The local officials (the mayor, legislators, and the president) where I live are all elected and I'm pretty sure that's already more than what China has

I think what I said is still true.

There's a lot of handwaving in your reply that China's population are just ignorant and censorship exists therefore its bad, based on little info. All Western countries also have major systems of censorship on social media. The majority of people in China have access to the internet via unfiltered VPNs - they have basically as much free access to information as you do.

You should honestly investigate how democracy actually works in China - You'll find that they have far more votes and actual choices for their officials than you ever have, and the approval rate of the government, even when anonymously/independently surveyed, is almost certainly higher than your country's.

This is basically it, why would the ruling class waste the resources to even try for 100% agreement? The moment the left gains, or has potential to gain, even the slightest sliver of power, watch the ruling class deploy their mass resources to squash us back to irrelevance. I only clearly realised this when the very popular Bernie/Corbyn campaigns were so deliberately choked despite major support of the base.

The classic "I was going to be a caring individual and oppose systemic wrongs but a leftist said things I disliked on the internet" move.

Let's be clear, in the UK, parents can almost always leave behind over a million pounds worth before any tax starts kicking in. Not to mention the thousands of easy loopholes.

A pact that was a necessity when all the Allies rebuffed the USSR, but also a pact that documents show the USSR never even intended to honour from day one.

I suspect pissing about copying a mass of text into an AI to have a 70% chance of getting an actually correct answer is probably harder than pressing Ctrl+F

Ah, I see, what queer propaganda will be next? Picking your character's name?!

XKCD covered this, it turns out any method of bringing enough ice into Earth's gravity well will release more energy than it will ever cool the planet down by. (In fact simply harvesting the energy of slowly lowering it down would lower emissions and planetary heating far more).

The answer is self-driving cars make all the value, and self-driving cars can decide how it's distributed, doi!

We're mainly waiting for you to say "Yes, I was wrong, Hexbear doesn't shill for Russia/China/DPRK and call them communist utopias, and I guess tankies is kind of a meaningless term.". I think that was the point.

"I want to remove our violent oppressors by any means necessary so we can be free and happy" - Bad violent leftist who ruins parties

"I knowingly sent material support for a genocide resulting in the deaths of 300,000+ people literally being gunned down in the street, oopsie doopsy everyone makes mistakes" - "Wholesome" "Nicest fucking dude"

It's a good question. I'm not sure there's a single answer, but the big thing is probably corporatisation and amalgamation in the internet. In the early days of the internet, it was absolutely viable to just buy some tiny site, post your own webcomics, mention it in a couple IRC chats or online forums, and watch a forum and community flourish - it was actually achievable for the average user, and I know because I watched average people start up and get fans and have a nice time. Most communities tended to be no more than 100 regulars in a web forum. The first decade or two of the internet really was a time where any schmuck off the street could make something fun and it would enjoyed and participated in by others. They didn't make much money if any, but that was never the point.

As SEO, Corporations, Google, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram so forth started to monetise and dominate, its now basically impossible. Money-making is the primary objective and so monetised things have been pushed on us and these big corporatised communities are the only way to hear about anything. Nowadays you've very, very little hope of making it big anywhere on the internet without aggressively advertising and monetising it. And if you're one of the 0.01% that still become popular while steadfastly refusing to do those things, then the massive tide that is the internet will probably break or shit on it anyway.

As a fun fact, I know two people who moved across the world and got married because they met on some stupid tiny pixel art forum two decades ago. I don't see those kind of personal connections being made online anymore.

No surprise that a leftist blames corporatisation for 'ruining' the internet, but as someone who's lived just long enough to watch that transformation happen, it seems the biggest contributor to losing the good aspects we once had.

https://www.buttersafe.com/ . It's a cute webcomic that peaked in the webcomic years, but is still going despite the much smaller traffic now. Everyone knows about xkcd and SMBC, but Buttersafe really just cheers me up on a bad day and appeals to my silly, inoffensive side. And the authors are just nice peeps. My Personal Highlights.

ublock obviously should be installed on Firefox by default. But I seem to have a host of privacy add-ons that break few-to-no websites.

• Privacy Possum , which blocks certain tracking headers/js. Privacy Badger by the EFF is an acceptable alternative but I've personally found it doesn't block quite as much.
• NoScript Honestly my favourite addon of all time. You can operate in block-everything mode and just allow javascript/HTML5 from sites you trust, or if you're lazy then just operate in allow-everything mode and every now and then set crummy sites to untrusted (looking at you google tag manager). In block-everything-by-default mode, this add-on will break some sites, but the UI is so easy it's a couple of clicks to trust all the sites in a tab and auto-refresh.

Be warned - If you're not privacy conscious, you might cry from seeing the hundreds of sites that are running javascript on your machine without asking.

• User-Agent Switcher Really easy add-on to just leave on and misdirect sites. Never caused me a single problem, and in fact is useful when sites (looking at you Microsoft Teams) claim they don't work in Firefox and refuse to load but actually work fine if you use this addon and pretend to be Chrome.
• Sponsorblock kicks ass. 30 hours of ads skipped in half a year.

And my personal silly couple ones:

• Wikipedia Vector Skin because I'm an old fuddy duddy and I like old Wikipedia.
• Cat-In-Tab because I'm also an old fuddy-duddy that likes whimsy sometimes. This is just silly but I like it.

So you're homeless and starving huh? Why didn't you of just think of putting in a little effort?

Every person with this attitude was born with a silver spoon in their mouth or otherwise given all their wealth by knowing rich people. 99% of people who work devastatingly hard end up even poorer, me and many of my family members have chronic mental and/or physical conditions as a result of working too hard, and now we're still piss fucking poor as well as in pain and traumatised.

The post history says otherwise ;)

Liberals: Nice try tankie, but all of our leaders and popularised heroes commit genocide, so it can't be criticism

I'm sure you're right, but I've not seen that to be true where I live in Europe. That makes absolutely no sense.

I've not played the game. I assume the issue is that gay people do in fact, exist in a game?