They at least used to be …

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

I am souring on mainstream, respected news outlets

What do you suppose their job is?

Historically, angry Marxist-Leninists with guns have been very useful allies in dealing with NAZIs! But history suggests that things didn’t work out too well afterwards, for those ruled by the angry Marxist-Leninists with guns …

Oh sure, there are competent individuals in most any regime. Wernher von Braun, Hanna Reitsch and Otto Skorzeny spring to mind.

What I meant was though that fascist regimes as a whole do not govern competently, for a variety of reasons, including promotion for loyalty. I’d argue though that the main reason is philosophical: their disdain for intellectualism and reason.

The original fascists weren’t competent either. That’s a myth.

Slavers weren’t consistently anti-immigration. They were just opposed to free and open immigration.

You’d want a stronger girder than they used.

Ohhhhhhh damn. Have I been wrongly hating on tape capguns for 40-odd years?

The experience I had was that the hammer wasn’t consistently firing the caps. Perhaps I just had a couple of bad guns? Either way, nothing like those reliability issues with ring caps.

This dumb bitch seems to think outright lying - when video shows a completely different story - is the way to go.

All available evidence suggests she’s correct (about lying, that is … it’s never stopped any of her MAGA superiors).

I know what they are, spent pocket money on them, and loathe them. Ring caps are far more reliable (albeit more expensive; always a topic of debate when said pocket money was $3 / month).

Yep 😀

The article led with calling them fucking stupid, although they used the polite euphemism “leftwing militants”.

(Note that “rightwing militants” means the same thing)

It didn’t happen in Germany or Japan even after they were firebombed and / or nuked.

People really don’t like holding power - even the formerly poweful - to account; and people in power generally don’t like it either (unless it suits them).

I suspect it’s partly because doing so would lead to the obvious question: who gave then the power in the first place?

Mattermost user here, I self-host an instance for friends and family (and their children).

To upgrade and discover I’d lost access to the message history on my own instance was infuriating. I’m investigating alternatives right now.

So far Zulip seems reasonable - although Google and especially Apple being shits about push notifications means you can’t self-host push notification servers 🙄 So I’m considering forgoing push notifications altogether and leaning on email notifications instead.

Not for self-hosted installations, where Zulip aren’t paying for the storage themselves.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. I have several of his print books and still enjoy reading them; ditto his old cartoons. They really spoke to me years ago, as a cubicle-coder.

That was a power that the court effectively granted to itself in Marbury v. Madison, in 1803.

Jesus that does go back a while.

… reads …

Huh. I always sort of assumed, as a non-American, that that was the one of the main purposes of the Supreme Court.

It does seem like a good idea, though, to have some court responsible for deciding the Constitutionality of laws.

Since FDR stacked it to push through the New Deal, if not earlier.

Your friendly reminder that the Democrats helped to set up the levers of power that Trump and his fascist ilk are now cheerfully pulling.

You don’t win elections by appealing to your opponents.

If there is just one lesson non-Republicans should take from Trump winning two elections, it should be this one!