Sounds like an excuse.

What I mean is: it sounds like his handlers kept making excuses and you kept accepting them because you wanted to believe them.

I know, I'm frustrated too. I dismissed the Alex Jones Fox News crowd because they were known liars, they'd lied to us for decades, and this really did seem like standard conservative projection to deflect from their candidates' obvious mental issues.

Hate to admit it. But the conservatives were right and we were wrong.

Selective enforcement is the core of conservative law making.

What I'm getting from that is:

(1) Wikipedias editors don't want to use racists as sources for articles.

(2) The author thinks refusing to give equal time to fringe arguments that link genetics and intelligence is a surrender to "woke ideology" that will kill Wikipedia in the long run.

Yawn.

Yes. In Republican eyes what you said is literally correct.

The long-term goal of Republican leadership is to ban all abortion from the moment of conception, ban all hormonal birth control (because it can prevent implantation of a fertilized embryo and therefore cause abortion), and return the question of whether to ban condoms and other barrier methods to the states.

Republican leadership realizes the American people don't support a complete abortion ban.

Republican leadership believes the American people are wrong and it's their responsibility, as Christian leaders, to protect the innocent children of America and impose a complete abortion ban anyway.

And Republican leaders know if they go hood off and call for a complete abortion ban they'll lose power in the backlash and abortion will become even more normalized.

So they're gradually restricting abortion rights while heavily pushing right-wing propaganda to children and teenagers - fucking PragerU is partnering with the Florida and Oklahoma Departments of Education to produce videos for school children, did you know that? - in order to shift the cultural consensus away from abortion is a right and towards abortion is a sin so that future generations of Republican leaders can complete their work and impose a total abortion ban.

So, yes, the Republican leadership is very much aware that what they need is marketing. They know abortion bans are unpopular. They're walking a fine line, trying to work towards a highly unpopular policy goal while still protecting their legislative control of Congress and the states, knowing their control of government would be at risk if the American people realized their actual policy goal.

And so you have Republicans talking about "pro-baby policies" now. Because who doesn't love babies? That sounds like WIC and infant nutrition programs and daycare and better neonatal care and all those good things that Democrats support. Hard to tell that the Republican is actually talking about forcing women to give birth to babies dead in the womb and babies with fetal defects incompatible with life, but that's the state of the national dialogue in the year of our Lord 2023.

I think the center right is more like "Don't say it out loud yet, we don't have enough public support."

When it comes to Republicans, I don't think there's actually a divide between moderates and radicals. There are the people who want to impose a Handmaid's Tale authoritarian theocracy right away. Then there are the people who also want a Handmaid's Tale authoritarian theocracy but think they don't have enough public support for revolution and want to gradually move America further to the right by taking over school boards and sabotaging liberal public institutions and so on. The destination is the same, only the strategy differs.

You spelled "pay bribes and walk free" wrong. Tate set up shop in one of the most corrupt countries in the world for a reason.

It's almost as if making a site dedicated to people too racist, sexist, antisocial, etc, for even Reddit's lax moderation policies, was a bad idea.

And that's before it became a central hub for literal treason.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it's archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you're describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it's because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

There's a Sea Shepherd ship captain facing twenty years in an Italian prison because she rescued drowning migrants. Because, in government terms, she smuggled aliens into Italy.

And she's just one of the most well known cases in the West. A fisherman in Greece got 280 years in prison for piloting a single ship of migrants to shore.

Saying the governments of Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc, don't care about migrant lives understates the situation. They want migrants to die at sea, and they punish people who bring them to land.

Remember the old saying: if a company is giving you something for free, you're not the customer, you're the product.

Subreddits are Reddit's product. Reddit makes money by selling subreddits to advertisers. If moderators damage that product, Reddit takes action. End of story.

I like to imagine that most intelligent species of the universe evolved from eusocial insect analogues or herd animals or solitary predators, and our weird tribal ape habit of domesticating and pack bonding with various predator species - and our general attitude that large predators are cool and exciting to be around because as we evolved domestication we modified our own brains to have positive associations with potentially domesticatible species - freaks them the fuck out.

It's like every other alien species is the Utah Conservation Department's Twitter page warning people not to pet mountain lions and we're all yelling "but if not friend, why friend shaped" at the whole universe.

I agree with you. I think property is theft; in an ideal world everyone would have the right to shelter and no one would own land privately. And I also think fear of housing insecurity - including the fear of a landlord extorting or evicting you - is the biggest reason America is obsessed with home ownership and I can't criticize anybody for pursuing it. The only way to have secure housing in the US today is to own your home, and everyone has a right to secure housing.

not give him credit for anything other than putting on his pants each morning

Conservative media doesn't even give him credit for that much. Or haven't you heard the rumors Biden has advanced dementia and his team of handlers have to dress him before leading him to public appearances?

I mean, given how the White House handled Reagan's Alzheimer's symptoms in the last years of his presidency, it wouldn't be outside the bounds of possibility. But still...