ChunkMcHorkle

I dunno about that. Usually kids start out great until garbage adults get a hold of them, and then all bets are off.

So you don’t actually know what socialism is. If you did, you’d be the last one saying the Nazis were using the name correctly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Smh. And I quote:

Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership. It describes the economic, political, and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can take various forms, including public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. As one of the main ideologies on the political spectrum, socialism is the standard left-wing ideology in most countries. Types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, and the structure of management in organizations.

To misuse names as labels contradictory to substance is a hallmark of propaganda. I don’t fall for it. Just because Nazis want people to think they’re just crunchy on the outside while remaining warm and caring on the inside and pick a name they think will do that for outsiders doesn’t actually mean shit.

Nuance is important. Learn to look past the name.

All of that presupposes the existing order continues uninterrupted in the event no elections are held, with a whole lot of other suppositions and ridiculous assumptions thrown in.

Let me list a few, such as “unrepresented” areas because current seat holders would just go home: even the Virginia AG who is not an AG and has been ruled as such by the appropriate court hasn’t gone home.

And “Democrats winning a bunch of seats” in elections that do not take place. How does that work?

And assuming that winners of Congressional elections would even be sworn in and seated by a speaker or Senate leader who stands to benefit by not having enough members left for quorum, as Mike Johnson has already done with Adelita Grijalva: why not just swear in some and not others, or none at all, since there is no rule book anymore, as they are already doing?

Or even that there would be the political will to treat the situation as a “constitutional crisis” that can be legislated out of, when in fact there is NO adherence to the Constitution anymore anyway and they are doing whatever they like, again as we are already seeing today.

Thinking that critical parts of the system will hold when others are torn down the middle, or even more bizarrely that there is direct line from your version of a canceled election to an outright “civil war” is nothing short of delusional. If you want to go find people to kill because elections have been sabotaged be my guest, but actual civil war, with civilian armies bearing arms and leaving their homes to go and shoot each other, takes far more provocation these days. It’s not 1860 anymore.

It’s far more likely people will remain at home because any civil war will NOT be geopolitical, another concept you seem to struggle with: there are no lines on the physical map anymore where, when you go there, you know what they believe. You just think you do.

As I said in my prior comment, believe what you want. But you write fantasy well, and this is more of the same.

Blocking you now on the grounds of sheer insanity. My reality may be shit, but at least it’s tangible.

If Trump calls to cancel elections, and some red states don’t hold them, the.correct response is “ok, you have left X seats vacant in congress.”, which would be worse for Republican power…

There is no such thing as a given “correct answer” in this scenario. While it is constitutionally true that elections are up to the states and 100% within each state’s purview to manage and control, what there will be is chaos.

Complete chaos at every level, including all the seats up for grabs that do or do not see their individual powers and responsibilities transferred peacefully, and the states that want to have elections now having to wage an inner political battle just to carry on in the face of some sort of presidential cancellation.

You write as though red states are red and blue states are blue and they can be expected to act that way, and you’re dead wrong. Red states have solid blue urban centers and blue states have large unbroken swaths of rural red, and every election is a surprise in this regard. Even hard red areas in Florida have been going solid blue lately. Who even knows where the lines are anymore?

Add to that the fact that this is not just about who goes to Washington: it is also about judges and coroners and water board commissioners and county taxes and boards of education and everything else from local to federal, and the people who are due to vacate those positions, and those who would like to have those position or at least keep others out of them.

So for every state that actually tries to have an election after some kind of election-canceling fuckery from the orange pedo, there will be an in-state battle over when and how and for whom, which some states will win and some will lose, and the line between winners and losers will NOT fall neatly between red and blue. The line may not even fall at all, meaning that this scenario could easily start political battles that never end and simply play out in court for decades to come.

To reiterate, EVERY item to be voted on in the 2026 mid-term elections has a battle ahead of it: referendums that need direct resolution, bonds that need approval, taxes that will be levied or not levied, candidates at every level that want to gain power or stay in it, as well as other forces that will absolutely want to make a meal out of the situation, not to mention propaganda (much of it foreign) that will seek to control the entire public narrative for its own ends.

The ONLY certain outcome of cancelling these elections is chaos. It is literally impossible to say how any of that will shake out at this point.

Your “correct response” take is incredibly naive. If you want to believe that what will be left after the orange shitheel sabotages elections is some central force that ignores everything else on the ballots while it calmly divvies up local, state, and federal positions and somehow neatly keeps the empty seats empty for those who would have been elected but were not, feel free. But it’s a total fantasy.

Thanks to three rounds of stimulus checks, people didn’t get off their couches to work.

For a single person that stimulus added up to a big fat $3200 max, and it ended almost five years ago, in early 2021. Married people and people with dependents got more, depending on their financial situation.

