At the very least, most of the Democrats are guilty of taking money from those ghouls.

To bring it back to Palantir, Biden himself was singing their praises back when he was vice president and the US government was using their surveillance tools.

As much as it is good to see MAGA turn on Trunk over the Epstein files, it’s not lost on me that Garland, under Biden, sat on the files doing nothing for 4 years. And maybe that would make sense if they were actively investigating and trying to prosecute people, but as far as I can tell Maxwell is the only one who faced any consequences.

I don’t want to distract the narrative away from Trump’s guilt. And also, when you stack up presidential accomplishments I’d still rank Biden near the top, probably top-5 in US history. But that says more about the other presidents than Biden.

I think Rupert Murdoch is involved too. And I think it’s good to mention Peter Thiel, the owner and founder of Palantir, any time they are brought up.

There have been a ton of governments swinging rightwards suddenly too. Not just the US- the UK has a long stretch of Conservative governance that was only barely broken by Labour in 2024, and the Labour party has drifted so far right that the Reform party was created. Germany is dealing with their own alt-right menace. Conservative middle-eastern governments like Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been spreading their global influence. The Philippines had their stint with Duterte. India has had a right-wing Prime Minister, Modi, since 2014. And of course, we have Netanyahu of Israel and Putin of Russia.

Personally, I look to the downfalls of communist states. The USSR collapsing in 1991, leading to the absolute mess of oligarchs looting the publicly owned assets and turning them into private fortunes. The opening of China to the west started by Deng Xiaoping led to similar issues there. The rise of the oil age, which helped both those Russian oligarchs and middle eastern petrostates (and the US. And the Scandinavian petrol states, though they at least moved to social democracy instead of authoritarianism).

All of a sudden all of this power was concentrated in the hands of just a few hundred businesspeople and politicians. Reagan and Thatcher happened. Socialist governments everywhere were undermined by the US government. Then economic crash after economic crash after economic crash. The dot-com bubble, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, wars everywhere, Brexit, the invasion of Ukraine, the pandemic. Every earthquake that hit Japan, every hurricane that was horribly mismanaged by FEMA, the fires in Hawaii and California and Australia and Canada.

Every disaster a new opportunity for those few hundred people in power to tighten the screws, acquire more power, and distance themselves from the rest.

I don’t mean this as a conspiracy. The billionaires fight each other too sometimes. Trump mostly seems like Putin’s puppet, but there are some exceptions. Putin backs Iran while Trump backs Israel. Putin was on good terms with Musk, and afaik that has not changed while Trump has distanced himself from Musk publicly. Just that the overall trend has been towards power moving from the people into the autocrats globally for the past few decades.

And if anyone’s panicked about the immoral stuff going on in the porn industry (and there are plenty of things to be addressed and critiqued about a hystorically predatory domain)

You’re 100% correct, but I would also like to point out how weird it is that porn seems to be the ONLY industry where these religious nutjobs pretend to care about workers.

In the US, the same people who say they care about the porn industry preying upon women are the same ones rolling back child labor legislations to send 14 year olds to meat packing plants. The same ones who have kept the minimum wage where it is for decades. The same ones who want to ban abortion even in cases where the woman’s life is threatened. I know this is a BBC article about the UK, but I can’t help but see some parallels with the right-wing religious conservatives everywhere in the world.

They don’t care about women. They don’t care about children. They don’t care about workers. They care about having lots of cheap labor. They care about parents being too tired, too overworked, too risk-averse for the sake of their children to dare to fight back. They want a world where peasant girls get married at 14 and start cranking out more babies immediately. Any substitute which threatens that (birth control, abortion, homosexuality, pornography, sex education) is under attack.

Imagine believing that Democrats are homogenous

Maybe if you live under a rock?

Exactly. The whole world suffers from that. And I’ve seen a LOT of Democrats get absolutely destroyed by their bases for supporting it. Fetterman went from being a folk hero of work class Pennsylvanians to a genocide-mongerer. Cory Booker just pulled off a pretty amazing feat of giving a 25 hour filibuster and yet the news cycle very quickly shifted to how he voted with Republicans to continue bombing Palestine.

This meme doesn’t make sense to me because I’ve never seen Republicans send that accusation towards Democrats. If anything, Republican criticisms tend to go the other way: that Democrats should mind their own business and that there is a moral obligation to limit the scope of government (not that they actually care about that, but they say they do).

Imagine believing that a party can have a policy that doesn’t affect you.

Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.