“Blurs the line?”

Ok, let’s try an experiment: "Hitler blurs the line on Jews, Romani and actual criminals ".

How does that read, Mr Journalist?

Fuck these false-objectivity, milquetoast, water-carrying fascist apologists.

You can also vote the Democratic primaries, too.

That worked out, suprisingly well, for Sanders. Think about how much change you could affect voting for Sanderses at every level.

This is how the Tea Party and MAGA co-opted the Republicans, and it’s the model progressives should use to move the needle in the Democratic party (and they have, with some success).

If progressives want to see change, progressives need to vote. In every election. General or primary.

Hello there, fellow Ontarian!

In seriousness, Ford is a great example of my point because he talks to how people feel. It doesn’t matter that it’s bullshit at best or whitewashing of his latest grift at worst, he’s at least acknowledging enough voters’ concerns and fears, and while tossing a bauble here or there (eg, booze in corner stores, buck a beer) to look like he’s doing something for the common person.

His opposition doesn’t do this. Stiles gets ignored, and Crombie just seems like a weak Ford impersonator.

The polticial left needs to do better. Yes that would probably mean getting called socialist, but since that’ll happen anyway they may as well own it.

Maybe, just maybe, liberal democracies need to do a better job solving problems for constituents and less time fellating billionaires.

That might help.

I mean, when I see a right-wing populist telling me they can fix all my problems, I know they’re a lying, opportunistic piece of shit, but I can also see the appeal because at least they’re saying that there’s problems and that they’ll do something, which is more than milquetoast centrists will do.

Yes.

They’re hoping for a Reichstag Fire moment where they can win control during the chaos.

What a craven, gaslighting piece of shit.

Ah, the Oracle clause.

Way to go, Bibi. Putting all of Israel and every member of the Jewish diaspora at risk just to save your corrupt political skin.

Oh, and killing tens of thousands of innocent people.

Hear me out, but aren’t these people supposed to be professional?

Wondering whether “happy” or “angry” variants of a person will show up should stop being a thing around sixteen to eighteen years of age.

Maybe thes story should read: “Trump grossly unfit for office and the Republican party is so badly broken that they can’t manage to replace him”?

Aren’t most trucks equipped with interlocks that prevent travelling at speed when the bed isn’t fully lowered?

Don’t they have enough money yet?!

Are they not, ever, going to be satisfied? Does a tiny little modicum of restraint upset them that much?

(don’t answer that!)

After the USS Liberty, Israel realized it has carte blanche.

Nope, they weren’t

To quote their own R&D lead: "Pfizer’s head of vaccine and research and development, Kathrin Jansen, had said on November 8 that they “were never part of the Warp Speed”. They did receive a large initial order, but they didn’t partake of Warp Speed for R&D. They did, however, get funding from European governments.

Moderna was the only completely successful recipient of Warp Speed funding. AstraZeneca was the other one, but their offering had issues with blood clotting.

Demonizing and downplaying and sowing doubt on the credibility of public health did incredible damage. One of the reasons the US suffered as badly as it did is because the Trump admin treated it like a PR attack on Trump, instead of like a legitimate crisis, which it was.

Trump’s failure is commonly assumed to have killed almost half-million people. And that’s just Trump’s response to COVID, turning vaccine hesitancy into a mainstream right-wing shibboleth is going to be a gift that keeps giving.

Warp speed also didn’t really help that much. Of the recipients, only Moderna’s was successful, and Pfizer wasn’t part of the program. And that’s before we get into insider trading allegations and how it didn’t coordinate with anyone internationally.

The pandemic kind of wallpapered over it, but at the time we were looking down the tubes at a recession and a trade war, and Trump had by that point gotten rid of most of the competent cabinet that kept him in check.

If a 2008 crisis hit, it would have been bad.

People tend to forget how badly he fucked up the pandemic response. Imagine his cronies instead of Bush and Obama’s people in '08. We’d be in a depression by now.

“Duped” is doing some heavy lifting in that sentence.

Russia comes to mind.

You really should read Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance to understand why this is important, and why “the only way to counter speech is with more speech” isn’t just wrong, it’s actually counterproductive.

Here’s the short version, if it helps.

Yeah, XP was pretty good.

I was a young sysadmin during this era, I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment. It got tolerable by the time of the last service pack, but it was a security nightmare otherwise and didn’t offer much over Win2k.

That said, I’m not a Windows fan in general, but I’d class the following as the “good” ones:

• NT 3.5 (user-mode GDI FTW!)
• Phone 7.0 (this was probably what I’d call the Practically Perfect version of Windows. WP7 is just so good)
• NT 3.1 gets an honourable mention
• 8 (after WP7, this is the first version of Windows that was pretty much stable on day one. Say what you will about the UI, the core was the best Microsoft has ever one; ditto fir Server 2012)
• 10 (8 but with refinement; I’m cautious putting it here because you can see the genesis of the decisions that gave us 11)
• Vista (a lot of what people like about 7 really came from Vista, like the WDDM driver model and the improved security infrastructure; Vista, like NT, came out before hardware was commonly available that could run it)

Anchoring the bottom

• 98 & ME (IE integrated everywhere and the security nightmare it begat deserves a special place in hell)
• 1.0 (you had to be there, but this thing made Atari TOS look sophisticated)
• 95 pre-OSR2 (VxDs, DLLs and a login screen you could bypass with an escape key!)
• NT4 (it wasn’t bad, per se, but I still resent how unstable it was versus 3.5)
• CE and pre-5.0 Mobile (hey, guess what, replacing your battery wipes your device because we didn’t implement persistent storage!)
• 11 (10 without most of the redeeming features, plus an Android launcher for a Start menu. Now with extra spyware!)

A lot of people really like 7 and 2000, but I tend to think of those as polish releases of Vista and NT4. They’re Microsoft eventually fixing their mistakes, after having everyone drag on them for years.