Master-Debater131

I did. I dont remember the number, but I hit it.

Oh man, YIM. I remember those days.

Wayback Machine FTW! Looking at that image really does make me miss the old boards. There was just something so fun about them.

Theres just way too many to list honestly. Just thinking about everyone I would talk to over the years, and its crazy. Soooooo many people that were just awesome. Really wish a bunch would make their way back.

I moved over the years. Started at Williams Street, moved to OA, then to Bab and IB, eventually Rants. I sorta settled into IB, Bab, and OA at the end. WSC really died off.

Man there was so much that was great. The old OA was a riot at times. IB was in its own world. Rants....oof. The Top Posters list was fun to. It broke down who posted the most to each board. Those IB Leader boards turned into a contest of their own. The people seemed better to. Wayyyyy less of the assholes that took over near the end.

I dont remember exactly. I think it was 05 or 06. It was a loooonnnnggggg time ago.

Clipped for brevity. Now that I do agree with. Trump is totally unlikable, but he is charismatic and that brings people with him. DeSantis doesnt have that same "it" factor. If DeSantis were more charismatic then he would be a much bigger threat to Trump in the primaries. As it is, he has to hope that his policy wins and potential external factors help push him over the top.

Im not really sure that this is a good argument to make. If I was Biden and I saw this graph I would not be happy. Biden is barely above Trump at the same time frame, and Trump lost. That is not a comfortable place to be in. I do agree that it will be a long slog though. There is a very long way to go in this, and to be quite frank, there is no guarantee that either Trump or Biden will be the nominees in 24.

The problem with playing up the Twitter launch as some sort of disaster thats already hobbled DeSantis is that it ignores that literally everyone has known he would be running for months. Some Conservative blogs even ran with titles like "We didnt listen because hes been running for months". By the time we get to the true primary season and start having debates no one will care about the Twitter launch. Likeability also doesnt really matter all that much anymore thanks to Trump. He is not a likeable guy with massive character flaws and yet he won once, and damn near did it a second time. Elections have become less about "look how good I am" and more about "Look how shitty he is". And in a competition like that, DeSantis does have the edge. 2024 could shape up a lot like 2008 where the in-power party is so hobbled that it didnt matter who the nominee was, the challenger was going to win. Everyone knew in 08 that whoever won the Democratic Primary was going to win the whole thing, and we may be looking at a similar environment in 2024. The huge wildcard in this is more Trump indictments. The NYC ones rallied the base to him because of how politically charged they are. If the DoJ goes after Trump is could improve his support as well. GA is the real wildcard because that would be a charge out of a Red state with a GOP Governor. There will be a point where these charges peel off enough of Trumps support that he should lose primary races. Theres also this showing the strength that DeSantis has. When putting it head to head against Trump, DeSantis won this round. Its still super, ridiculousness, early in this entire process. Im not entirely convinced that the eventual GOP nominee is even in the race yet. The GOP has a very long history of the strongest early candidates flaming out in spectacular fusion. But as it stands as of today, I would say its no better than a 50/50 Trump v DeSantis.

As mentioned above, it may be that Biden is so weak now that any GOP candidate, even Trump, could beat him. His numbers are cratering across the board and the only thing keeping him in the 30s is support from Democrats. 41% say that a Biden win in 2024 would be a "disaster", thats only 3% better than the 44% who say the same about a Trump victory. Biden also is at serious risk of taking the full blame if the US Defaults on our debt. The Left has been operating with the thought that the GOP would take the blame, and thats not true at all. This poll confirms that most Americans would blame Biden and Democrats for the Default. And they should. The GOP has had a bill passed for months and Biden refused to negotiate with them. Biden is incredibly weakened right now, and he may not be able to recover. If the economy dips or goes into a full blown recession, if inflation keeps up, if we default, or any other number of things happen and he may be irreparably crippled.

Its been a couple days since DeSantis announced his campaign and the reaction in Conservative spaces has been interesting. The hardcore MAGA crowd is losing their minds. Trump himself is saying that just by running DeSantis is committing "election interference". His suckups are out in the MAGA-sphere saying that DeSantis is horrible and that even the NY Gov is a better Gov than he is. They've gone off the deep end because they realize DeSantis has a very real chance at taking Trump out in the Primary. The Never-Trumpers are rallying behind DeSantis in a big way. They view him as the best chance at taking out Trump, or weaking Trump enough that someone else grabs the nomination. The Establishment GOP are going with the message of "whoever can beat Biden", and while one could argue that anyone other than Trump could beat Biden, DeSantis is particularly strong against him. They just want to take control back no matter who its behind. The one thing that all three groups are agreeing on is that it was smart of DeSantis to bypass the MSM and announce it on Twitter. The launch itself was glitchy, but it sent the message that the entire GOP base gets. The MSM is nothing more than the propaganda arm of the DNC and should be regarded as the enemy. This was clear a decade ago when they went after Romney saying he was the 2nd coming of Hitler, and it only got worse since then. Trump laid the groundwork for this in 2016 with his use of Twitter, and DeSantis has gone a step further over the past year or two. The GOP is finally waking up to the fact that the MSM will never give them a fair shake because they have no interest in doing so. By totally bypassing them DeSantis, and other Republicans, can speak directly to their base and to the American People without their message being totally distorted by the MSM. Its smart of DeSantis to bypass the MSM in the primary to focus on the GOP base. DeSantis himself is launching a roughly $200M grassroots organization that will door knock on the primary states in huge numbers. He is planning on flooding the zone with his staffers to make sure that he gets his supporters to the polls in the primary. This is also huge because that same apparatus can be deployed in the general election as well.

