Surely if it’s less than 1% it’s just noise - what is their average month-to-month change in subscribers?

Fascists depend in large part on vast numbers of naive people who take them at their word and don’t follow politics closely. Maybe it’s hard to imagine, but it really shouldn’t be: vast numbers of people only interact with politics through biased sources, or in very small amounts. You should easily be able to work out there are literally millions of people in the US who don’t draw any connection between republicans today talking about suppressing disrespectful speech, and democrats talking about similar things for the last several years which those same republicans vehemently criticised.

Pointing out the hypocrisy is not supposed to suddenly convince the actual fascists that they’re wrong, it’s to convince the people they’ve duped into following them that they’re both wrong and evil.

So now he cares about such principles…

The state is collecting a database of which names are which IP addresses

Why do you believe this?

You are giving me the lawyerly pr bs

I am trying to get you to do the bare fucking minimum to convince me that what you fear has anything to do with this article.

The words “disclaimer”, “waiver” and “sign” do not occur in the bill. Whatever process you think exists does not, because, again, you haven’t bothered to understand what the bill is about. It’s not getting anyone to sign any disclaimer, so that information, whatever it might be, cannot be newly collected.

If you disagree, you need identify - preferably by referencing the actual clauses of the bill that I linked above - what new thing the bill introduces, and what harm that is likely to lead to.

First of all, the information data Brokers collect which includes Google is sold to government agencies that use it without warrant or judicial supervision.

If you believe that, then why do you believe this bill will make the situation any worse?

This is a question I already asked but which you didn’t answer.

What database are you talking about? The database of Google accounts? That already exists. Government officials don’t (as far as we know) have access to it, and in any case that is not something this would change. Right?

Can you be specific about what new information (or access) this bill would introduce? The only thing the article or from my (non-exhaustive) reading of the bill introduces is that accounts would now have to have age bracket information in addition to the information they already have. How will that allow anything nefarious or harmful?

How is this connecting people’s ID to their IP address when this does not involve anything to do with people’s ID?

How did you manage to not only not read the article, but also fail to read the second highest top-level comment which points out exactly this?

This, by the way, is exactly why I think the comment I reply to should not have been made: it’s contributing baseless suspicion and cynicism, and when other people read it, it arouses their suspicion, but without any remnant of whatever tenuousness may have been possessed by the original commenter. You aren’t saying “I have a suspicion” you are saying “this is connecting…” as if you know it. But you don’t know it - you haven’t even read about what you’re talking about.

My general point is that saying “I suspect that [something I could have checked]” is the worst kind of lazy cynicism. Just… read it? Or if you don’t have time, ask the question?

Feel free to find where it says that…

It’s the reasonable consequence of what you’re saying. Israel’s war is genocidal - we can all see that, from the absurd number of civilian deaths, to the use of starvation as an indiscriminate weapon, to the statements about mass population removals. Even if you purposefully ignore that reality, only the willfully stupid can deny that Israel’s war is in flagrant breach of the principles of proportionality and discrimination between combatants and non-combatants.

So we start from a position where Israel is committing horrifying war crimes and murdering children every single day in extremely cruel ways.

It is also completely evident that it is impossible to eliminate Hamas. Just like it was impossible to eliminate the Taliban, or Al-Qaida, you can’t destroy a resistance movement by force. You can prevent (some) terrorist attacks committed by those movements by force, but all attempts at destruction result in new recruits, unless you destroy the entire population among which the resistance exists.

So you are saying that “this only ends with the complete destruction of Hamas” which is only possible by the complete destruction of the Palestinian people. You only make demands of Hamas, not of Israel, even though Israel is perpetrating crimes against humanity every single day and has killed orders of magnitude more Palestinian civilians in this war than Hamas did in the instigating event (never mind before 2023). That favours their genocide.

So, with Israel incapable of eliminating Hamas without eliminating Palestinians, I take it you’re in favour of genocide, then?

This isn’t “full mask-off white nationalist”. This is regular dog-whistle white nationalist.

What’s that I hear? The sound of barking and rolling over?

If OP is saying that the likelihood of John Bolton having snagged a copy of the Epstein files in 2019 and used them as an insurance policy against them one day being released in modified form is in the same region as that of some random sheriff, then there’d be less contention.

It’s not obtuse to point out the distance between John Bolton and a particular FBI raid. Indeed, it’s being obtuse to say how they’re linked in some game of six degrees of Richard Bacon when the point is that the mere fact of their being in slightly overlapping circles doesn’t in the slightest way imply that Bolton both was able to and actually did make copies of evidence.

Why are you joining this comment thread to do something other than offer an actual reason to believe that Bolton has an Epstein-based insurance policy, when this investigation is adequately explained the same way all of Trump’s other retaliatory abuses of power are explained?

Because ever since Kissinger the national security advisor has been the conduit between the president and intelligence agencies. And Bolton was in that position when the FBI opened the safe at Epstein’s place.

The “conduit”? Correct me if I’m wrong but the National Security Advisor isn’t out kicking in doors when the FBI go on raids. The FBI is not an intelligence agency (it has an intelligence branch) and being the “conduit” doesn’t mean he has the ability, inclination, foresight or skullduggery to gather such “insurance policies.”

If I said a rectangle was a square, would you say that’s only possible if every rectangle was a square?

If you said that on a specific day the sun rose because you had prayed really hard for it to pray the previous day, I would be asking you what about all the other days when it rose without your apparent intervention.

Reality…

Not good enough.

What about America in 2025 makes you write off every conspiracy as fake?

I’m calling out your conspiracy theory thinking. Target John Bolton with an FBI investigation is a conspiracy, is a fascist abuse of power and is not, in any way, giving Trump “the benefit of the doubt.” But it’s not conspiracy theory thinking, because there’s no super secret bullshit that only a select few are smart enough to work out - it’s the regular kind of secret stuff that we can infer based on facts and evidence.

To believe your story I have to believe that there’s a high chance John Bolton has “the Epstein list” and has kept it as insurance. You have given me no reason to believe this except that Bolton was head of - not the FBI, not the DoJ, but the National Security Council. So what? On the basis of such weak evidence you’d be saying that thousands of government officials have Epstein related “insurance”.

You’re not, though, because you’re not actually basing this on any thought process which takes evidence into account.

The difference between N and N+2 should be minimal, as opposed to “as much as we can get”.

1. What makes you think John Bolton would have anything Epstein-related?
2. What about the many, many other individuals Trump has targeted with the DoJ and other branches of government? Do they all have an Epstein-related “insurance policy” as well?
3. What makes you think Trump is “freaking out” about Epstein? He has said several things disapproving of the intense interest in Epstein, but that’s not enough to make me think that any time he abuses the government to target his opponents it must be because of that.

This is like all conspiracy theories: you’ve got a pet idea that would be exciting if it were true and so you’re minded to ignore any alternative explanations for the facts.

If he releases something, and says it’s everything, anyone that might have retained information from prior to Joe Biden’s presidency is a threat.

What’s to prevent him from saying they’ve fabricated it?