Fucking Republicans.

Firefox looking better all the time...

"That's why it was one of the great presidencies, they say. Even the opponents sometimes say he did very well, I have to say. 'Take it back,' they scream. his people say 'Take it back.' From that day on, our opponents, a lot of opponents, but we've been waging an all-out war on American democracy."

Doesn't sound like a gaffe to me. He has been waging a war on American democracy, literally tried a coup.

Trump wanted US military generals to emulate generals of the third Reich and treat him like he was Hitler:

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/inside-the-war-between-trump-and-his-generals

Trump, not a man known for his literacy, kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed and would read it sometimes:

Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2015/07/donald-ivana-trump-divorce-prenup-marie-brenner

Then there's this:

Donald Trump appears to take aspects of his German background seriously. John Walter works for the Trump Organization, and when he visits Donald in his office, Ivana told a friend, he clicks his heels and says, “Heil Hitler,” possibly as a family joke.

Trump seems to aspire to be Hitler-like, and he even tried to take supreme dictatorial power through populism, lies and propaganda like Hitler did.

Russia looking a lot like their old enemy the Nazis these days.

The one that passed: Lexus Teammate with Advanced Drive (2022-24 Lexus LS)

Saved you a click.

I predict him pulling an illegal stunt and getting off scot-free because he's wealthy and has aligned himself with the christofascist party that doesn't support the rule being used against its own.

It has no fundamental grasp of concepts like truth, it just repeats words that simulate human responses. It's glorified autocomplete that yields impressive results. Do you consider your auto complete to be lying when it picks the wrong word?

If making it pretend to be a stock picker and putting it under pressure makes it return lies, that's because it was trained on data that indicates that's statistically likely to be the right set of words as response for such a query.

Also, because large language models are probabilistic, you could ask it the same question over and over again and get totally different responses each time, some of which are inaccurate. Are they lies though? For a creature to lie it has to know that it's returning untruths.

Smart move, Trump's word is worthless and any concessions he might agree to give to unions aren't worth a damn. He's always been happy to fuck over workers for the leisure class.

Infinitely reproducible digital media has little inherent value. As the article acknowledges, the value proposition Netflix offered was convenience. If pirate sites offer more convenience than Netflix offers legitimate users, Netflix will lose. I find it baffling they are fucking around with ads and locking down access, making their experience worse. Same with Amazon Prime. It's like they forgot their own business model.

I think the whole Twitter debacle has disproven that he's a good businessman. Rather, it highlights how far one can get by having heritable wealth and being in the right place at the right time.

Ah yes, that most cherished of freedoms, the freedom to let children die of easily preventable diseases

Thank you Elon, may I have another?

Putin has Republican leadership in his pocket.

That obituary is far too kind to him.

The Yale University historian Greg Grandin, author of the biography Kissinger’s Shadow, estimates that Kissinger’s actions from 1969 through 1976, a period of eight brief years when Kissinger made Richard Nixon’s and then Gerald Ford’s foreign policy as national security adviser and secretary of state, meant the end of between three and four million people. That includes “crimes of commission,” he explained, as in Cambodia and Chile, and omission, like greenlighting Indonesia’s bloodshed in East Timor; Pakistan’s bloodshed in Bangladesh; and the inauguration of an American tradition of using and then abandoning the Kurds.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-dead-1234804748/

1. Force women to give birth against their will
2. Deny them any public support

Seems like they're intentionally maximizing the suffering of women and children.

Its a mahoosive Nation, its must have the right person somewhere.

The time to vote for them is during the primaries. The general election is where we defeat fascism with the person we chose in the primaries.

Kidnapping and killing random civilians... including at a "Festival for Peace" music festival near Gaza. Absolutely disgusting and horrific.

It is important to … recognise the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation

This is the statement they're doing this over? It seems pretty tame. What the fuck Israel?
Is it because Gaza was blockaded but not occupied at the time of the attack?

Erdan has already demanded Guterres’ resignation and described his remarks as blood libel.

That's not what blood libel means.

His inaccuracies: blaming Israel for the al-Shifa missile attack, and referring to the hospital as, "flattened."

I've seen people repeating these inaccuracies constantly on Lemmy.

Inspiring? Elon Musk's cost cutting strategy was he just decided not to pay people, not to pay his landlord, not to pay his janitors, not to pay his hosting companies, not to pay many Twitter employees, and not to bother following laws, because, presumably, "fuck you, I'm a billionaire." If that's inspiring to spez, I'm feeling really good about leaving his platform. Aaron Swartz must be spinning in his grave so fast we could generate power from it.

