He later refuted the idea that his rhetoric was a problem, even as polls show Trump is viewed less favorably by women than by men.

He’s right, it isn’t a problem. Why? Because Trump is not relying on votes to win since he has every intention of massively cheating instead.

LOL, drat, they’re on to me (I tried to get the $100 even though I voted):

Are you lying to Cards Against Humanity, [name redacted]? Big Data says you’re lying. Says you voted in 2020. Big Data knows a lot about you, [name redacted], and now we do too. So here’s a new proposal: how about you give Cards Against Humanity PAC $7.99, get 30 incredible new cards about the crazy shit that’s happened this year, and we’ll forget all about what you’ve done?

Honestly, I was expecting a stronger rebuke.

Only fascists are allowed to blatantly violate campaign finance laws with impunity. If anybody else tries it, they immediately get mega-fucked by the fascist-stacked courts.

I guess they didn’t learn their lesson from when thousands of prisoners were abandoned in their cells during Katrina.

Did the authorities responsible for that go to prison themselves?

If not, then the Florida prison officials apparently did learn from it.

That doesn’t change the fact that it can still get a lot worse.

We also don’t have control over automatic number plate recognition, surveillance cameras, etc.

I, for one, have consistently avoided publishing photos of myself on the Internet my entire life (and I’ve been online since the '90s, so I was really ahead of the curve on that), and even shy away from being in other people’s photos as much as possible (sometimes you can’t avoid it without consequences, such as if it’s a driver’s license photo, or imposed by your employer, or the news covering an event you’re participating in, or that sort of thing). Even then, I still have very little confidence that I’ve managed to stay out of these sorts of facial recognition databases.

You don’t know. Webkit is the older brother of Blink (the engine in Chrome). They’re not different enough to count as separate.

Switching to Free Software is kind of like planting a tree: the best time was years ago (because you’d be over the learning curve). The second-best time is now.

Sure they shouldn’t be let off the hook (they probably will be, have been though)

Yep 😡: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/05/1126884708/a-michigan-judge-drops-felony-charges-against-7-people-in-flint-water-scandal

"Sure, we can also listen to:

• The Living Tombstone - Spooky Scary Skeletons (Remix) - Extended Mix
• Andrew Gold - Spooky, Scary Skeletons (Undead Tombstone Remix)
• Dave Wave - Spooky Scary (Swingin’) Skeletons - Extended Club Version ← my favorite
• etc."

Because we weren’t talking about signing up actual Trump supporters; we were talking about gaming the system by signing up fake ones.

But what other consequences might there be? I would do that (I’m in a swing state), but I worry the people I name would end up spammed to within an inch of their lives or harassed or something. (And on top of that, I wouldn’t put it past Musk to find some excuse to renege on the deal.)

Okay but what you need to understand is that the EPA’s allowable level of lead for municipal water supplies is 15 parts per billion (PPB) (which is very low), and the standard doesn’t change based on what materials were used for the pipes. Getting below that threshold is not only achievable but expected even with lead pipes, if you treat the water properly. Flint’s problem was that it didn’t, because the Governor kicked out the people who knew what the fuck they were doing!

As for your 20/20 hindsight, it’s just that: hindsight. A lot of these pipes date back to the early 1900s or earlier, when not only had plastic not yet been invented, even copper pipe barely existed because they hadn’t figured out how to efficiently manufacture it water-tight yet (source). That means the alternatives to lead pipes were really shitty, such as terracotta or wood, and even if they did manage to use early copper pipes or some other metal, guess what: the joints would all be soldered with lead anyway. Moreover, this was also back when they were so ignorant about the cumulative effects of exposure to lead that they still thought it was a good idea to put it in things like gasoline and paint, so why would they have concerned themselves with the relatively small risk from using it in plumbing?

If Flint were a sunbelt city built mostly after 1950, then sure, using lead for the pipes would’ve been inexcusable. But Flint was already in decline by then, so most of it is older than that!

People forget that the proximate cause of the lead contamination in Flint wasn’t the pipes themselves (which had been in use, relatively safely, for decades), but instead that locals in charge of the water system got forcibly replaced with an emergency manager appointed by the (Republican) governor, who ordered the system to be switched from sourcing water from Detroit (Lake Huron) to the Flint River to save money and failed to treat it with the usual corrosion-control additives that Detroit had been using.

To blame the pipes is to let the Republicans off the hook for their miserliness, incompetence and systemic racism.

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-you-need-know

https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2016/01/epa_official_says_he_was.html

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/chemical-study-ground-zero-house-flint-water-crisis-180962030/

They decided to repair the sidewalks last year, just out of nowhere, and tacked the amount on to your property tax as a special assessment if you didn’t make arrangements of your own to have someone come out and fix it when they wanted it fixed by.

I’d like to highlight for a moment just how fucking outrageous and unacceptable this actually is. The sidewalks are part of the street. It is ass-backwards to be treating pedestrians as second-class compared to drivers!

And like, I know sidewalks are sort of a gray area

Absolutely fucking not. They are 1000000000000000% just as much the responsibility of the government as the rest of the street is. You should be fucking pissed that the city is shirking its responsibility for them and saddling you with it instead!

This is just yet another “fuck you” to the Chagossians, for whom it could have been the next best thing to reparations if they were given control of it.

Now pipe it through lolcat

my main job

I’m also a farmer

Never has Japan felt so foreign to me as while reading this comment. Being a farmer (as a job, not just gardening as a hobby) and having another career at the same time? What is this sorcery?

Because destroying the public’s trust in democracy is what paves the way for fascism, and that’s way more important to every Republican than the lives of their constituents.

It’ll be “allowed and supported” when e.g. you can download F-Droid from the Play Store instead of having to side-load it.