Not sure I get it, is this the meme thing where they're slamming liberals for some obviously bad outcome? I mean, that would be hilarious to realize how annoying that phrase might be to the people who would be bothered by it, but aside from that it's hardly a 'bad outcome'.

Or maybe the meme is being used ironically. is there even a way to tell?

I think that should be allowed, but then just have like an outright charge on things like water and roads and education. I mean it's already kind of like that for rich people, but let poor and middle class 'opt out' of government provided stuff and just take stuff a la carte....I mean it would probably have to be more expensive for each thing, but overall let people decide what to chip in towards

No, sarcasm is really hard to do, I'm sure only humans can possibly understand the nuances of language like that.

That's why these discussions generally come down to understanding/misunderstanding 'instincts'. Certain breeds have at least broadly understood instincts when it comes to offensive/defensive postures, and those instincts may never be triggered in their day to day, even year to year, routine....but extrapolating that to mean 'my little Cuddles would never X if Y happened' is dangerous and selfish.

Maybe think of it like one of those big walls of post office mailboxes......behind the wall is your computer and an app might be waiting for a message at box 22 or box 45678. You could close all the boxes and nothing could get in, or you could open one or all of them and allow people to deliver messages to them.

If you connect your computer directly to the internet, anyone who knows your IP address could say 'deliver message X to port 22 at ip address and the program watching that box would get the message.

If you put a router in the mix, and multiple computers, the router has the same block of boxes, but if someone sends a message to one of the boxes it just sets there. If you set up 'forwarding', sending a message to your ip address gets the message to the router, but if you forward box 22 from your router to a specific computer on your network, then the router takes a message at box 22 on itself and 'forwards' it to box 22 on whatever computer you specific (using internal ip addresses).

You could map box 22 on your router to any other box on your computer....like port 22 coming into your router might get sent to port 155 on your computer...this is useful if you don't want external people just exploring and lazily breaking into your computer using known vulnerabilities. Lots of ports are 'common', so an ftp hack on port 22 is easy, and might be 'slightly' harder if you tell your computer to actually look for ftp traffic on port 3333 or something.

As an American it is horrifying to not be able to argue with this directly, because for every outward appearance it might as well be true.

But the argument I would make is that Americans are not the dumbest people in the world, Americans are simply allowed to survive and visibly prosper in spite of, and sometimes because of, their obvious stupidity. And combining this with the entitlement inherent in 'just happening to be born here' and the relative complete lack of suffering most of them experience, makes it easy for them to publicly hold opinions that people in most countries would either have to keep to themselves for their own personal safety, or just because few others are willing to join arms with them.

Basically it's a constantly building bubble that could happen anywhere, and to smaller degrees probably happens all over the world in small communities, but here it's a bubble that for some reason has been resistant to popping, to the point where any attempts to pop it are easily avoided due to it's mass and ridiculously protective userbase.

Look at the UK and Brexit, or Russia and the mass of people outwardly supporting Putin, or the Middle East and apparent support of honor killings. Even if the majority of the people living in these areas don't agree with this outward support, fear or resignation or something stops them from being the loud voice in the space. In the US it might be closer to resignation or hopelessness, but across the world we're all really the same when you sit down and talk normally...there are stupid people everywhere you look, here we just don't have a good way to embarrass them into shutting up.

Because an precedes a word that starts with a vowel sound, not just because they start with a vowel letter

Some presidential candidates benefit from being punched repeatedly in the face. Let’s not demonize presidential candidate face punching so quickly either.

Same reason people have gone on for a million years. Noe of that matters or is really as bad as it sound at an individual level. Individually you have it better now than at any point in history, asking why ‘you’ should go on because of the unknown future effects of the climate crisis (which is real enough, and shouldn’t be understated) sounds more like depression than a valid outlook that people should have considering actual world events.

Even the worst off people on earth, on average, are better off now than they were 1000s or even 100s of years ago. There have always been poverty, starvation, wars, rich taking advantage of the poor, and fewer safeguards or oversight on top of that.

B

Right, but there is no central authority to decide the best rules, so we get to live through the process figuring itself out. Go ahead and promote what you consider a good solution, but anyone bitching that this or that platform is inhibiting their free speech by not conforming to the process they propose is just part of the noise, not someone to be taken seriously in the discussion.

If that was the argument presented I doubt there would be any argument to begin with. Saying ‘hey, you might not want to break connections with site for no reason so your users aren’t surprised or worry that they…so on and so forth’ could be met with a ‘hey, thanks for the advice’ and everyone would have moved on. Accusing them of censorship and attacking someone else’s freedom of speech because you don’t think a personal decision they made was justified because other people utilizing their platform expected something else is a completely different animal.