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Ame | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag +1 
 Trump didn't do as much as he could have, but he still permanently damaged both the credibility and survivability of the regime. Assad's victory in Syria ditto. J6 wasn't what it could've been, but it still scared them enough to cripple the military with an 'extremism stand-down' and pull out of the middle-east. Russia-ukraine shattered the myth that the U.S. could protect its puppet-states and punish its enemies effectively, and, as a result, we saw the Saudis disalign from the U.S., and a bunch of other countries get cold feet. 

Things do happen, it's just there's a lot of inertia and institutional power trying to hold things together, and new equilibria start to feel normal after a while. Drastic, immediate changes are rare, even as the result of drastic, immediate actions.
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kamehamic | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I was talking only about X/Twitter. In practice, censorship wise, nothing has changed except what I would call the illusion of change with events like BanTheADL, people got banned/shadowed anyway. If Elon wanted change, as in really make the platform free speech like he said he would do, he literally would have to "sacrifice" Twitter to make it happen, as in ignore/fight the jewish groups and see how it ends, but as I said that requires breaking the NEH rule.

The pattern which I guess was in front of my eyes all this time, is that the system is VERY resistant to breaking the NEH rule when it's not them doing it. Change very rarely will happen if it's not done by ((them)). In retrospect the few times Twitter seemed to change, this past year/s, it was an illusion.

Regarding events outside of the western world... "no shit sherlock" I guess.
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Ame | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Part of it's normalcy bias, another part is just the parts of twitter we engage with. Lefties are increasingly complaining that the site's now a lot more right-leaning - they're detached from reality, of course, but I have noticed that anything in the normiesphere is no longer censored - you can call out fraudulent elections, jab stuff, and so on. Snapping your fingers and purging a bunch of IC alums from a very complex system isn't as easy as all that - he could be doing more, sure, but it's not trivial.