. Laughing at the liberals who reveal their weakness by showing empathy, leaning into and enjoying his bad-guy persona.

That’s what I thought he meant.

I get the feeling I’m in the minority here, but let me try to express a nuanced opinion on the Internet:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to fly the Mexican flag at these protests.

To be clear:

• I don’t object to it.
• I don’t think those who do it are less American.
• I don’t think the “swing voter” effect of it matters at all.

But it’s unwise and counterproductive because:

• It’s creating a narrative that Trump’s specific lie about there being an “invasion” is true.
• That lie will be used to both physically abuse protestors and legitimize using federal armed forces against civilians, now and for the next four years.
• It gives an easy out for racists who are looking for an excuse to dehumanize and cheer police brutality.
• Using the flag in context obviously shows this is about us taking America back from the racists, that they are not free to define America.

If the goal is to show multiculturalism, I think it’s a grave mistake not to simply use the American flag. America is built on immigrants. It is the proverbial “melting pot.” As the saying go, our flag is red with the blood of immigrants who fought for the country, not just in wars but to be accepted and treated as equals. They have earned the right for it to represent them.

Avoiding it because it’s associated with the right is short-sighted and tragic. Right wing nut jobs should not be allowed to continue to appropriate the American flag, to make it toxic. Because they are traitors who are trying to destroy constitutional rule of law, i.e. America, while *we" are trying to protect it.