There are multiple meanings of “support.” There’s an endorsement meaning, which can be explicit or tacit, and there’s an aiding meaning. The Democrats may not explicitly endorse it, but the Biden administration certainly did tacitly endorse it by directly aiding it. And most of the party has been tacitly endorsing and aiding it for decades.

Huh, that’s really odd conclusion to draw from Democrats literally supporting genocide. Harris couldn’t even be bothered to come out against it during the campaign even when they knew their support was a losing issue.

It’s a simple moral calculus, don’t you see? You must always vote for Hitler and help him kill 5,000,000 people, if the alternative is somebody who’s going to kill 5,000,001 people.

This was obviously the outcome no matter who was elected. Israel has always been very clear about this.

More research is always good, as it can deepen our understanding, but the basic outline of what’s going on is already known. A lot of people just don’t want to believe it, because we’re all stuck on the metaphor that we’re all captains of the ship inside our own heads. You see it in this thread; people want to blame non-voters, as if millions of people all had perfect information and all made decisions based upon it through conscious reasoning. Because they’re just—I dunno—bad people? (Which is a completely bonkers belief when you start to dig into it.)

Actually, neuroscience tells us that consciousness doesn’t really exist, except as an emergent phenomenon of sensory experience. Brain scans show that thoughts, feelings, and decisions occur before we’re consciously aware of them; the conscious mind is basically a rationalization machine, inventing narratives about why we did a thing or felt a certain way, only after the fact. And, it’s notoriously bad at it. (The Misattribution of Arousal is one of the classic examples.) So, if you can affect the way that somebody’s brain works, you can in many ways control what the they think and feel.

And that’s exactly what authoritarian demagogues do.

Steve Biko died in prison in 1977. There were a bunch of movies about Biko that came out in the late '80s to early '90s, the most famous was Cry Freedom starring Denzel Washington. Nelson Mandela was famously imprisoned, and released around that same time. My guess is that since most Americans don’t really pay deep attention to the news, especially world news, it just got all blended into a miasma of vague memories about some South African anti-apartheid activist.

Really? This is an example why I’m done with Democrats.

Would it be worse than a fascist dictatorship?

The President has historically had wide latitude to act in times of emergency. The instigator of the insurrection should’ve been in Gitmo on January 21, 2021.

Sure, call me extremist, but look at where we are now. I’m fucking right. But, barring the correct action, Biden could’ve followed the moderate, decorous course of launching the prosecution that day. But no, it took TWO. GOD. DAMN. YEARS.

I’m so done with Democrat excuses.

Centrists: Don’t vote for third parties, because they can’t win. Work within the Democratic Party.

Also centrists: Not like that!

Yeah, nobody’s buying this bullshit.

In case anybody was actually wondering, the difference is sudsing agent. The manufacturers originally put a chemical in laundry detergent to make more suds. That doesn’t make them clean clothes any better, it’s just for psychological effect. Customers feel like it’s working better when they can see suds.

But too much sudsing in front-loading machines can cause leaking from around the door seals. (Same as putting dish detergent in the dishwasher.) So the HE detergents are the same thing, but without the sudsing agent. They work just fine in top-loading machines, too.

But does anybody remember those TV ads for Biz detergent which pitted a woman using it against man using “Hiz” detergent? Hooray for casual sexism!

Reminds me of a meeting my co-worker and I had with the IT staff of a company that is a customer using research instruments in our facility. The meeting was to ask us to enable data synchronization through SharePoint. (We’re a Linux shop.) We asked what the issue was with getting their data files with SFTP. They said, “It’s open source.”

Then, a few beats of silence as it sinks in for us that there is no next step in the chain of logic. That is the totality of their objection.

That’s amusing to me. Back around 2010, I used a lot of state legal forms that they only released as PDF files, but not fillable. It was annoying to print them and fill them by hand, and terribly fiddly to use the PDF annotation tool on the computer.

So I just used OpenOffice.org to create almost-pixel-perfect versions of the forms, with fillable text boxes, then exported them as PDF. Word couldn’t do it at the time.

Now, at work, I use Microsoft365 because that’s what everyone uses because of the site license. I wish we’d switch to something else, because Outlook fails so hard at basic email stuff.

The Bush administration abrogated due process, but we might have been able to move past it as a shameful anomaly in our history perpetrated by one out-of-control political faction. But then instead of prosecuting the offenders, or at least disavowing their actions, the Obama administration doubled down on it! It decided that American citizens could be killed on the basis of an accusation. It cemented the destruction of due process as a bipartisan principle of American government.

The Turd Reich might be speed-running the course, but it’s just using the tools that past administrations laid out for it.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. There’s no statistical difference in the chances of victory between men and women when running for political office. Lots of Republican politicians are women. I don’t see it as a big deal.

Also, lots of open racists voted for Obama. If you look at the polling and the interviews, it was much more about running conservative Democrats trying to get the votes of people who wanted to shake things up. That’s what Obama promised, that’s why Sanders would’ve won, by some measures, and it seems AOC is out there generating the same buzz.

I think the implication is that you’re going to die in El Salvador, so better to die at home and maybe take a few ICE thugs with you.

The court thing is not universally true. I worked in a family law firm for several years, and the practice in the courts here is to start from a baseline of equal custody and placement, and I’ve heard the same about other states. The men who lost out were the ones who wouldn’t fight, because they were convinced that the courts were biased. But hell, in one case, we got full custody and placement for a guy whose son wasn’t even biologically his! (His wife cheated, and he didn’t find out until well after they’d emotionally bonded.)

We talking about 19th century land grabs? There’s a really interesting (to me) law called the Guano Islands Act of 1856. The United States needed fixed nitrogen, and therefore could just take it?

The history of the US—the real history—is wild.

Willfully blind. Eastman Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, but decided to focus on their existing, profitable product lines. Clayton Christensen describes the process in The Innovator’s Dilemma.