chicken

My interpretation is, they sent the message to prevent the creation of anything that could plausibly be a threat to them and ensure the success of their invasion

The controversial statement they walked back, in case anyone wants to save a click:

Here is our official response, also available on the Mastodon post in the screenshot: Corporate capture of Dems is real. In 2022, we campaigned extensively in the US for anti-trust legislation. Two bills were ready, with bipartisan support. Chuck Schumer (who coincidently has two daughters working as big tech lobbyists) refused to bring the bills for a vote. At a 2024 event covering antitrust remedies, out of all the invited senators, just a single one showed up - JD Vance. By working on the front lines of many policy issues, we have seen the shift between Dems and Republicans over the past decade first hand. Dems had a choice between the progressive wing (Bernie Sanders, etc), versus corporate Dems, but in the end money won and constituents lost. Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.

It's been a long time but IIRC The Hobbit is written for a younger audience, LOTR is harder to read and has a more serious tone

The way I think of it is, I don't live in China, so regardless of my objections to their values or human rights abuses, why would CCP or an affiliated company care about me or ruin my life on the basis of or by abusing my data? A big part of why I care about privacy is I don't want to be filtering my every thought through consideration of whether the powers that be would approve, and US companies are way more relevant to that.

From what I can tell a lot of this is just Twitter culture. It is totally possible to have a debate where the point is exploring the ways your ideas do and don't make sense rather than purely trying to "win" by addressing a crowd with propaganda and rhetoric, it's just that the internet has trended strongly towards the latter over the years.

I agree with OP in that I wouldn't try to debate people on Twitter either. That doesn't mean debate has no value though, you just need to figure out where your line is for when it isn't going to be worth responding, and then do the hard part of actually committing to that.

So what would happen if you fell

Wouldn't the water pipes freeze?

Some big ones were the greater anti authority sentiment, contrarianism, acceptability of expressing negative emotions. Reddit was often (though not always) better for polite formal-ish discussions, 4chan was better for processing your feelings about stuff via trash talking, dark humor and generally dropping your filters.

I used to post on 4chan and greentexts are kind of nostalgic to me. Some relevant context here is that the site becoming dominated by cultish far right politics was something that progressed over time, and there are probably a lot of people with an interest in imageboard culture who do not especially identify with the people currently posting on /pol/, for whatever that's worth; those guys overrunning the site was a big factor in quitting for me.

From other comments it seems like the context is they know each other and it's not really like that. More so because it's not a broad topic, it's a question about personal experience, shushing someone trying to weigh in on how other people must feel about something they're only speculating on is reasonable.

Ok yeah, I got annoyed you kept trying to dance around the issue. You're right I should still be more polite about it.

None of the things you were saying clarify the contradiction I'm talking about, but I can respect that you choose not to specifically address that.