Not satisfied with losing once and constantly being humiliated in the courts, Noted loser Kari Lake appears ready to do it all over again! She perfectly sums up the problem for the GOP in 24. The GOP have a massive opportunity to sweep into power, and they will likely blow it because of idiots like Lake.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/22/anti-kremlin-militia-freedom-of-russia-legion-overrun-russian-border-village-kozinka Anti-Putin militia claims to have overrun Russian border village "Fighting has broken out along the Russian border with Ukraine after self-described Russian partisan forces launched a cross-border raid and claimed to have overrun a border village for the first time in the war. The Freedom of Russia Legion, which describes itself as an anti-Kremlin militia seeking to liberate Russia from Vladimir Putin, claimed to have crossed the border and overrun the settlement of Kozinka, while sending units into the town of Grayvoron in Russia’s Belgorod region. It is not yet clear how many people have been injured in the fighting, which continued into the evening. Footage of the raid, purportedly from a border checkpoint in Grayvoron, has shown casualties, including video of a Russian officer lying facedown in a pool of blood next to Russian passports and other documents scattered on the floor. The video also showed armoured vehicles appearing to overrun the post. The growing chaos in Belgorod region, where local authorities announced a “counterterrorist regime” on Monday evening, was a rare case where Russian villages have come face-to-face with a conflict that the country’s army has unleashed across Ukraine. Both Russia and Ukrainian officials have confirmed fighting at the border." So yea, it sure does look like theres some sort of skirmish happening in Russia right now.

Something may be happening in Belogord. It sounds like the Freedom for Russian Legion has taken a huge chunk of the area from Russia. They are a Ukrainian allied group or Russian fighters. Belogord is also where Russia stores some of its nuclear weapons. Nothing is confirmed yet, but theres a ton of stuff starting to float around online supposedly showing the FRL with heavy equipment moving through Belogord.

At this rate they will take all of Ukraine in, *checks notes*, like 35 years.

Yes they can. And even if they couldn't they absolutely can ban traffic to TikTok itself. This really isnt hard. It happens all the time all over the world.

Congress is trying to with their nationwide TikTok ban. And even if they succeed people who really want to use a VPN still. Its the same with this law. If you really want to get to tiktok you can, but for the vast majority of people they wont. You will likely restrict more than 95% of the access in Montana by doing this. Most people cant be bothered to set up a VPN and use it properly.

Its extremely easy to stop someone from retrieving data. Websites do it all the time. Apps do it to. Registration location has nothing to do with region locking either. I have an ESPN+ account. I cant watch some teams when I am at home because its region locked. But when I travel for work it loads up just fine because my geographic location has changed. Its not hard to do. To say that it cant be done or is difficult to do is just flat wrong.

The psychical site of a server does not matter for where the data is retrieved, or where it is blocked. Websites routinely alter their services depending on the region that they are providing service for. ESPN absolutely region blocks content for live sports, and pornhub just blocked the entire state of Utah from their website. Its laughably easy to region lock websites and apps. Everyone is acting like this is some huge technological hurdle when it really isn't.

Theres a huge difference between 2A and an app. One involves an object you own and can hold, the other is just a bunch of 1s and 0s. In one case you would have to go door to door asking for weapons and hoping no one shoots you. In the other you can simply block internet traffic to a designated destination. Are there ways around that? Sure. You could use a VPN like everyone in Utah is doing to get to pornhub.But you would eliminate more than 90% of the traffic to that website. TikTok is a legitimate threat to the US so it absolutely deserves scrutiny. In an ideal world the bill to ban TikTok would simply be a nationwide digital privacy law that protects people from all social media, google, amazon, etc. But thats not our world. So instead we got that abomination in Congress and piecemeal attempts to block tiktok like this.

Not sure what the 2nd amendment has to do with anything here. Banning an App has nothing to do with going door to do checking phones. Montana can simply instruct ISPs to block all traffic from TikTok and hold them liable for any breach of the law. If they wanted it off of phones then cell providers would be forced to push an update that blocks the function of the app itself. All of this is done without ever looking a person in the face. Its by some programmer somewhere in an office.

The part where the bill isnt a simple bill to ban TikTok but essentially the Patriot Act on steroids and applied to the internet. It gives the alphabet agencies farrrrrr to much control over the internet and the ability for government to simply ban any website it wants without even having evidence of any sort of wrongdoing. Dont like a website? Poof! Gone! That kind of power is so open for abuse that its truly terrifying. Heres a quick rundown of the bill: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/could-tiktok-ban-bill-criminalize-vpn-use-the-eff-says-its-not-impossible/

1 down, 49 to go. If Congress wasnt trying to use this to shoehorn in one of the worst pieces of legislation ever I would get on board with their plan. But they cant just ban tiktok, they have to try and totally take over the internet in the process.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/05/10/7401474/ Ukraine's defenders defeat 72nd Russian brigade near Bakhmut, liberate territory and capture prisoners The videos of the attack are just insane. Ukraine totally outclassed the RA though the use of combined arms. They steamrolled through some areas and really did some damage. Ukraine is putting the weapons we gave them to good use.