Putting aside the obvious concerns, a mayor doing this and using “it’s the same as the maintenance guy” should be a red flag.

I’ve worked in companies where high-level people take it upon themselves to do operational work. It’s at best pointless retail poltics, and at worst it’s rampant bikeshedding.

I’m sure China would be equally amenable to a peace proposal that would allow Taiwan part of the mainland, or would allow Tibet autonomy.

China, in other words, can fuck right off.

If someone could port AUX’s UI, that would be perfect.

And as a fellow System 6/7 fan, it’s love, not masochistim. Long live the spatial Finder!

Depressingly, also Fetterman.

Discretion? From the whale carcass anti-vax guy?

“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.

Ah, the Oracle clause.

Neoliberalism broke democracy.

People are willing to vote for someone, anyone, who promises to make things better because they’re tired of bootlicking milquetoast corporatists that’ll give a tax break to a billionaire but will charge you user fees for breathing.

We need to vote for politicians that will actually improve things, instead of either rainbow-bench-painting wage-thieves or protofascist grifters.

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”?

Again, it’s “Don’t quote the troll”. Some of us learned this in Usenet in the 1990s.

Saying “This is bullshit” or “You’re weird” without engaging with their ideas stops the contagion from spreading.

It is, though. Studies in disinformation have proven this. This is why right-wing bullshitters are so eager to engage in debate: just getting the chance to show up and be refuted in a legitmate setting, like a major newspaper, gives them an audience for the ideas and credibility, that their position is one worthy of refute.

This is how we got the alt-right in 2015: by taking neo-Nazis seriously.

This is what the media doesn’t understand, and why fact-checkers are getting–correctly–rolled on social media. Every time you bring up one of these lies, even to fact check it–especially to fact-check it–you give it credibility.

This is why the Harris/Walz campaign’s tactic of ridicule is working so well. Instead of saying “No, you’re wrong about XXX because YYYY and ZZZZ”, they’re saying “What is wrong with you? You’re weird.” The latter doesn’t give the lie any oxygen.

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

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.

“Liberal” doesn’t mean what many people think it means.

It doesn’t mean “leftist” or “progressive” or “humane”. There might be some overlap, but these are not the same things, despite conservatives trying to define them as such.

Yes it is.

You might not wish it to be, but fact-checking absolutely does amplify fake news, especially if you give details.

A simple “this story is bullshit” is all that’s needed

And now you, the mainstream media, are amplifying it and giving it oxygen.

It’s like y’all never learned the old Usenet adage: “don’t feed (quote) the trolls”.