He’s the asshole’s candidate. We don’t need to politely pretend otherwise.

The only difference between the conservative Burundi government and the conservative American government is what they think they can get away.

Probably lots of reasons, all of them fucked.

The main reason is probably money. There’s no better way to turn billions of dollars of public funds into billions of dollars of private profits.

It also reassures neoliberals that for all his rhetoric about forgiving loans and improving healthcare access, he’s still willing to kill children if there’s money in it.

It’s also a chance to show off the unstoppable force of American arms against people who are considered completely expendable to America.

they can give millions in subsidies direct to corporations

That’s exactly why they’re fighting it – every dollar they give to poor people is a dollar less they can give to rich people.

Their initial investigation into him lasted 13 months.

Epstein died in 2019. If there’s any open cases it’s because they’re not making any effort to close them.

I won’t. He’s not a good person and doesn’t make even a token effort to pretend otherwise.

I also have to subscribe to and use Adobe software but suggesting it’s less buggy and less expensive than other apps is delusional.

The moment you try and do anything outside of basic image editing, Photoshop immediately shits the bed.

It’s riddled with features that were half developed or half removed. Tried using any of the 3D stuff? It pops up a box saying “We’ve abandoned this and it probably won’t work, but go ahead and try because we haven’t properly removed it”. Using artboards? Probably not, since half the app seems to break with them, including their brand new features like Live Gradients that rearrange themselves when you save.

Looking for a filter? Well there’s 2 places to look since they seem to have lost interest in the filter gallery half way through, then piled mediocre AI filters on top. It’ll be a slow search, since for some reason some popup windows take fully 3 seconds to open, probably due to their 4 different UI systems in various states of abandoned.

Photoshop is widely used today because it was good 15 years ago. If someone hasn’t already creating a leaner, more stable, better designed, more ambitious piece of software, it’s only a matter of time until they do.

Republicians are never going to go after a Democrat for sleazy, self-serving neoliberalism because they’re also sleazy, self-serving neoliberals.

It’s one of the unspoken rules of the rich – you can use unimportant bullshit to jostle for votes, viewers and market share but you’re never, ever to attack the system that makes them richer.

The moment someone does, watch them band together across “left-wing” and “right-wing” in a show of class solidarity and signal strength the rest of us can only dream of.

We also have no idea what measures they take to stop the system being manipulated (if any).

The far-right could be working to ensure they’re recommended as often as possible and if it just shows up as “engagement” or “impressions” on their stats, YouTube is unlikely to fight it with much enthusiasm.

Libertarians are mostly just neoliberals who are upset they’re not allowed to be more psycopathic.

Their new utopia will tear itself apart with greed, drugs and sex abuse just like all the old ones.

It doesn’t seep in, it’s cultivated by far-right groups that intentionally target children and openly groom them for extremism.

But he was naive thinking he could store that much data with a tech giant, his “life’s work”, risk free.

Google made a promise they didn’t keep and articles like this are the consequence of that.

It’s not ideal, but it still feels better than “let them lie and then blame their victims for believing it”.

I haven’t even gotten to ask what anti-drone measures they have.

The answer will be “none” because unless they’re ex-military, their entire contribution to any militia is usually “gun”.

Most of them wouldn’t pass fitness requirements nor take orders. Few of them have other skills such as first aid, communication tech or drone piloting.

Even when contributing their gun, you can’t assume they know how to safely and usefully handle a weapon, or that they’re mentally fit for combat, because none of that is a requirement for buying a gun.

It’s a hero fantasy they’ve literally never thought critically about, but it’s supposed to make all the mass shootings worth it.

They were Trump voters, so that’s inherent. They seemed enthusiastic about their son’s interest in guns because it’s right-wing.

But America makes guns available to shitty parents and rarely requires them to be properly secured from children, no matter how many red flags that child shows.

Stories like this will happen over and over again until that changes.

Maybe I’m old

Sounds like you’re not forced to spend 5 days a week at a location targeted by mass shooters.

The media has been pushing division for decades now to keep the money hungry corporations happy. Local news has all been bought up.

Firearm manufacturers have been making record profits selling guns to people who shouldn’t have them, then using lobby groups to donate $16 million a year to Republicans – a figure that conspicuously doubled in 2012 after Sandy Hook.

But of course they’re not “money hungry corporations” putting profits before lives, it’s all the medias fault for greedily reporting on things that happened.

I’m sad about that students hardship, and am happy they were able to tell their father they loved them.

You’re not very good at pretending to have emotions and compassion.

Hearing your peers being indiscriminately executed and surviving through nothing but dumb luck is not a “hardship”, it’s trauma on par with living in a war zone.

There is nothing at all “happy” about a child fearing for their lives and calling their father to say their last words. It’s genuinely surreal to see you describe it like that. Who are you happy for?

I just recognize that it is pushing a fear based narrative to become fish in a barrel and embrace death during a crisis

Word salad.

It matters because the Gun Violence Archive and the uncritical mass media are inflating the statistic to make people scared so they can push an agenda

Bullshit. You’re attacking it because it’s counter to your agenda.

Republicans, right-wing media, the gun lobby and the pro-gun community routinely fearmonger as a way to boost their own profits and power.

Not only do you not care when they do it, you’ve enthusiastically put yourself and your own family in more danger because of it.

You’re hopelessly compromised and your thoughts about how gun violence statistics are about as trustworthy as a cops views on police brutality statistics.

While it’s not quite “throw a dart board at a map”, it’s pretty close.

I didn’t claim the number could be 0, I claimed the acceptable number is 0.

Following every one of those shootings you linked, people demanded to know how it happened. Why did they have a gun? Was there warning signs that were missed? Was anybody negligent? How can we stop it from happening again and limiting the damage if it does?

That is the reaction of a society that finds any number above 0 unacceptable. They treat mass shootings as a failure of the system.

Meanwhile in America, they don’t bother to ask those questions.

They had a gun because it’s trivial to get your hands on semi-automatic rifles and handguns, even if you can’t pass a background check, because there are millions of unsecured weapons and no universal background checks.

The police and politicians are deliberately negligent, staunchly opposing red flag laws despite most mass shooters having multiple red flags.

No effort is made to prevent it happening again, because the murder of 20 children is shrugged off as some kind of inevitability, no more preventable than an earthquake or tornado – much the same as you’re doing right now.

Limiting the damage isn’t just staunchly opposed by the pro-gun community, many of them fully support making more dangerous weaponry available.

These are not the actions of people who find all gun violence unacceptable and the only reason the Ulvade police are criticized and the Newtown police are given a pass is because the Ulvade police didn’t bother to pretend they cared.

The “normal” number of people getting shot is 0.

They want you to sweep gun violence under the rug. You don’t need to ask why, it’s because gun sales bring in millions of profits for the gun-lobby and the Republicans they purchase.