natsup123490

I'm a US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside of the US. 35 years in the US, and 16 years now in New Zealand. And it's not plainly obvious to me. Bowling for Columbine movie pointed out that Canadians have just as many guns, but much less shootings.

I'm in New Zealand. New Zealand has guns. You need to take a class and be approved by the police who interview you and inspect your gun safe. Pistols are much harder to get. More than 10% of people have a gun license. There is almost no culture of using guns for self-defense against other humans. Farmers consider them necessary tools on the farm, hunters use them to hunt food, and DoC workers use them to cull pests (so do farmers). I also feed my dog about one-third of her diet by shooting rabbits and possum. Recently certain semi-automatic weapons were prohibited, but even before that we didn't have school shootings. Sometimes a family household would be slaughtered by a member of that household. Last night in Auckland seven houses were shot up in gang related violence.

Kids get bullied everywhere, in every culture. It's part of growing up.

I have no comment on the contagion effect.

Me too. Left during the second round of layoffs in 2002 I think. Worked with Suns at university previously.

I remember the original logo, CG6, and TurboZX/Leo. I don't recognize the others.

I definately react mentally to things happening in my gut. I suffer from IBS and the only times I have ever had dark moods in my adult live was during IBS episodes.

I've even gone to the ER once for something I couldn't describe as pain but rather as "intense horror" which seemed to just confuse them.

All this theory is nice, but let's look at actuals. Of all the people I know who have been booted off of twitter (several dozen), none of them are bad actors (except maybe Alex Jones). They were booted off because their political opinion was not liked by left-leaning moderators, who made up laughably incorrect assessments of their tweets.

Twitter is being used as a political weapon in a political war.

Actual bad actors who spam, harass (which requires repeated unrelenting action, not just one-time nastiness), defame or incite violence... nobody cares if their posts get removed. Defending them is not what Musk or the political right is on about.

I have to speculate that the reason why "social media is indeed corrosive to trust in governments, news media, and people and institutions in general" is oftentimes because it highlights their apparent failings (biases, lies, etc). That is, the problem is not primarily one of people failing to trust in trustworthy institutions, but due to a hyper-focus (retweeting) on the failings of those institutions.

As we communicate more, we find we don't agree as much as we thought we did, and that is divisive. Social media allows us to highlight and amplify the information about our disagreements.

Efforts to make governments behave are pretty hopeless. Besides, it's not just the US that is spying on everybody. If you want privacy, you need to change your behavior and your tooling, using technology to create privacy.

Hard times and war change people. Many changes are negative: poorer, less secure, less trusting, more fearful, devastating losses.

But other changes are for the better. And you don't need war to make these changes. If you make them before hard times come, you'll be better prepared for them: becoming more stoic (less emotional, less offended at everything), becoming more serious, more resourceful, more self-reliant, lowering your expectations, being more humble, being more careful with your words and who you speak openly with, knowing your place instead of speaking for the whole of humanity, being better able to negotiate, being better able to compromise, being more tolerant of other opinions, appreciating the wisdom of our ancestors more, and focusing more on what really matters.

If this bill passes, it will only weaken America's position as leader in the Internet space. The world will eventually benefit from that weakening. We will route around America.

> I can't imagine staying in this country much longer.

If you are serious about that statement, I encourage you just as I have encouraged all my family and close friends. I have never regretted leaving America. There are dozens of nicer countries to live in.

However, tech platforms exert their dominance worldwide. Americans have made this a global problem.

Most of my family and friends still feel like they don't need privacy because they have "nothing to hide" because they "aren't doing anything wrong." It's hard to communicate the idea that the tech lords' ideas about "wrong" are being rapidly redefined and weaponized, driven by a very active and rapidly growing neoreligious woke cult, and it has nothing to do with logic and reason, little to do with morality, and much to do with power. And the more information you feed them the more power you yield to them until one day you'll realize the enormity of what you willingly did, but by then it will be far too late. You will be a slave to their crushing, perverse, and ever smaller version of morality. They know who all your friends are, what your fingerprint looks like, your walking gait, where you hang out, ... everything. And they abandoned the motto "don't be evil".

> We must have law and order

Absolutely

> that requires accountability for Trump and his enablers.

Absolutely not. It's words like that that truly frighten me. Have you lost your good sense?

What truly worries me is this part: "his enablers".... what exactly are you saying? That voting for Trump was a crime? That supporting Trump was a crime? That protesting for Trump (but not engaging in violence nor tresspass) was... what.. Terrorism (as the media is now trying to suggest)? No, no it was most definately not. It is very dangerous to use loose words like this which can be interpreted in too many ways, especially now. If you mean to say that Trump committed a specific crime and had co-conspirators, explain it that way and name the conspirators. Otherwise you are going to have a huge percentage of the population believe that you intend to "round them up into camps" or "line them up against the wall" or other things that other very dangerous people have tweeted. Trump supporters will defend themselves, potentially pre-emptively (just like how the war between the states started) and nobody wants that.

I don't associate with a political tribe, I didn't like Trump, and I left America long ago. But I've cautioned my mother who still lives there and who supported Trump all the way (she believes all the nutty theories, but isn't a bad person) that she needs to plan an escape route into Canada. Because I truly fear for her life at this point. Biden and the media keep wrongly using the word "Terrorism" in order to (I'm quite sure) invoke special governmental powers that allow them to suspend all civil and human rights from... who? ... all Trump supporters? And PATRIOT-ACT V2 has landed, all premeditated and prepared, ready for a huge draconian power grab.

Nobody has demonstrated that Trump has committed any crime (AFAIK). I'm sure there will be attempts. But nobody has even pointed to a credible suspected crime (AFAIK). Well respected constitutional lawyers like Alan Dershowitz have weighed in with clear opinion that Trump doesn't need to pardon himself because he has not committed any legally cognisable crime. And that his speeches were not incitement to violence... and Alan gives a long history of speeches that resulted in violence... and America has always punished the violence doers, not speakers, being extremely hesitant to invoke "incitement to violence." In this case it's laughably far from such.. he said walk, he urged peace, he only called for a protest.

But I'm positive many people will attempt to "require accountability for Trump." Go ahead, do so via the court system using the laws of the land. Both political tribes will support that.