Anyone that relied on that cash alone to “stay on their couch” as Liz “Let Them Eat Cake” Uihlein asserts is either dead or homeless now, because the last time a single person could live even at subsistence level for five years on $3200k max in an urban world was a long, LONG time ago.

I wrote a longer comment elsewhere, but while the facts this article presents are in themselves correct, the conclusions the authors have reached, I think, are not. There are a number of glaring omissions that, to me, add up to trying to erase the very likely blackmail Epstein was conducting all along.

Or, to put it another way, I think the NYT represents NYC’s many billionaires very well, a non-zero number of whom were directly engaged in this behavior with Epstein and/or helped him to keep his lifestyle and social standing intact, not just before his 2008 conviction in Florida but well after.

Frankly, I think people like Leon Black and Les Wexner and all these other Epstein “theft, but only theft” victims are shaking in their sordid little boots right now because it was NEVER just theft or they’d have brought charges and/or sued, and that’s what NYT wants the public to forget about. I think that’s why this article was written the way it was, excluding not just the extreme audio/visual evidence from Epstein’s mansion search and his data collection practices in St. Thomas and private islands, but as Blue_Morpho rightly points out in their comment, Epstein’s stint at Dalton where he was hired by Donald Barr, another pedo freak.

These very well-heeled New Yorkers form the core of NYT’s subscriber base. Something to bear in mind as you read.

every time I say anything negative about the US one of you nasty weasels shows up and all you can do is deflect, deflect, deflect because you know that you have nothing to say.

You’re not actually saying anything so much as whining, throwing out pejoratives, and dunking NOT on the guilty, but on anyone who actually cares enough to do anything from the safety of your own porous border, while we have unmarked govt cars rolling through our streets picking up undocumented and citizens alike, and Palantir hoovering up our data, surveilling all of us.

You’re intensely critical of everyone and everything EXCEPT those actually tearing everything down. You talk about the danger the US represents to your country, but you have ZERO words of censure for the individuals actually creating the danger you speak of.

Why is that? Why so full of fire and brimstone for those trying to change anything, and none for the actual perps?

You have an exceptionally selective grasp on reality, crafted by the mainstream media, without ever guessing that Americans are no more the exact same person than Canadians. You are as propagandized as anyone south of you, and don’t even see it. You are exactly what you claim to despise, wrapped in a maple leaf. Congratulations, I guess that makes you better?

When you cannot see individuals because of the group they are in, and you have grouped them that way in order to “other” them, to place on them the burden of your own anger and ill-will, congratulations! You are propagandized.

I saw it in your first comment, but now you’re tripling down like the best of the Fox News crowd, so okay.

that no one gives a shit about the good individuals…

Then who do you think is going to fix it, if not for us who care?

I do not care how many of you are “on our side” because you are effectively useless.

Then why are you battering the “useless” with your words, where they will either do no good at all or tire out what little goodwill we have left?

Where are your words when it comes to those creating and doing this great evil? Because I see ZERO in your screeds.

Strongly worded letters

I never said or even implied that the controlled opposition in Congress was or is “good”: they are as complicit as the openly destructive.

and some sanctioned protests

If protests are sanctioned, why are protesters being surveilled and jailed?

the 100+ million people who either zealously support it or don’t think it’s that big a deal

Here you are again, consuming media that serves your own partitioned worldview just as much as anyone on the right: this is what the media wants you to believe, that you should hate average people like yourself, believe no one can change anything, that all effort is wasted, and that the best possible outcome is that you personally get to shit out your own dissatisfaction with your own life via strong words that might as well have been scripted for you by Fox News were it not for the anti-authoritarian slant. You probably think that orange fungus got elected and we still have fair and aboveboard elections, lol.

And I note that you personally can’t do shit in Ottowa, or you’d be there doing it instead of dunking on the only people who can actually change anything for the better in the US: those of us who DO give a shit.

You’ve given up. And worse, you have an exceptionally selective idea of reality. You really need to pull your head out of your self-pity, because you are not helping, you are only dragging the people who actually care down, without having a single idea of how close you personally are to having your own government yanked out from under you in similar fashion. While you think it’s a matter of mockery to watch a country turn to full Nazism, you’re not exactly doing so from a safe distance: how long do you think you last if we lose?

And where, oh where, is your contempt for the actual doers of all this evil? You have plenty of shit to fling at anyone trying to effect change, but ZERO for the leaders of this filth. Where is that? And a better question is, doesn’t your lack of censure for people actually doing what you claim to hate just make you another lazy hypocrite of the kind you despise down here, another lounge chair warrior “too cowardly to stand up for yourself in the smallest of ways” when you personally have nothing like ICE cruising through your neighborhoods, picking people up on sight?

