Social media is to kids today what cigarettes were to teens last century. Might even be better compared to the Radium marketing blitz that poisoned so many while making a few very rich.
I see stuff like this and laugh. It would seem that most Americans, Democrats in particular, cling to the notion that they will have a chance to vote again. If there are midterms or another full election, they will be rigged the same as Russia, North Korea or any other "strongman" dictatorship. Keyboard warriors won't make a whit of difference.
I'd agree that it peaked a long time ago. I joined in 2008 or so because my teenage sons had joined. We didn't know each other's IDs, I wanted to know what they were interested in and found a couple communities I liked for myself. Every year it got less inclusive and the toxicity that was contained to some communities started to spill over. I had already left when the corporatization started in earnest.
Republicans / Conservatives have always told their members that they are better stewards of finances and yet for the last 40-50 years they have been the ones to drive up the debt and run annual deficits while handing ever increasing amounts of money to the 1%. How they keep convincing their members that it is the left who are the problem, is a remarkable study in propaganda.
In today's online messaging world, one person's sarcasm is another's opinion. Without /s it is very hard to tell which it is.
Someone launched fireworks a week ago in our neighbourhood. Why? A birthday? Who knows. It wasn't any holiday nor a weekend. How exactly does one plan for that? And it wasn't a single bear bang, it went on for 10-15mins. Nor was it that unusual. People seem to have fireworks displays at random throughout the year - any month, any day of the week. Some are even too early for it to be dark enough out to see them well so they are just a bunch of noise. I don't mind the scripted displays on Halloween night, NYE, and July 1st but we don't need all the amateur in between ones.
We should be thanking Trump. He's so undisciplined, uncouth, uneducated that he talks like an 8th grade dropout mafia wannabe. However, that is much more representative of average America than the usual Presidents. He says all the quiet parts out loud. The US has been the biggest bully in the world since the end of WWII and uses every allied nation to prop up and enrich their own. For the past decades they have been masking it through a veil of diplomacy. But not Trump. He tells it as it is. Problem for the USA is that he thinks that is good and that America is a great nation that all others worship. Maybe under his government, the rest of the world will be freed from the US.
This would seem more accurate to me if it said "Grandparents at 25". I'm the 25yo parent's age and for us, people were already considering whether they could afford 1 or 2 children with mortgage and childcare costs. I guess if we had the big screen TVs, cellphones stronger than computers, gaming computers, and cheap airfare around the world, many of us would have also decided parenting was much too expensive.
It means that everything PP is currently sharing is made up misinformation because he has cut himself off from having real information. He is firmly in favour of that because he can say anything, real or imagined, that he thinks will appeal to his potential voters. Truth is something they might not agree with so it's better for him not to be held to that. Inuendo is so much easier to spin than fact.
Most of the trips that have happened in February and March were planned and often paid for before that time and couldn't easily be changed or cancelled so many went ahead. There will be a continuing drop off. Airlines are reassigning their planes because so few Canadians are booking trips to the USA, even as a stopover to anther country. Some border businesses have already lost 50% or more of their business.
I don't know about lack of reparations. Where I live it is only the Indigenous groups that have massive amounts of federal and provincial money to spend. All sorts of fancy new buildings going up for housing and recreation and self-government.
My boys are now in their 30s. They always helped with the big family dinners. Even made a couple of them on their own for the rest of us. I do not understand how anyone in my age group, Gen X, could not have raised their sons to be completely independent but somehow, I'm in a minority.