The last time a President wasn’t a Democrat or a Republican was elected was 1848. But neither the Democratic or Republican parties resemble at all what they were in 1852.

You don’t change the 2-party system, you change the parties themselves.

It’s like the difference between having an air of mystery and a sense of je ne sais quoi.

That’s how seasons work, ideally.

I care when people think I’m lazy and outsource my writing.

I am lazy, but my terrible writing is my own, dammit.

How many boats of civilians did Binlden order to be sunk? How many heads of state did he kidnap or assassinate in wars of choice? How many American cities did he occupy with military units? How many of his political opponents did he have the justice department charge with baseless crimes? How many Nazis did he dine with?

The Dems piss me off, but saying the only reasons to say they’re no different than the Republicans are:

1. Being a fucking idiot ;or

2. Atremptingto prop up the GOP by convincing leftists not to vote against them.

Which anti-capitalist third-party has even a 0.000001% chance of winning enough seats to be an impediment to Trump?

The em dash thing annoys me because I actually used em dashes a lot in my own writing. Now I’ve had to change how I write to keep people from assuming I’m using generative tools for writing.

In the plus side, our mayor loves my writing style because he thinks staff should be using AI for everything.

People should have been imprisoned over the Sony rootkit scandal.

For those who don’t know - their music CDs had malware built in that automatically installed itself on PCs without prompting or notification that gave unsecured root access to any PC through a hidden service that couldn’t be detected or disabled from within Windows. It was as bad as bad gets. There was no hidden EULA or anything. They just straight-up installed viruses on millions of PCs that opened the door for other malware to install itself at the root level where it couldn’t be detected.

Sony should have been shut down entirely over it.

The US has a violence problem. We also have lots of guns.

I love guns. I enjoy shooting them, building them, and collecting them. I’ve got over 50 firearms ranging from a 50-dollar unbranded used 22 to a “I don’t really want to think about how much I’ve spent on this” custom Bergara precision rifle. And of course I have a ton of optics and a few silencers. I also recognize that most of that collection was too easy for me to get, and that if I were unstable or violent I could cause a lot of harm.

I also concede that the pro-2A crowd has a point that registration of firearms is a line they don’t want to cross because it’s a necessary first step towards mass confiscation.

And with the current political climate, I’m glad the government doesn’t know about my guns. If they could look up how many guns I own and that I’m a leftist, how quickly would they label me as an armed enemy of the state?

The guns are a very hard nut to crack, and the political reality is it’s almost impossible to restrict them. There’s millions of pro-gun single-issue voters and almost no pro-gun-control single-issue voters.

So the more realistic approach is to violence, not gun violence. We do that by making society more equitable, providing social services, free healthcare (including mental health), and worker protections. Keep peope from being driven by desperation into crime and provide mental healthcare to those who need it, and we’ll significantly reduce gun violence without doing a thing about guns themselves.

Skooma comes in pill form?

We had a similar per capita rate of participation in No Kings as France has had in its recent demonstrations. But the US has a much lower population density over a much larger land area, so the protests appeared smaller despite having millions more people in the streets.

It was genius. Instead of installing surveillance systems in everyone’s homes, they marketed the surveillance systems as luxury products and let our consumerism do the work. Instead of forcing it on the general public, they made us want it to the point where they can cite consumer demand as the reason they don’t even offer products that don’t invade your privacy.

In Texas, we’ve actually seen more snow the last 5 years than the previous 20, but also more extreme heat. It’s just extremes all around.

Our weather comes in the form of months-long heatwaves and droughts, isolated severe floods that saturate the ground and wash downstream instead of replenishing aquifers, and the annual extreme cold snap in February.

It’s not even the 1% anymore. It’s the 0.01%.

You can even see this in the enclave cities where everyone is a millionaire. They’re experiencing a round of gentrification as the billionaires come in and bulldoze a row of 5 million dollar mansions to build compounds.

It’s absolutely wild.

No, we need to keep a crumpled post-it note with the wipe password written on it in our pockets.

It’s the police’s fault for just typing in the unlabeled code they found. We use our actual passwords all the time - why would we have to keep those written down?

I went into the ER in Alabama about 20 years ago, and the nurse at intake didn’t even look up when I said there was a hatchet stuck in my leg and started asking if I was a smoker and what my race was.

While true - this isn’t just about Brazil. It’s an Argentine MAGA broker who tried to kill a Bolivian lawyer while coordinating with an American company to boost Brazilian Nazis and damage the Mexican president’s administration.

It’s bad.