At what point do the Democrats start shutting down the government?

You are wrong that it never mattered. It failed in some cases but in others it didn’t. And it is always something that activists could embarrass governments with. In some countries, it is even something that can be used to force a government to do stuff. It is a political space and we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

…and my bow

Yes, however scientific papers aren’t always linearly formatted PDFs (eg 2-columns), so pdftotext tends to be brittle.

If you only mean reading a file from a specific selection of text, I’ve never seen something that,

Okular actually does that, and with Pied I can use nice Piper voices, but the controls are very basic (start at the stop of the page, pause, stop).

ReadAloud sort of does but it requires sending the pdf to their website, which is obviously not ideal.

A screen reader reads what’s on the screen. What I’m describing is reading a document. ReadAloud does exactly that for Firefox, I am just asking for standalone applications.

Now somebody needs to kidnap Jude Law and keep him in a basement until after the white smoke.

LMDE because it’s Mint and a recent Debian stable.

He’s been prime minister for like 10 years, like 3 elections. People in democracies get tired of leaders after a while.

Thoughts and prayers to all those affected by this tragedy.

Maybe we should abolish stock markets.

They kept voting for the conservatives for a while after Brexit. They kept voting for Boris fucking Johnson.

If there was a credible alternative to the left of the socdems and you were arguing for supporting it, your post would be an argument and probably a valid one. In the absence of one, your post is a wish, a prayer, a hope. So quit sniping at the left that exists and build the alternative.

Make billionaires millionnaires again. And that’s a compromise.

American standards of freedom of speech are not universal.

But what if you are the richest man in the world and you only did a roman salute to send your heart out.

You know what else used to be incredibly expensive, to the point of being more valuable than gold? Aluminum.

So cry me a river.

That’s objectively good news. But sadly the cycle will continue until the apartheid and the occupation are dismantled.

I mean, they are also trying to decouple from China, and some are about to start a trade war. In other words, the overall system is trending into that direction. This is the opposite of what’s going on with Israel.

I find the “where are the protests” argument very disingenuous. Western countries are not bankrolling the Uyghur genocide, are not supporting it, are not invested in it and are not giving it immunity in the Security Council, as they do for Israel. So as a western citizen, what is there to protest? Protests are not rituals to dispel evil, they are a political pressure tactic.