username checks out

places hands over ears screams “LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE”

I feel like Meta could do a ton more damage with my information than Tencent

Probably the closest thing you can get to in terms of a “privacy” credit card. Everything about a credit card is tied to you by their very nature. So it depends on what or who you want privacy from.

Someone else mentioned privacy.com which I also use - it’s good if you want to hide your transaction from the credit card company, or if you want to hide your identity from the merchant. But Privacy.com is more like a virtual debit card that connects to your bank account. Privacy.com still knows who you are.

It never ceases to amaze me how they mock Joe for speaking gibberish but then this seems to make complete sense to them.

Don’t underestimate him. He may sound like an idiot to us, but we aren’t his target audience. He doesn’t care what we think of him. He knows what his cult wants to hear and he’s plenty happy to chum the water to get them in a frenzy.

There’s a reason scam artists target the elderly. If a box on the computer screen says “put payment info here” then who are they to argue with the box?

You make a valid point, but the reason people are undecided is that they they have no properly informed opinions. I hate this narrative that Biden is ineffective. Biden has done a lot of good things. And where congress failed, he found a way to get shit done anyway. People don’t know that because media sucks and their echo chambers don’t tell them. Or alternatively, their expectation about what a president can do in one term is completely unreasonable.

And that is all while ignoring that a republican congress will hold back the entire country for years just to make sure their guy looks better. And it works! People complain about shit not getting done but couldn’t tell you how their representatives voted on those things.

So yeah, pretty much what you said. They think the candidates are roughly the same, but they have no clue how what their candidates do actually affects them.

I’m sorry, I must be misunderstanding you. You aren’t asserting that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza started within the last 12 months, are you?

Because if you are, then I strongly encourage you to look a little bit deeper into this whole thing. It’s been going on for decades.

This is completely tone deaf to the things that Biden HAS been able to accomplish. I’d encourage you to research his presidency before you accept and parrot all of the bad things you hear.

To name just a few:

• Unprecedented student loan debt relief
• Improvements to Medicare including the ability to negotiate drug prices and capping prices of certain medications like insulin
• Extremely low unemployment, just a few short years after the pandemic
• Pardoning of minor federal marijuana convictions and initiated the process of having marijuana rescheduled
• A push to make birth control pills available OTC without a prescription in the wake of conservative attacks on reproductive health rights
• Renewed focus on infrastructure spending
• Policies friendly to green energy

And that’s not mentioning the things that could have happened were it not for constant obstruction of Republicans - specifically, efforts to better protect our borders and efforts to curb gun violence.

The president is not a king or autocrat no matter how much Trump and Republicans might disagree. His policy decisions must be focused in order to make any progress at all. He can’t simply wave his hand and make everything a magical utopia.

So before you continue complaining about the lack of progress, I implore you: take ten minutes to do some Google searches about the things that are important to you and the reasons why more progress is not being made. You might be surprised at weary you learn.

It is critically important that we do not give up ground and backslide because the conservative media machine is so powerful that it makes it seem like nothing good has happened.

From what I’ve heard since then, there was some vandalism / breaking and entering going on. I haven’t heard about any violence directed at people, but if they’re breaking into buildings, it is reasonable to stop them. If they were all just peacefully (meaning non-violent, not necessarily quiet) camped out on the quad, then I would say the govt had do right to remove them.

Wait… you need more than that to demand a recount?

But then how are news sources going to make otherwise mundane events sound noteworthy?

BTW, 100% of person making this reply voted Democrat, therefore everyone in the country will also vote democrat.

Well yeah, but that’s a pretty broad spectrum. Giving up by not participating at all is a higher degree of apathy than “giving up” by realistically evaluating your situation and recognizing that participating in a deeply flawed system will still have a chance of moving the needle in the direction you want it to go, or at least stopping it from moving the other direction.

Even though you preemptively asked people not to provide a counterpoint, I feel the need to highlight a problem with your analogy that you seen to already be aware of.

Your position of “I don’t want to go camping anymore” is a fantasy. The only way to achieve that is to emigrate to another country. The real situation is: you’re going to sleep outside. Do you want a leaky tent or a ragged old tarp? Those are your only two choices. If you do not make a choice, then you are leaving the choice up to everyone else.

If you’re okay with that, then sobeit. It is your right to opt out of participating in the political process, but that doesn’t change which tent you’re going to end up sleeping in. If you’re an American, you’re along for the ride whether you like it or not. Your choice to opt out does not change the outcome, it merely cedes control to everyone else.

I tend to agree with your main point though. I’m pretty exhausted with everyone around me selecting the same deteriorated tents that we’ve been using for the last 50 years because “that’s the only way enough people will select it over the moldy tarp” instead of considering a new one that actually works, or at least has fewer leaks.

It’s a brain malfunction where cognitive dissonance apparently feels good.

This is a reference that I’m afraid not enough people understand.

As long as they’re peaceful, then pretty much, yes. A state university where the land is publicly owned (government “owned” property), it sounds like they were exercising their rights to assemble, speak, and petition the government…

I’m still convinced that he’s actively and intentionally trying to destroy Twitter.

Well, let’s talk about when Twitter was founded…