I hope you are right. I personally don’t see it. I think we cannot underestimate the cult factor. All it takes is a Vance or an orange (or even the deviant MTG) to point at it and screech like a Body Snatcher: “It’s socialism! It’s handouts! Kill it with fire!” It won’t matter what you branded it as. Their branding will be stronger.

I am afraid that this isolated (and probably edited and not very scientific) example of people seeing the power is reason will not scale to the masses. The fear of socialism is irrational and I don’t think you can fix that with rational explanations alone. It’s not like people like Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez aren’t trying and there is enough of a base to get them elected - but not into executive power. On top of that you have the MAGA cult followers who would happily vote against their own self interest if they can say they owned the libs in the process.

I chose him because he is generally well liked. I haven’t heard anybody shit talk him. I don’t see him as a person of inaction or unaccountability. I do see him as somebody who acts from a set of values and who can heal wounds thoughtfully (without letting perpetrators go unpunished). Go ahead and replace him in your mind with somebody who fits that profile.

The problem with American politics is that it affects the whole world but the rest of the world doesn’t get a say. If you organize armed resistance against 47, that becomes very active when he declares himself king with no more elections, you are looking at a civil war 2.0. The right-wing supporters are already armed and organized, you’d give them something to shoot at. And the standing military will probably majority side more with the other side. At the same time, while the US is distracted by killing each other at a higher rate than usual, China will grab Taiwan, Russia will push through to the Elbe river, etc. So it would be better for the rest of the world if you could not solve this predicament by force/assassination. Protest, strikes, use politics. But I can totally understand why the sentiment to use the 2nd amendment for its stated purpose for a change is an appealing option.

A socialist will not win 2028, provided there even is an election. NYC is not representative of the whole country. And most Americans are still on this cold war hangover where socialism became a dirty word. An outspoken socialist would not win. Unless we get another great depression - which will if history is our guide more likely lead to war. Or if they manage to fake centrism so believably well and are then okay to be a one-termer once they show their real colors. The Democrats need a Mr. Rogers type politician (preferably male, blame the Midwest) without scandals (so nobody from CA) who can appeal to a sense of decency again. #MADA

I don’t think this would’ve happened though if there hadn’t been the societal impetus that aided adoption. The singular they may have been around since Chaucer or Shakespeare - ~30 years ago, people didn’t really use it. There was far more “he or she” going on, that’s now been more commonly replaced with a “they,” also because it’s shorter. English benefits from the fact that the neutral pronoun slots right in to the existing grammar. Other languages struggle with finding such a neutral replacement because it’s more often than not a new word and a slightly altered grammatical function. English is okay on the first problem and arguably okay to mostly okay on the second.

Laaaast Christmas …

So this scientist believes this? Huh.

You’re right, it could’ve been a case of preemptive obedience by the censors, based on popularity and face-losing potential of the meme. I vaguely remember reading about him not being pleased. But it’s also been a decade.

The economy is shit. No matter who will be in charge, they will fight an uphill battle.

There is one example in recent history where the reinstallation of the monarchy went great (=as well as it could): Spain. The monarch let the country slide from a dictatorship into a constitutional monarchy. One that decided to pull the veil of silence over the crimes of the old regime but still a democracy. So let’s hope the possible return of the Shah follows the Spanish example more than anything else.

I don’t think anyone can predict what will happen in Iran. My gut feeling is that a collapse of the current regime will lead to a fracturing of the country, something like a civil war between moderates and religious fundamentalists. A mix of what happened in Libya post Gaddafi, Iraq post regime change, and Syria post Assad. The overthrow of the mullahs will only be the first step.

The problem with the VPN solution is that the BBC has gotten smart about that. It’s a game of whack a mole. Every time a service has installed a new server with new IPs, iPlayer finds out about it and blocks it. So you don’t even get to the part where you could fraudulently claim to be paying for the license.

Where in France are you? In Calais you might still get terrestrial signal (although I don’t know if the signal standards differ) or it could be available on cable.

A third option is not perfectly legal but more so than torrenting. There are online services that record the terrestrial signal and allow you to download the recordings after the fact. Google BBC online HDR or DVR and see if one of these services might be for you.

Source: I’ve lived there for a decade, talked with people, including PSB officers.

Every time China is in trouble, mostly economically, they play up the Japan stuff. There are island disputes, there is historical baggage. They play it like a piano and those are pretty much the only times organized street protests are permitted.

I disagree with you about what you think is irrelevant.

As far as I’m concerned it was never racist. It was Chinese internet users looking at a picture of Xi and Obama at a summit and compared them in stature, aptly I might add, to Winnie and Tigger. It never stuck with Obama and Xi evidently took it with no sense of humor.

Outside of China the majority of people will not be aware of this meme or have forgotten all about it.

I am not an expert and I think this falls at the first hurdle because a login is required to view more than the latest post or two.

Here is how I use it: you take an old device that you never installed Insta on, run it under a burner account at the OS level, run a kill switch VPN on it (preferably always on the same server), and then create an account on Insta that you’re ready to ditch the moment they want your ID. That device doesn’t do anything else than Insta.

China? The country of Tiananmen Square? The country whose people practically develop an ever-changing coded language to avoid big brother coming down hard on any sort of criticism? The country that runs “reeducation” camps for many who do get caught? The country that has Uyghurs and Tibetans to blame “within,” and Japan without? Or the US? Where senior cadres of the party magically grow richer?

Don’t pin authoritarianism on lack of administrative competence.

You don’t get to vote or if you do it doesn’t matter. There is little to no separation between the three pillars executive, legislative, and judicature. So there is little to no oversight, which leads to a breakdown of the rule of law. People can and will be disappeared. People live in fear and try to adapt, self-censor. Authoritarian leaders need a bogie man, somebody they can blame for all their failures. So an ethnic group, minority, or another country will constantly be blamed for everything from the economy to ingrown toe nails. The elite will get richer, everybody else pretty much won’t.

I was under the impression that they do exactly the opposite of what fans want. So, Paramount, if you’re listening, we want a TOS reboot, more Section 31, and everything as movies, please. Under no circumstances do we want an episodic Captain Una show! Please do a prequel to Enterprise instead, but with Borgs. And I mean the ones from Picard S2, of course.

I get that. But a rating system by the unwashed masses is going to give you shit data to base your decision on. Because they cannot tell if it was a setting on their device, the hotel network, their ISP, or an act of god that fucked up their internet speed. People are dumb, attribute fault preferably externally. They’ll all blame it on the hotel. You could be reading five reviews from last week about bad internet when there was an unfortunate power outage at the big brand ISP and they were running on the backup satellite internet the hotel had ready for just that case. That doesn’t tell you shit about what it’s like on any other day when everything is working fine. And the reviews end up hurting their business.

Ratings work if you get thousands of them to get enough variety, which I think you probably won’t here. Or if you find a trusted source, a reviewer who knows what they’re doing. Internet speed is in the reviewer category for me.

The problem with speed as a metric is that it isn’t just up to the hotel infrastructure if you as a user actually get it. You’d be rating the hotel on the performance of their ISP and other factors not under their control. Let’s say you traveled from far and try to access websites from home, and the undersea cable got disconnected by mad shark, it’s not the hotel’s fault but you cannot expect that all users will consider that it isn’t the hotel’s fault when they give it a one-star rating on internet speed. If you’re behind the great firewall of China anything but local sites are fast.

You go to this website, choose the theme, then look for the floating bar at the bottom, hit the hamburger menu icon (three lines), choose log in > forgot password