And remember how they made a big deal about Bernie's age in 2020? They asked for medical records, and even after getting letters from two or three doctors, that wasn't enough. It was like the birthers all over again: when they got what they asked for, they moved the goal posts and wanted the long-form documents.

Meanwhile, not a peep about Biden, who is Bernie's junior by fourteen fucking months, as if that made all the difference.

And then, four years later, it wasn't an issue anymore. Just run the guy again.

On top of that, the DNC would condescend to anyone left of center about electability.

Well before covid, I knew Republicans would politicize almost anything. Covid made me realize I was wrong, because they will politicize literally anything, even a fucking virus.

Typical leftist cancel culture. You commit just one white supremacist terror attack, and all of a sudden you're a pariah!

Sometimes I think about how much art was never created because of capitalism. It either never got funded, or a potential artist never got the chance to make it, because just to scrape by, they had to spend too much time toiling to make some business owners money. It's depressing.

And, just to cut off one potential counterargument: I don't give half of a shit how "good" that art would be. I'm confident there are spectacular works of art that never came to be, but even putting it aside, it's all subjective. Some folks would have loved it, and the artists would have found value in making it. That's more than enough, and a hell of a lot more meaningful than breaking your back working for a living so that other people can own stuff for a living.

TERFs will also straight-up join with anti-feminists. It's okay to be anti-choice, anti-gay, "socially conservative," whatever. Despite yelling about how they're protecting women, none of that matters so long as they hate the same people.

Yep. If they ban drag performance, and don't recognize trans identity as valid, then trans people presenting as their gender would be considered "in drag." Merely going out in public would be criminalized, which is the point. They want extermination, but will take disappearance in the meantime.

Holtorf: That's just a story. What's more important is the policy.

The policy is the whole fucking problem! His hypocrisy is an issue because, even with a complete lack of any ability to empathize with different people in different circumstances (which I assume as a default from right-wingers), he ought to understand this situation because it did happen to him. Yet he just doesn't care. Christ, what an asshole.

Yeah, there's a gap between "basic integrity and human decency" and, far below it, "average Republican behavior." He went in between.

It might even be simpler than that. Capitalism just doesn't care past the next quarter. And when ownership is disconnected from labor or even from customer, than it's just a really rudimentary collective intelligence. The shareholders just want the line to go up, and everyone in the corporate structure is accountable to the shareholders, so they all do their part, big or little, to make that happen. It completely dispenses with personal responsibility, whether for negative externalities, direct harm, or even the future as close as months from now.

The last time Google pulled out all the stops to fight ad blockers, I had to update uBlock Origin every now and then until the whole thing passed. That's all.

So I'm not worried. But I am amused that they keep making ads more obnoxious, which pushes more people to use ad blockers. I didn't even use sponsorblock until a particularly egregious bit of native advertising. They could probably gain ground by just making ads less irritating, but they absolutely will not.

Huh. I kind of do this in between sessions. I like to read a few pages, maybe a chapter or two, from whatever rulebook, just so I'm constantly brushing up on the rules.

A buddy of mine in NYC was offered a $14k bonus to move to Texas, closer to his employer. He declined for a bunch of obvious reasons, but one was that he and his girlfriend would each need a car to get around. That would quickly eat into that bonus, if not use it up entirely.

As others have said, "in-ear monitors." However, it's not technically about the quality. Earphones sit in the outer ear, while IEMs go at least a little bit into the ear canal. They do better with blocking out sound, which is better for audio quality, but sometimes you want to be able to hear things around you, so it's a matter of context.

Also, while audiophiles can get wild with it (and there's a lot of snake oil in that area), I just got some Salnotes Zeros for <$20 and they're great.

...who do you think the other guy in the comic is?

Tankies: The word 'tankie' is meaningless because it gets overused by disingenuous people on the right.

Also tankies: Everyone who criticizes my position is right-wing.

Also, Batman isn't opposed to her environmentalism, and a ton of his rogues' gallery are rich assholes. A situation like this would be likely to end in Batman stopping Poison Ivy and sending her to Arkham, but also stopping the billionaire's plans through destroying his project, exposing his plans, finding a reason to send him to jail, etc. It very much might involve kicking the shit out of a billionaire. More or less radical depending on who's writing that story.

And really, not to be a wet blanket, but Batman's been written by tons of people over nearly a century. Depictions of him and his surrounding characters are going to vary. Poison Ivy tends to be more of an antihero nowadays as her cause has only gotten more sympathetic.

It honestly reminds me of fascists saying that harsh criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. It's a dishonest rhetorical game.

And capitalist regimes. The Russian Federation was literally founded by a betrayal of a reformist movement in the USSR, and China consulted with Milton Goddamn Friedman on their economy, ending up with billionaires. I even saw .ml users crying about Russian *oligarchs" having their assets seized ("stolen," as they said), and unironically citing Matt Taibbi. Not even "back in the day" Taibbi, but literally The Twitter Files. Using bought & paid for corporate propaganda to make their point.

They're just campists. I don't want to run afoul of a "No True Scotsman" situation, but fuck, for people who seem to think they're the Only True Socialists, they're willing to drop socialism in an instant if it means they can be edgy dickheads on the internet.

even apart from audio quality, Spotify is just plain terrible as a music library.

For someone who lives in playlists, it might be fine. But I like to pick and choose albums and songs, and be able to sort the whole collection on the fly. Spotify, and unfortunately a whole bunch of the competition, will have three separate lists for "liked" songs, albums, and artists. Only want to save the studio tracks, and not the demos and live versions? Fuck you, you can like the album or not, it's all or nothing! And the special edition is the only version we have! enjoy the solid hour of shittier versions of the songs you actually wanted!

Seriously.

It's like when you see a post about punching Nazis, and concern trolls show up to complain about people misusing and overusing the term. They don't offer a correction, and they're not defending anyone because no specific person or group of people was called out. They just saw a negative post about Nazis and fascists, got defensive, and tried to muddy the waters. A hit dog will holler.

Also, obviously any term will be misused and overused, and I don't know every context people are talking about. But, for my part, I see complaints about people being called "tankies" way more often than people being called tankies, and in situations like the above. And it's usually accompanied by complaints that right-wingers are calling people tankies, something I don't actually see all that often. What I see more often than that is the terminally online, gatekeeping left. So, is the problem coming more from actual conservatives, or from leftists that other ostensible leftists want to dismiss out of hand?

I don't know what's in anyone's heart, the specific people they're talking about, or the contexts and personal experiences they're talking about. I'm not going to assume bad faith. But, when I see people jump in to say "tankie" is a meaningless phrase, it just sounds like the same rhetorical game when people try to say "Nazi" and "fascist" have become meaningless.