I may love your country, but your own position and actions are contemptible. When you can do something other than your personal best to discourage anyone else from even trying to change anything, even as you suck on the media’s warm tiddy of manufactured narratives and caricatured Americans, let me know. Until then, keep “doing your own research” and “telling it like it is” and “just asking questions” because what you claim to hate, you have already become.

Canada

I’m genuinely sorry to hear that, not just because I actually know how far our right-wing shit has reached into your country, but because I am aware that we never had a better friend than Canada, and without Canada to the north and Mexico to the south the 20th century would not have been nearly as meteoric as it was: without Canada we would have FAR less to brag about. I hope you are aware of just how many of us are on your side, how many of us are the ones telling you to “keep it up” with the boycotts and yelling “Elbows up!” when we see or hear another way Canada has decided to resist, because we are not represented in the media.

Canada has never been anything but the best friend my country ever had, from helping us in disaster to joining us in war, and you deserve far better than the neighbor from hell to the south. And while that does not make what you wrote correct or even anything less than arrogant and entirely dependent on stereotype, it does make me genuinely sorry, because we’ll never have a better friend on the national stage, and it will be a cold day in hell before Canada forgives us. Deservedly so.

You are consuming far too much of the exact same mainstream media narrative that got us into this mess. All you’re really telling me is that you are from a country Putin is not interested in, or your own friends and neighbors would be going batshit crazy too.

And before you excuse yourself thinking you’d never personally do that, that you are just way too smart for propaganda to ever be swayed by it, given your own propensity for unambiguously consuming media narratives and attaching your personal emotions to whatever caricatures of reality you’ve been shown, like you’ve just demonstrated in your comment, you’d probably be first in line to fall for the right-wing foreign-funded propaganda we’ve been flooded with for decades now.

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Akshara Ashok @happyfluffcomics

In part, this is what Microsoft Recall is about: scraping end users’ data at will to sort and feed to its LLMs, without the user ever seeing what is being scraped or having any real, lasting ability to shut Recall off and keep it shut down.

While I am aware that MS insists none of that is true, it is fact that 1) the snapshotted and OCR’d Recall data is now stored in an encrypted database that takes higher than average user skill to get into; 2) even users who turned off Recall saw it turned on again at the next Windows Update; and 3) even after MS said they were backing off Recall, MS continued to partner with hardware makers to create computers bundled with Windows 11 on top of the extra GPU necessary for processing all these Recall snapshots without making that sluggish Windows bloat even more sluggishly bloated than it already was.

So why all that money and effort, even as they claimed to be backing away from it, just to help a hypothetically forgetful user here and there? Data harvesting was always part of the payoff, why they were and are very willing to piss off a huge part of their own consumer base around the world by ending Windows 10 unnecessarily, and why even now they keep ramming Recall shit down the pipe when literally NO ONE wants it.

They get your data. At will. And as much of it as they like, without you ever having the opportunity to oversee what they’re getting, much less curate it. And after feeding it to their LLMs, they get to aggregate and broker it to their “partners” as well. Never forget what MS did in Palestine and the partners they can and will gladly work with, all based on massive collections of quietly gathered user data that either should not legally exist, or is not known outside of MS and its partners to exist at all.

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I hope so too, and yes, it does have the possibility of helping others, especially by forcing procedural loopholes into the law and also forcing the exception for complicated pregnancies that many people want.

But I just saw an article about a letter just issued by Ken Paxton saying that the judge’s ruling will not protect her, her husband, her doctors or her hospital from criminal charges if she goes ahead with the abortion. Note the URL: this is straight from his own office. (Just so you know, a TRO is a temporary restraining order and in this case it is the specific part of the judge’s ruling that allows this abortion, so when Paxton talks about the TRO in negative terms, he’s speaking directly of the judge’s ruling.)

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-responds-travis-county-tro

I have dealt with real evil in my life. Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton are wholly amoral, and their actions look just as evil as those I have ever had to deal with. If they are forced to back down to save this lady’s health and future ability to bear children, they will try to find ways to punish anyone involved, because that’s what evil does. So this further update about how they will be criminally charged despite the judge’s order doesn’t really surprise me.

Yes, but I can’t help but reflect on what this has cost her not just in terms of available cash, but physical energy and even privacy. She is carrying a baby that will not survive: viciously hard under even the best of circumstances, but she doesn’t even have time or space to grieve.

Because the state of Texas has weaponized her healthcare, she has had to come up with cash for attorneys; she’s had to drag herself to court appearances; she’s had to subject the most intimate of medical information to assholes that never spent so much as an hour in medical school or she, her husband, and her doctors can be charged with a crime; and now the entire fucking nation is all up in her shit.

Hell yeah she’s a hero. But look at how much it is costing her.

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