conditional_soup @ conditional_soup @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

I wonder if she ever went on to have a moment of self reflection there. I doubt it, but I do wonder.

Well, not entirely. We can get into a lot more good reasons why drug laws and prostitution laws are ass, but, I mean, yeah. Being rich doesn't make you above the law. If we're unwilling to enforce it on the wealthy, we shouldn't enforce it on the poor.

You know, this is the libertarian argument for drugs and hookers for me. This stuff is already legal in the US, but only if you're rich enough. I just want it to be legal for everyone regardless of whether they're billionaires.

I'm fully convinced they slow rolled the Trump prosecution so that they could use him to fundraise. I'm half convinced they slow rolled it because they were going to just let it slide if it was clear Trump was going to stay out of politics, because the ghoul club looks out for each other behind the scenes.

And yeah, there's an actual laundry list of places where they fucked up hard on this last election. A non-exhaustive list includes:

• Lying about Biden's condition/ not pushing him to step aside because the establishment democrats considers seniority to be the holiest of all political attributes. It's why they were SO pissed that Obama cut Hillary off and they went on about "it's her turn!" in '16. Tbh, it's probably just as much a part of why they shut Sanders out in '16 as him being progressive. Anyway, this meant that we had basically a sham primary. Yes, it was a real primary, but we all know the incumbent always wins the primary, and they lied over and over about his condition until that shit was over with. So, no, I don't think you can really say it was a fair election, because voters were deliberately deceived by their own party.
• Colluding to get Biden put in. I know someone's going to come and tell me that the '20 primary was 100% legit and totally not sketchy at all, but I'll never forget Biden showing up to those debates looking like a freshly reanimated corpse and, all of the sudden, he wins South Carolina (which I do consider legitimate) and all the other candidates start dropping out and giving their delegates to him (which I consider illegitimate because it really smelled coordinated and allowing candidates to pledge their delegates forward is sketchy AF). To me, this is the original sin here. Biden wasn't a god awful president, but they knew he wasn't the best candidate they could possibly run, they knew his history, and I will never ever be convinced that they picked Kamala because she was the right person for the job. They picked Kamala because she landed some absolute body shots on Biden about racism in the primary debates, and they needed to clean that radioactive spill up. I think they felt that the most expedient means of doing so was for Joe to get Kamala. I don't think for two seconds that Kamala was Joe's choice. This wouldn't have been all bad if they'd committed to working on polishing Kamala up and getting her out there in the public eye and grooming her as a viable independent candidate a la Gore, but they didn't. They kinda just shoved her into the broom closet after Biden won and only dug her out after he blew his legs own off on the debate stage. So, that stupid fucking maneuver to shut Sanders out in '20 gave us a president that not many people were excited about; a VP that neither the president, nor the DNC, nor the people liked who would go on to be his natural successor on the campaign trail; all while ensuring that said VP had no distinct political image, and even, due to the righteous trait of seniority, forcing Kamala to assure voters that she absolutely adored Biden's unpopular policies.
• The DNC didn't even trust their own candidates. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Kamala is God awful; I wouldn't have picked her, but she had enough good qualities to work with to stand on her own if they'd trusted her. This is especially true with Walz on her team; they had some real potential if the DNC had got the fuck out of the way and stopped focus grouping them to death. Instead, they picked Kamala and played up what little leftist cred she had and then foisted HRC's campaign staff on her, made her talk about limited means-tested small business aid, and got celebrities to make guest appearances. They got Walz for his incredible shit talking abilities, then muzzled him. They saw the campaign starting to make its own identity separate from Biden and screamed "NO, YOU'LL DISHONOR OUR SPECIAL BOY. HE WON'T KNOW, BUT WE WILL!" They saw the populist moment, the people crying out for change, and went "hey, shut up, offer them means tested tax assistance. Here's Obama lecturing down to our base, that always goes over well".
• They abandoned their strategy of talking about what a dangerous fascist Trump was after that kid in Pennsylvania nearly started a GoFundMe for Trump's family. Trump didn't stop being a dangerous fascist, but the appearance of decency was more important than speaking the truth. If Trump didn't want to get his goddamn brains blown out, maybe don't go having fascist rallies in open fields. But it gave the perception that they didn't really believe that he was a dangerous fascist, that they were just saying it until they realized it was dangerous to say it. This was a huge mistake, imo.

Yeah. Imo, T3/Resistance and all the other slop are alternate timelines. The main timeline ends with T2, as far as I'm concerned.

No fate but what we make is more about trying to prevent judgment day, and the need for the resistance to happen at all, from happening.

I spoke with a firefighter I know about those trusses. He said they were the worst thing in modern fire safety and that he refuses to buy a house with them, because once they start getting hot, you've maybe got two minutes before that stupid staple plate pops off. Two or three trusses get their stupid little plates popped off and the whole house is coming down. Makes house fires way more dangerous and time sensitive than they already were, apparently.

Just wanted to say that I took your advice, and posted an update to this thread. It turns out that moving to LibreOffice would have virtually no benefit in any regard whatever according to the city IT manager. Thanks for the advice!

