That was when it kicked off in earnest.

I still think that if there’s one single person who deserves more of the blame than anyone else for Trump becoming president in the first place, it’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

But they can’t focus on big tech after all the robber barons lined up to pay protection money to Trump.

Unfortunately, the establishment Dems have the desires of the voters in one hand and they’re weighing that against hundreds of millions of dollars in soft money in the other, and so far the money has an uninterrupted win streak.

And Gilibrand has already clearly signaled which side she favors.

I used to work with a woman who was part of a Pentecostal church that did snake-handling and speaking-in-tongues.

Reading this article was sort of like listening to her talk about her church.

I would say that the most telling thing is that there hasn’t been a similar shift among Republicsns.

Anyone who can look at what Israel has done and is doing to the Palestinians in Gaza, and increasingly in the West Bank, without being filled with horror, revulsion and pity is a monster.

It was a brilliant bit of theater, just like their mass drone response to Israel’s last provocation.

In both cases now, Iran has managed to make Israel, and now the US, look both antagonistic and foolish. Their precisely measured responses really highlight the fact that they didn’t provoke either of these fights, that they have no intention of engaging in pointless bloodshed, but that, if pressed, they can and will respond in kind.

It makes them look like the only adults in the room.

Israel is a rogue state.

With any luck, it will kill google.

I don’t see how they can even pretend that it will do anything other than steal website traffic, since the exact point is to provide you with the information you would have gotten if you had gone to the website, leaving no reason to actually go to the website.

So painfully obviously, Google intends to steal the websites’ content in order to steal the websites’ traffic.

Which would seem to me to be grounds for class action lawsuits on behalf of the entire internet, which, if judged fairly, should bankrupt even that foul beast of a corporation.

And ironically enough, that would almost certainly “rejuvenate the internet.” As a matter of fact, I can’t think of a single thing that would do more to “rejuvenate the internet” than killing Google.

Because tyrants have a shared interest in not normalizing the killing of tyrants.

Yow.

Do you genuinely not realize that you just wrote an entire post methodically proving that my analysis of the situation is correct?

My idea of progressivism is something that leads to peace, not backing stupid theocrats that spread violence wherever they go.

If this was true you’d be condemning Israel as well.

It appears to me that your problem is that you’re viewing it entirely binaristically.

You’re accusimg the leftists who condemn Israel of being pro-Palestine, when that’s actually two separate issues, and it’s in fact quite easy to condemn the patently evil oppression and slaughter of innocents without supporting the government under which they live.

And at the same time, in your rush to opposevthe undeniable toxicity of Islamic fundamentalism, you’re ignoring or excusing the laundry list of atrocities in which Israel engages on a literally daily basis.

If you had the working brain you claim to have, you’d be able to make the small stretch to condemning both Islamic oppression and Zionist oppression, instead of ignorantly treating it as an all or nothing prospect in which opposition to one requires support for the other.

As the proud owner of a Santa Claus beard (though in color and texture, it’s more of a Grizzly Adams beard) I would say that the most important thing is to turn the care over to a professional. Just like your hair, don’t attempt to manage it yourself (beyond washing, combing and the like). Find a stylist who also does beards and go on a regular schedule and have them trim it and maintain it. And they’ll also be able to tell you if you need to do something special to care for it.

And…?

You’re talking about two different things.

Context was the idea of a government banning certain popular foods

This would mean they’d be against food safety regulations, would it not?

It’s entirely possible to be in favor of food safety regulations and opposed to the government banning foods outright. In fact, I think one could safely presume that those are the positions most commonly held by most people.

I’ve never understood why anyone thinks that the hysterical propaganda and lies spewed by ignorant right-wing reactionaries who would never vote for a democrat in the first place should have any bearing on any decision the democrats might make about anything.

instead of propping up a creator who checks the perfect ideological boxes

Which is to say, slavishly regurgitates all of the just barely to the left of the Republicsns neoliberal swill that keeps losing elections.

Democrats should embrace the online spaces for young men that already exist.

What? Actually going with what the people actually support rather than trying to force some corporate-approved hack that nobodly likes on them, then blaming them when they predictably lose?

What a novel idea.

For example, creators like Hasan Piker, a left-leaning creator with over 5.5 million subscribers on Twitch and broad popularity among young men, has largely been ignored by the Democratic establishment.

And gee… I wonder why…

Piker’s political content leans farther left, sharing a populist economic message paired with strong criticism of U.S. foreign policy in Israel.

Oh. my. who. would. have. guessed. that.? Gee. whiz. what. a. surprise.

There is a tendency to shy away from those spaces because our favorite thing to do in the Democratic Party is to, pardon my language, shit on the left,” said Smith.

Huh. I thought their favorite thing to do was to lose elections.

Same thing either way though…

And I’m calling it now -;the Dem leadership is going to waste their time and money ham-fistedly promoting a pathetically transparent neoliberal shill, then blame everyone but themselves when they utterly and completely and entirely predictably fail.

It’s not that they’re truly synonymous but that each also implies the other. If it’s true that he’s dead, then it’s also true that he died and vice versa. So it seems like they mean the same thing because if ypu say one, it can be taken for granted that the other is necessarily also true.

But even that’s not 100% - it’s possible that “he died” is true but “he’s dead” is not, since he might’ve been revived. That illustrates the fact that they actually each communicate something different - “he died” is an experience through which he went at some point, while “he’s dead” is the state he’s in right now.

So again, they broadly communicate the same thing since saying one implies the other as well, but they don’t actually mean the same thing.

I keep wondering the same thing.

It’s especially galling when I see some cautionary piece in the legacy media about how some Republican policy “might” lead to some negative consequences. As if the Republicans are unaware of that and it’s up to the media to gently nudge them and point it out.

The Republicans are fully aware of the harm their policies are going to do and that’s much of the point. They quite simply want everyone who’s not one of them to die. They’re not only okay with that - they’re eagerly looking forward to it.

Cunning would-he tyrants don’t go to people and say, “Give me this power so that I can hurt you.” They go to people and say, “Give me this power so that I can hurt the people you hate.”

I can’t see any situation in which I would.

Mostly I have zero interest in sucking any dick (other than maybe my own, and I’m not that flexible).

But beyond that, $20 just seems wrong no matter what - if I wanted to do it, $20 would be pointless and if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be near enough.