It's a show for low-information voters to establish false equivalency in their minds, fuel for whataboutism. Sadly, it will probably work on the intended audience.

This is further proof of that.

In America, right wing supporters are often the dullest tools in the shed. They're sure they're right, but they don't understand how anything works, historical context, how to discern truth from bullshit, or what words mean.

"I Love the Poorly Educated" -Donald J. Trump

What a gift for epic games. Glad I never wasted my time learning Unity.

Huzzah! Another great move by the Biden administration that will probably be overlooked by most commenters, like his labor board appointments that led to the recent union resurgence were.

Christofascism is so hot right now; these people are enemies of the United States, they want to destroy it and replace it with a theocracy.

Republicans love playing pretend to create false equivalency. Their people never read beyond the headlines and actively oppose any sort of fact checking, so politically they have no burden of proof.

Over cigars one night, Rush told Weissmann that he got the carbon fiber for the Titan’s hull at a big discount because it was past its shelf-life for use in airplanes, Weissmann said. But Rush reassured him it was safe.

Death by hubris

Although it won't absolve one of crimes, affluenza seems to be a real thing. The social isolation and deference that money brings seems to have a host of well-documented psychological issues that accompany it. Musk, like Trump, seems to believe that he can do whatever he wants without meaningful consequences, because he exists in a bubble of sycophants and wealth, where rules for the plebs do not apply. Normal people can't burn this much good will and go on with their lives unhindered. Normal people would be permanently financially ruined if they lost that much doing stupid and illegal business moves.

I've long wondered if lead exposure accounts for their behaviors over the past couple decades. Lead that accumulates in the bones over one's lifetime leaches out into the bloodstream when one becomes elderly, like calcium does with osteoporosis. Cognitive issues and rage are associated with lead exposure.

A pox upon both houses. Both sides are hypocritical as hell. And both sides fucking suck.

I find it hard to look at the behavior of both American political parties and see them as equally objectionable. Our Overton window has shifted wildly in the last decade. By international standards, Democrats are conservative left and Republicans have become dangerously radical right. American Republicans have abandoned the rule of law. They oppose democracy and attempted a coup when they didn't like the results. They openly lie and gaslight. They scapegoat vulnerable minorities. They force women to give birth against their will. They induce violence via stochastic terrorism. I can't look at this situation and muster comparable ire for both sides.

Congress has like a 18% approval rating, but a 80+% re-election rate.

That's congress as a whole, most Americans have a positive view of their own representatives.

rather than set those wedge issues aside and recognize that there's FAR more important things at stake, we keep squabbling over bullshit rather than actually making progress.

In a 2-party system there's little incentive to. I posit that voters are motivated to vote more by fear of the other party than enthusiasm about their own. This is a consequence of Duverger's Law. If we want to fix the system and encourage cooperation, the best way is ranked choice voting, which encourages candidates to reach out to all voters even on the other side because they might be their 2nd or 3rd choice. When they implemented it in SF, some candidates running against each other started campaigning together, cooperating for mutual advantage.

He spoke at Duke's convention:

In 2002, Scalise was a speaker at a convention for the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a group which was founded by David Duke. This became known in 2014 after political blogger Lamar White, Jr. uncovered anonymous comments from 2002 on Stormfront, a white supremacist website, which made reference to Scalise as a 2002 speaker at the convention. source

Yeah he definitely sounds like a big enough of a racist piece of shit to be popular with Republicans.

The point was never to secure the border, the point was to make it look like Democrats weren't.

Sounds like this scum is trying to hide the misery his party's policies have caused.

For those who don't know who Ben-Gvir is, this guy is pretty terrible, (archival link here,) probably the worst in Netanyahu's administration. He calls for war crimes, he has framed pictures of Jewish terrorists on his wall, his politics could accurately be described as Judeofascism. He's Israel's National Security Minister which means he oversees Israel's police and prisons, it would be best if he wasn't involved in government at all but at least he's not waging this war.

I suspect stochastic terrorism is the last card he has to play.

Republicans love manufacturing a narrative/case based on one person's (falsified) account. They did it with Saddam's WMDs, they did it with their false 2020 election claims, (the 'kraken,') and they're doing it with this Hunter Biden BS.

Am I out of touch?
No, it's the electorate that is wrong!

I guess that's the kind of policing Uvalde wants 🤷‍♂️
Not sure why anyone would want to live in a town like that though.