Follow up: I called the IT dept and spoke with them. Apparently they already get the "low cost" licenses with Microsoft for users who don't need access to office (which is the overwhelming majority of them) and just basically get them an email address. The cost increase is really down to the city having added more staff, which means more licenses, since they've got a fixed rate contract locked in with MS. It sounds like moving non-power-users into LibreOffice would have negligible benefit and cause more disruption than not. Ah, well, swing and a miss. Thanks for the support, everyone!

The only cope I have left is telling myself that all these dumb fucks have left the door wide open for commie mommy AOC to come in and lead us into the glorious revolutionary future. "BUT THAT JUDGE ISN'T QUALIFIED" the right screeches, as AOC smirks and says "they've read their theory, comrade. Have you?"

Oh, yikes, that's problematic. I was afraid of that. It really doesn't feel good to look at that and say "and therefore, sorry firefighters, we need to pay Microsoft half a million a year to let us have Excel", but I guess I get it.

Nah, the cops are losing some positions too. Our council is pretty good compared to some others, (and, honestly, our PD is pretty good too. They've worked really hard to keep a good working relationship with the community) but they're definitely hitting a bunch of stuff that nobody wants to see cut either. It's pain across the board. I guess if we have to make cuts, that's how to make them, but I'd like it if Microsoft took one for the team too, here.

Again, I specifically want to leave the power users alone, but my experience in business/industry is that 90% of folks with Excel on their machine don't even know how to write a function. There's no sense paying lavish amounts of cash for those particular people to have Excel when LibreOffice will likely suit their needs.

Those are great points, it's almost always better to walk in the light. I think I got too attached to the validity of my idea. I'll reach out to them and see if someone can have that discussion.

Is LibreOffice calc much worse? And, again, I feel that most users of office suite software are fairly basic users. I want to specifically leave MS Office power users alone, let them keep their licenses, but if people are just using the basic features, there's no reason for us to be paying outrageous amounts for MS Office licenses for them. Yeah, I'm aware that this is going to increase the load on the IT dept, but I'm hoping that the targeted user base are basic enough users that they can be onboard with an orientation video for most cases.

Hey, guys, I know I'm too late to the party, but my city just announced that they spent half a million dollars of Microsoft office licenses last year. I think that's nuts. I want to try to persuade them to switch non-power-users to LibreOffice suite and reduce their office licenses by over 90%. Do you have any advice, examples, or selling points that can help me persuade them to cut Microsoft office licenses instead of literal firefighters? And, seeing as this is late, I'd welcome anybody answering. Thanks!

At first, I came here to talk shit, but it turns out that the music companies are one of the few sectors more evil than telecoms. I'm pulling for Cox.

I'm starting to think that we're bringing knives to a Kaiju fight. Even if we somehow scrape through the next four years and recover the republic (spoiler alert, we've already lost the republic, it's just a question of Trump being bold enough to go far as even as decided to do and look more like), the people who got him this far, wrote project 2025, and financed and boosted his campaign will still be there, learning from the mistakes they made this time and eager to try again. That was the mistake we made last time, thinking that when we beat Trump on '20, he and his movement and wealthy/powerful supporters would simply vanish in a puff of smoke. Now we know better.

What we'll also still have is a weak-kneed, noodle-spined, and sponge-for-brains democratic party that's eager to virtue signal left talking points but fights actual left policies and politicians harder than it fights the republicans. Even now, as we're trying to recover the republic, the DNC is working full tilt to fight anyone trying to make them into an actual opposition party with actual opposition policies. Never forget that the democrats joined the republicans to censure Al Green, the one man who actually did any kind of protest with a backbone at Trump's not-a-state-of-the-union. We're not going to be able to keep the republic from these monsters with gatekeepers who are too busy with honoring intra-party seniority, rites, and traditions and shooting anyone who actually tries to make any meaningful action to fight the monsters. Being the only alternative can't be good enough anymore, we need more people to do whatever they think is right (get into politics yourself, harass your elected officials, start a new party, I don't give a shit as long as the answer isn't do nothing) to force the democrats to get their shit together or else relegate them to the dustbin of history.

Just... I can never ever ever take another conservative seriously for the rest of my life. All their "worries" about big, unaccountable government, waste, fraud, and abuse, following the constitution, and fiscal responsibility were all just a load of bullshit. I mean, I always knew they were hypocrites, but congratulations, you blew up everything you claimed to believe in so that you could make a handful of already breathtakingly rich and powerful people even more rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. But you managed to feed a few brown people into the shredder in the process, I guess, so I hope you're fucking satisfied.

It's wild that they've dropped all pretense of believing in any of this stuff, and it makes me hopeful that, in the future, if some new left movement arises, when the cons inevitably screech "but the constitution! But the budget!" we can just answer "lol. Lmao." And move on with life.

God, I remember when this happened. McCain slid a land swap into a defense funding bill as a giveaway for this mining company. The tribe wasn't consulted, ofc, McCain decided unilaterally that the tribe should just have this land over here instead of that land because my rich friends really want that land. In a just world, it would have been the scandal of scandals, and it would have immediately been struck down. But here we are, everything's a fucking scam, you've got rights as long as they don't get in the way of someone's profit.

I remember listening to an episode of TWiV where they bemoaned that more negative results weren't published. They're useful, too, just not nearly as cool and flashy as positive results.